A short story: Loving Alone

How do you reciprocate love to one you have no feelings for, and how do you quench the love you have for one who does not have feelings for you? This is simply a case of loving alone.

I have seen that life is complex and love is even more complicated. As I clutch the broken pieces of my heart, I ask myself again, why can’t life be simple? Why can’t it be black and white without fifty shades of grey in between?. Although, I take comfort in the fact that I am not the only one entangled in the complexities of life and love, but of what use is this comfort if I am still trapped in its circuitous route.

See this. Hassan is a fine young man who is doing well for himself . He is kind and has consistently pursued me four years now yet I have zero feelings for him. Why I don’t have an atom of feeling for him is harder to decipher than trying to proof Newton’s third law of motion.

I wish my feelings were like a light bulb switch. It would have been easy to turn off the useless overwhelming feelings I have for Kabir who pays me the least attention and transfer it to Hassan who is more deserving of them.

Once again, I watch my phone with a feeling of hope and disgust. A hope that Kabir will be kind enough to call me as promised and the disgust that I am waiting for him to call, while I conveniently ignore Hassan’s numerous calls. The feeling of disgust takes over and I delete his number angrily but the feeling of hope immediately overtakes and I find myself looking for a way to get his number again.

I sigh in relief when I finally get the number back on my phone.

“Oh Kabir, what have you done to me and why do I feel this way about you?!”

I drive myself into exhaustion each day to avoid thinking of him. This alternate feeling of hope and hopelessness is making me lose my sanity. I cannot deal with this anymore.

It is with this thought of hopelessness that I sluggishly stroll towards my ringing phone one random boring Saturday morning.

“Hello Hauwa, this is Kabir ”

This call was all it took for my mind to start planning a wedding with Kabir!

And as usual, he stopped calling again and one more time my heart crashed.

This time my rib cage couldn’t hold it anymore so I had to hold the broken pieces of my heart in the palm of my hands.

I don’t understand my heart anymore, for the more Kabir treats me like trash the stronger the feeling I have for him and the more Hassan treats me like gold the more irritated I get.

So I took the bitter pill of honesty. “Kabir does not care about you, let him go”.

Why do we love the ones who don’t love us and be indifferent to the ones who genuinely love us?

Is it ever possible to love and be loved in return by the same person?

Until then I mend my broken heart.