A Simple Love Story

I am Sh sh sh....Sha Rukh, not my real name but her favorite actor. It was the sobriquet name she had given to me.

She was 14 and I was 17. On our new uniforms we crossed each other, met our eyes, looked back, fell in love and heaven be praised it was the love at first sight. We understood it because we smiled, to each other.

Nature had it that I could confess only towards the end of academic session. On a full paged paper I wrote, "I love you". I had waited a day long to get a similar note, "I love you too". It was on 12^th October. That day I discovered other dates were just envy of it.

I felt insecure and feared of losing her. I wrote a long letter to forget me, handed over to her friend and left to another boarding school. However, I could not forget her and she lived within me in the form of heart beats until I got three-paged letter from her. I missed my beats, felt a terrible loss and several days later realized I deserved that.

Two years through and 2000 kilometer away from home, I heard she was preparing to become a mid-wife. I imagined she must be enjoying in her new institute but could not dare to think if she was going out with anyone. A yearn to go back and embrace her was becoming a distant dream. I lived with my thoughts and imagination thereafter.

When we met online 14 years later we did not know where to start from. We felt nervous, sad and with exuberance of mixed feelings learnt that she had become a mother of two lovely kids. She learnt that I was also married and recently joined the world of fatherhood. I had told her everything of how I kept her in my heart and cherished those memories. I had to tell her before another 14 years or so just slip off.

After many exchange of mails and telephone calls, we saw ourselves riding again from where we had left a decade and half ago. We were travelling a beautiful journey to a destination not truly known. We also went back to those years accusing each other on why each had taken this or that step, eventually making our hearts burn with remorse and guilt.  We cried a lot and we were falling in love once again. We realized that it was a tug of war between the reality and us. We had become the responsibility to our spouses and kids. We did not want to hurt them. True love must not hurt anyone, we knew this. We wanted to enrich love and spill happiness to our spouses and kids. We became the reasons to live not only for ourselves but for the two families.

And then, we had to make a tough decision. After long silence, the longest of any silence, apart from mails and rare telephone calls, we decided not to face each other, ever again.