Cobalt Blue

by Sachin Kundalkar

When you’re looking for a relationship, the process weakens you. You feel you have to bear with whatever the other person wants. This is one of my basic beliefs about human nature. Each one of the people I have met has made this a little more clear.

I went into my room and watched the rain. Moisture had seeped through the wall and the photographs were all crooked now. My illusions stripped from me, I felt my body go hot. I felt a sense of loss; the world felt a deceitful place.

Our house was big enough for middle- class dreams but not for privacy.

‘When I want to do something, I’ll do it. Why do I need dates?’

Why do we judge relationships only by their age? Why is it that only a long-lasting relationship may be called successful?

Tanay says things again and again, as if he wants to reassure himself, as if repetition will fix what has happened in his memory. Once you get used to this, you realize that this is how we grieve, how we remember, in the present tense and in the past, all at once, because the imagined future must now be abandoned.