Everything does not work from causality. This is the concept I’m currently exploring thanks to “I am” by Nisargadatta Maharaj. And I think there’s a point there. Effects don’t tend to have specific causals like we think they do in a linear uni-dimensional direction we have always presumed. It’s more a many-to-one relationship, where multiple, completely unrelated factors, often including many beyond one’s control contribute to an effect. In his words, a causal body is the collective cloud of all that was thought, wanted and done. That might be a bridge too far to fathom all at once, but I try to rationalize it by expanding the causal body one step at a time.
The reason we are in this place is not because I asked to open up the relationship while leaving the country. Neither is it because I was galivanting on my journey without including her in it. Nor is it because I didn’t set up that appointment with the counsellor because I didn’t want to create a new id on a website. It was because of everything that came before and after — the distance, the pandemic, the visa situation, the job change, the financial burden. And countless other things. Yes, without a few of these, we would probably not be in this situation today. But we would probably trudge on, oblivious to the cracks in the foundation we had created from the time we were together, only to get here another day. Or get to another place, another day. But there’s no way to know.
If anything, there is grief for the loss, not regret. There is a time to mourn the loss of something that meant a lot in your life. When I went back to IIM Ahmedabad in 2021, the rush of emotions I felt was a factor of the time and how much I grew during that time. If that is the barometer, this is taking that to the nth degree. I spent 8 years in this relationship (there isn’t a bigger sign of a fading one is when there is disagreement on the amount of time).
I grew incalculably in this time. It is essentially a quarter of my life, and as with time, the most consequential is the most recent. I haven’t been associated with most things, let alone people, for a quarter of my life. And this was supposed to be the relationship that preceded everything else. We made promises of ‘forever’ and wrote vows that promised each other the world. Did the things people do when in love, for ourselves and the world to see. And shared with one another a part of each other nobody else will probably ever get to see. The good, the bad and the ugly. From the tears of love and joy to the tears of excruciating pain.
And now we are turning the page to the next chapter in our lives, independently. One where we won’t have the comfort of familiarity. The thought of knowing everything about a person, every reaction, every quirk, every idiosyncratic oddity, every birthmark and every strand of hair. And where there will be no life to occasionally breathe into the nostalgia of the memories we shared together. Of traveling 20+ countries together, of loving and hating each other and everything in between. It will be tough to get used to life without each other even though we trained ourselves well over the past year. While we hardly spoke, we still had the knowledge that the other existed somewhere in the world and were always just a phone call away and more importantly were in some part, yours. There was no part of her that was going to be mine, and no part of mine that was going to be hers anymore.
We were going to be friends, we reckoned. But I think we both knew how that was going to go, or at least I thought I knew. But what did I know? Everything I thought I knew was not true anymore anyway, so I might as well take every day as it comes. Cause and effect didn’t matter. Causality didn’t exist. Nothing did. All that matters was that life would go on.
