Note: This is the second blog in the My December series by Sahil. The post has been inspired by something Berlin Artparasites once shared on its Facebook page. Here’s an ode to the moment when you want to love someone, and it’s not that you don’t love them but…

It’s not that I don’t love you, it’s just that this one time, I was in school, and my class teacher punished me for something I did not do. And she made everyone in the class come and shame-slap me. And I looked at my then best friends and she whispered sorry but she did slap me. And I came back home, in a state of crying mess, and my brothers saw and laughed. They asked me to be stop being a sissy and my mother didn’t say anything at all.

It’s not that I don’t love you, but when I was 16, I was so alone that I lied to everyone, even to myself, about having a girlfriend. When the lies got too bad, and everyone wanted to meet her, I freaked out so bad, I faked killed her. Even now I get guilt pangs because each of those friends cried the whole night they got to know that my girlfriend committed suicide.

And it’s not that I don’t love you, but when I was in college, all my parents did was fight. I wanted to get away from my house the moment I’d wake up and not return until dawn. This one time, my mother cried real bad, and the next thing I saw was the corpse of my father. And I wondered if my mother hated my father so much, how she could cry so hard.

And it’s not that I don’t love you, but I’d still fight with you, make mountains out of molehills, push you off, maybe even hit you, only to see if you would still bleed for me.

And it’s not that I don’t love you. It’s just that I am broken…too broken perhaps. I used to think that two people can complete each other, but this one time, I went to a Yoga camp, where an exotic looking imposing woman ridiculed my thought. She told me that no one completes the other person. That we must first complete ourselves and then go ahead falling in love.

I was 20 then and it has taken me half a decade to really understand how broken I really am.

It’s not that I don’t love you, it’s just that this one time, when I was just a child, I enjoyed painting a lot. I painted something beautiful on a piece of glass with magical colours and ran to show it to my parents. And they were fighting the way they always had, and in a fit of rage my father jolted my shoulder and the paining fell breaking beautiful into a million tiny bits and pieces.

And I realize now what I had always known. Sometimes somethings get broken beyond repair. Beyond repair.