Being with You

by Vani Viswanathan

[box]Vani Viswanathan writes a dripping-with-“cheesy” love note.[/box]

I resisted you for long. Thought I had enough, and didn’t need you. I knew you would distract me from my studies, I knew my spending would increase exponentially because of you, and I would lose sleep at night because I’d want to look at you, feel your face, and smile. I knew, because I’d seen my friends go down this route.

But then when you came to me – like, handed on a platter – it was hard to resist. I couldn’t come up with a logical explanation for why you and I would be a bad idea. My friends would scoff at me for letting you go, for they knew you were the best I could get for now. It would be stupid to say no, for who knows where we’d end up – I said ok, and there, we got attached.

It’s always hard at first – I didn’t know where I could touch you without things going awry. Well, it wasn’t just about touch, but we got communicating as well – Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, Google Talk, everything. We liked clicking pictures and uploading them on Instagram after using some filter that made even our abysmal photos look pretty. We thrived on being connected all the time – isn’t it wonderful to know what’s happening around the world, with your friends, in your backyard, through status updates, videos, photographs, memes and notes? We loved listening to music, tunes we knew and quite a few unknowns on radio. Even when we were out, we could keep ourselves in touch with our work, an email here and there, a quick document sent to satisfy the professor – it just made it easier for us to be together without feeling guilty about getting distracted. It kinda seemed perfect, and I thanked god for bringing you into my life.

When you write something like this, people usually think something sad is going to happen. Or maybe something bad. Well, here it’s not exactly so. We’re still very much in love. For all my resistance earlier, and my promises to self that I wouldn’t get too involved with you, it happened. I’d wake up at night and want to see you, and ask of you tales from far away. Some kind of obsession does set in, I guess, in every relationship. During lectures, I’d want to catch up with you discreetly, while the professor droned on and the class dozed off. I wanted to hold you all the time, hoping for something interesting to happen. I depended on you to wake me up, to remind me to return the library book, to make me laugh, to comfort me when I want to cry. I’d feel jittery when you were not at your best of health, and couldn’t wait for you to feel all charged up. It’s strange, really, but it’s also lovely, this kind of dependence.

People would think it’s creepy to get this attached to a phone, but I’m just one of the first few to have owned up to how much we treat a phone like a real person in our lives.

Vani Viswanathan is often lost in her world of books and A R Rahman, churning out lines in her head or humming a song. Her world is one of frivolity, optimism, quietude and general chilled-ness, where there is always place for outbursts of laughter, bouts of silence, chocolate, ice cream and lots of books and endless iTunes playlists from all over the world. Vani was a Public Relations consultant in Singapore and decided to come back to homeland after seven years away to pursue a Masters in Development Studies. Vani blogs at http://chennaigalwrites.blogspot.com

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