Our Summers Of Discontent

“War is the province of men!” – Eomer, valiant Rohan Knight from The Lord Of The Rings

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My Esteemed Liege,

Few summers ago we met in the most unlikely places. In the wastelands of cyberspace we eyed each other with shrill cynicism, preserving our fragile selves with insinuating banters, anonymous detachment, and the most viral humour we can both muster. We resisted the growing fondness doing lithe pirouettes at the corners of our eyes. We are invincible, or so we foolishly convince ourselves, and we stuck to such tacit pact without acknowledging defeat. We held our gazes steady, preserving our respective fortress.

We are aware of our immature, insecure delinquencies, yet we cling on to such unblinking resolution and we paid for it dearly. For the cost of unyielding stubbornness we thoughtlessly forfeited that flimsy, germinating affection.

In the hushed spaces of this graveyard hour I’d like to come to terms and come out clean with my defeat: for my end, at least, and still unbeknownst to you, my resistance retreated long ago. I found myself loving you.

Nothing but imprudent, false hopes could possibly justify the madness of anticipation for mIRC to usher your familiar handle’s arrival. In your honour, I found the insolence to wade through storms of bullshit from other online dwellers, surviving waves of idle talks, in the feverish optimism that any moment now your presence will blink from the other side of the World Wide Web’s ceaseless fence.

My dreams would be beleaguered with your intrusions. Three hundred seconds lapse before you reply on one innocuous text message from me and my heart would sink, despairing, pierced. I allowed myself such dismal descent into private humiliation. I cannot flee. Even on numerous occasions when I succeeded to digress from your enthralling breath, I find myself recoiling my footsteps to that online lobby, where you lord over, your voice crisp, your laughter ascending, puncturing the calmness of unholy daybreaks.

Maybe it was providential that we drifted apart. I cannot precisely pinpoint how it happened, but bartered numbers were relinguished to abandon, and, subsequently forgotten or scrubbed off the directories of our mobile devices; online messengers remain lifeless, ignited only on occasions when we have the need to brush off the cobwebs and sweep the dusts under the rugs of our real life obligations and distractions.

On those early days I have come face to face to a heartbreaking reality: I am not unlike those unwise mortals who came before me. I am vulnerable. And it took me this long to acknowledge that there is no shame in defeat. I was proud. So were you.

Yet I doubt we have forgotten. I certainly have not.

I’d view our off-chance encounter, after many moons of absence, as brutal fortune. The war has been rekindled. Our private war and it's addictive entanglements of the most shrewd and cruel mind games blaze like a mischievous wink. And we’re back with the same rabid tenacity of someone who would never relinquish to downfall. We polish our swords: gauging each other’s armours, looking for flaws to wield our assault.

Our words fling with comic cunning, cleverly outsmarting each other, brandishing our breastplates with restraint and casual detachment. We do this to amuse ourselves, to bide the idleness between the rising and falling of our breaths.

There are no victors in this war, my Liege, only casualties.

We are the casualties, admitted or not. Our wounds run deep. They birth on tender craters on our hearts.

And scatter seeds of aching redundancies in our memories.

Till our next repartee,

Indigo