The Anguish of Unrequited Love

I can’t help but feel like I’m waiting to catcall you. Like I’ve watched you pass by the same street every night, smoking in the corner. I feel like I’m stalking you. Like how I keep hanging around here on purpose thinking you might show up at 8:05. I don’t know if you’ve seen me at all in the dark. Or perhaps you’re extremely aware that I’m there, watching, waiting. When you hurry past me, your pace quickens, a key wedged between your fingers, ready to rip me apart if I breach your boundary. Why wouldn’t you start taking a different route then

I think about the things I could say to you as you pass through my cigarette smoke and I’m sure I’ll just scare you. I’m scared you won’t get it- what I mean by the things I might end up saying. There’s so much distance between us. So much space for words to float, deform & contort. You won’t get it.

Or worse, maybe I don’t have anything special to say. I’d call you “beautiful” at best. But you might already know that. Perhaps you have a girlfriend who tells you that every day, in a way that makes you feel safer. Safer than out here on the street. Safer one feels in their own skin. Perhaps you’ve forcefully slipped it into your morning affirmations in front of the mirror and gradually learnt to mean it. Perhaps your mother has always told it to you & you used that as an excuse for shawls & bras. Or you already know and don’t bother about it

With every passing hypothesis, I swear the cloud of smoke around us thickens. You seem impenetrable. I don’t have anything to say. I don’t have a say at all. So much smoke separates two people. So much structure & purpose. We thrash & grope through the fog trying to feel each other. All through the cloud stacks that choke the air that divides us. We block each other’s paths to chat for a while, get late for work, or try to hold each other in the currents that sweep us away and onward. I know you’re tired & just want to go home. I’d have come in the morning, but my shift starts at 6. It’s impossible to live in a world that makes no time or room for

But we wouldn’t have gotten as far as we have without love. So, our sly world makes space for it. Little channels & pockets within the smoke- spaces where our love was allowed to quietly slip through and suffocate without much of a fuss. In the daytime, at home, with courtesy & grace. In marriages, in economies, in hospitals & taxes. We know where to look for love- our dating apps, our castes, brokers & bars. All marriages are arranged. All social love is arranged, organised & rationed.

The air that hangs loosely off your hurrying body is yours, not mine. It rests on your tympanum and doesn’t deserve to be shaken up with my holler. Especially when I have nothing to say.

Does anyone ever though?

Is not love our one shot at diffusing this smoke? When we stop & talk & tell each other about our day, where we’re headed & going? Maybe I will have something to say then. I could tell you you’re not beautiful in a way that has any value. You’re not beautiful in a way that could be turned into capital, bought, turned into a magazine cover, or be thought of as something that a nervous pervert in a dark alley has any right to. You’re beautiful in a pretty useless way, & isn’t that great?

Again, maybe you knew that too. But does it matter?

Love is our one shot at diffusing this smoke. Reaching across the structures & stories that define & divide how we’re allowed to live & keep moving. In a world like ours, love is always unrequited.

It disrupts, disorders, & disillusions. We aren’t allowed to love that would be true to the meaning of the word. We’re only allowed to define our social relationships in the way of usefulness to society.

What’s interesting is how blind we’ve turned to the lines and divisions that decide who, when and where we share our space and time with. We’ve got rules, maps, and timetables right from boys and girls sitting separately in kindergarten to ‘pure veg’ restaurants. We move our programmed bodies through these defined, gendered, & divided spaces. We barely clock how much it restricts who we “happen to fall in love” with. It’s a lot less to do with luck than it might look like. There are just so many layers of difference & math written into the smoke.

So, when I look at you through this smoke, I know I can barely make you out. The fog is thick, & there are no cleared-out pockets at all for our love, but I’m determined to make it through everything that defines us.

But I wouldn’t want you to feel unsafe though.

So, I let your love disrupt. I take the next day off work, & wait at that street, 7 am. I don’t smoke. You walk by and I stop you and say, “Hey, I love your style. Where’d you get your skirt from?” You stop and smile.

You get a little late for work.