What happens after Happily Ever After?

I don’t want to fall in love. I need it, I'd love it, I don’t want to. How can I fall in love, walk into it with binoculars around my neck and a microscope in my trembling hands, knowing that someday it will end? Not by cheating. What, you think each gay guy has a gallery of Grindr guys just hanging on to his word so pathetically, like the umbrella you carry to work just in case. Always hanging on to his arm with each sway and crowded metro trip, falling each time he steps wrong and coming back anyway. No, not that kind of carousel love, not when you’re the one watching the lovebirds sitting on the unicorn under edison bulbs and movie-theatre soundtracks. 

I can’t willingly love knowing that someday I will be holding his ashes in an urn, running my thumbs across the surface everytime I remember the empty crooks in my body that I was left with in return for the years of memories. We have to love our friends, our families, there’s no two ways about it. But the kind of storybook, white woman written gay-romance carved love, how am I supposed to live beyond it? So many stories where the handsome widow finds a twink full of love to give, or another tragic-struck beauty who stuck around long enough. Too many loopholes, too many times I thought ‘He’ll leave. It’ll end. The fiction will break and fissure. It always does.” When have you ever picked up fantasies and happily-ever afters and walked out of the last page, exhaling every bit of make-believe naivete from that bleeding heart of yours? How can you love, knowing that a day, five decades, two minutes later he might go to a place there is no return from? How do you live with the dust that once used to his things and his favourites and his home. How? How??

I always hate the authors by the time I reach the last page. I need to know what happens when the sex-filled lives of the fiction turn domestic and affectionate, their hair greying and the only way they can make love is to hold each other close and hope that by some measure of osmosis they would become one again? When the only way before was toe-curling and panting and drunk eyes. Uncertain eyes. Scared as shit that they wouldn’t say ‘I love you so goddamn much that I wish I could bake cookies for you right this instant and watch you eat them like a kid on Diwali.’ 

How can I love not knowing how to deal with the sheer grief of it all? If grief is love with no place to go, where the fuck do I go before I explode this world with the sheer pressure of not knowing Who do I give it to? Where do I keep the love I was supposed to give him until we were supposed to die within minutes of each other at 100 years old, where am I supposed to leave the future and its corpse that I would carry tethered to a simple ring on my finger? 

I don’t want to love. But I need it so bad. I don’t want to feel so empty anymore. I want to mould his chest to my back instead of the two blankets I make do with instead. I want to smell his hair and feel his hands as the stuff of home instead of relying on the laundry soap of my childhood to do it for me. I have so much love to give, it’s started to rot and fester in the boils and acne scars that pinprick across this battlefield of a body. Many men have lusted and lost themselves and I am so tired of being a baby doll playing dress up and shave down, trim down, love down when the next grey profile walks through the door. I get attached so easily, and men with rings would lie so easily to have a mouth waiting for their… needs. 

I don’t want to love, and I have so much to give. I have so much to get. How can I survive knowing that the time we could have had, we could have loved, I would remain numb as a teenager who believed he was never enough because he was too easy. Too terrified to return to tearing up about daddies of daydreams and cuddles on rainy days, except this time, reality was mere memories ago and not a future of dreams away.