The force of vacuum

26.9.07

I’m back to my baby again…my journal I mean. It has been quite some time since I’ve written. Feels like homecoming - homecoming for comfort, for refuge. I’ve come back to my journal to seek refuge. Come back to it, pressed by the force of vacuum.

V left for Bombay (yes, I prefer it to Mumbai) today. My confidante, my confession box, my punching bag…GONE! For two whole weeks!!! It was only natural that I turned to my journal for my release. I wonder if it is this way with all writers. Are inspirations always had in moments of crisis or emptiness? I’ve not written in a while (just turned the pages to see that it has been a precise two months and a week); didn’t feel the push, not even slight traces of that mad urge that I’ve sometimes experienced. The spoken word has taken precedence in V’s presence. With him, everything felt is almost immediately ejaculated in words – spoken ones, heard ones, understood ones.

My relationship with V has obviously changed in the last couple of months since we started seeing each other. Only yesterday, we were discussing how the frequency of our written communication has reduced to a zilch in so short a time. I was fretting over how the nature of our communication has changed so rapidly implying perhaps that we don’t communicate as much as I would like to. Only a day later, today, I realise where my argument was flawed. As V points out too, only the mode/style of our communication has changed; the volume hasn’t. It has increased rather. Today, when he’s not around, my awareness of his absence overwhelms me so much that it has pushed me over the brink and made me gush on paper. And as always, it’s proving therapeutic.

This gap, this vacuum – his absence has also made me see clearly what he has come to mean to me. Beyond that breakneck speed that our relationship is moving in, beyond those plans of a proposal/engagement/parents-meet-parents/and wedding, beyond my defensive statements of “It’s not like I can’t live without him, blah, blah, blah, beyond it all, I realise that V is much more. I love him. I respect him – immensely. Respect him for what he has become, for what he is and what he chooses to be. I adore his openness to the new, his willingness to learn. There is so much promise in imagining a life with him – a life of learning, a life of teaching. A life of looking forward to a myriad possibilities, encouragements, criticisms, fulfillments, pride, and not to say the least, a life of mature love. I love him for questioning me till my confusions have cleared. I love him for not allowing me to take for granted even those things that I rightfully own. I love him for making me constantly compete with myself – to want to grow, to be smarter, funnier, better read, more knowledgeable. I love him because he taught me his not-so-good jiving and admitting and admitting that he doesn’t know it too well. And well, so much more. This is what I miss – this is the name of this vacuum.