Relationships? How do you define them? Are they supposed to make you whole or are they supposed to be a part of your life? Guess we can never truly know, or is it just an illusion like everything else is? Or is it just depended on how each one of us thinks about it or has a different perception about them? Are they supposed to make you feel warm and fuzzy or shall it be something satisfactory from which you can yield out something? Relationships are both platonic and romantic but why does romantic come to our mind as soon as we hear the word?

To me relationships should be like a clementine, you peel it open, it bleeds but it does not stain, it leaves a residue although. You pull apart a piece to eat, it tastes sweet in the beginning, going towards a more sour palette, eventually you swallow it regardless and leave a bitter aftertaste. Relationships are something very similar to the experience of eating a clementine. Beautiful, whimsical, fleeting at first but eventually you get the sour taste of getting to know more about each other making it tough to feel the same way as before. Yet, you try to keep it as fleeting as possible, but as it is said “fleeting moment” not “fleeting forever”, your tries goes wasted you can no longer uphold, break, break yourself, break the other person, hurt each other and leave, leaving a bittersweet taste. And after all this time all you have is memories. How ruthless are memories and how ruthless is the mind who remembers it all. Everything plays like a film roll and you just want to live in those moments again or maybe forever but nothing ever lasts forever which is a very depressing thought in itself. “Nothing lasts forever” this stops us from starting so many things in life thinking we can’t have them all forever in our lives, and yes! It is true indeed things don’t stay forever but why should that ever stop us from having what we can have?

The type of relationship my parents share makes me question it all a little, at times they’d make absolutely beautiful gestures or fight like wild piranhas. The type of relationship I share with my mother gnaws at me, it’s absurd, it traps me and we ruin each other in a way but at the same time we don’t hate each other but we can’t function together in the same space at the same time. My mother always taught me to not show vulnerability but it’s the only thing that makes me human? Then why does my mother ask me to stop being vulnerable, but so do I? I pull all the tears back and let out silent whimpers at night when I can’t sleep but isn't it painful to not be able to be vulnerable to the person you thought you could be transparent to? Sometimes I think my mother’s altruism would stretch further if I wasn’t around. She wants me to grow but doesn’t want to open the shell and won’t let me do that either, is she scared of me flying away and never coming back?

What I share with my father is emotionally unavailable (pun intended) . It infuriates me sometimes how he can be so complacent in showing love and care but when I realise and put together his actions it does say “I care for you”. He was physically abusive when I was a kid. Well beating up a kid is ruthless and pointless because it just instils fear and yes I was scared of my father for a major part of my life till now. I want to wish good for him but somehow he never makes it to the “list” I wish for. I feel miserable at times and want to make things better but I’m so tired to do anything so I just let that feeling sit in my gritted teeth and in the waterline of my eyes. I let myself be miserable but seeing other people have a similar relationship with their fathers reassures me in a way it shouldn’t.

If I could I’d protect what I share with my sister but at times I just don’t want to, being the eldest “daughter” isn’t something I asked to be so I envy her. She lights up my day but makes it as dull as night. We share jokes that nobody else knows, not even our parents. Some Days I can’t seem to let the rage slide, I hate how I have let her think of me as her friend but she crosses limits and forgets that respect is mutual and she can’t respect neither can I and I get out of my way. I clench my jaw on days like these but I unclench and let it go. I misdirect my rage of other relationships sometimes.

I am a tapestry, collage, fusion, etc etc. of all the relationships I have and I have had they make me who I am today. I could reform my entire body and I’d still find solace in the thing I had with my ex best friend. I have always hated the word “ex” so much it doesn’t align with my understanding of relationships. Calling someone you’ve known “ex” feels so ignorant of everything you ever used to share with them. All the memories you have of them seem so far, so distant than they are. I could pull out my organs and put them in a different mould and I’d still remember what we did on a certain day. Hilarious how the one who remembers everything also struggles the most to give up on it all and let go of that one particular relationship.

Some relationships could burn you and yet you wouldn’t feel your bones melting away and your blood turning into ash, you would never be able to feel the warmth of a home. Some relationships which feel burning even at the touch of the candle’s flame. Guess some relationships hold more significance in our not so abhorrent lives?

I wish I could pour my everything into a relationship, but I can’t, something stops me from doing it. For once I’d think of giving up on my ego and pouring in my everything but then get the sourness coming from another person making it all just stupid. Rearrange my organs in a way I’d want to pour my everything but I still can’t because you can’t change how the soul feels and thinks. When we meet years later at a deserted café in a sleepy town, holding down the knots in our throats rising steadily, as we try to talk again,, but we laugh, laugh at the absurdity of it all. Of everything that we did years back and how we could’ve said things differently to not be able to laugh at it now. But that’s what it is. Broken relationships where we are strangers, strangers who at a time knew what the other one was up to at a certain time of the day. Where broken relationships leave you hopeless about yourself but yet feel freeing, where you want to talk one last time but not with words, but with the language I always knew around you; love.

Love; transcends everything, every language in relationships yet so difficult to be truly shown or maybe all those grandeur gestures of expensive gifts, flowers, teddy bears make the simple gesture of cut fruits, folded clothes, washed dishes, watered plants, letters, 12 am wishes, long texts, pressed flowers, seem micro in front of the money? If I could win someone I hope it’s by my love and not money (not that I have so much of it but still hehe).

Hope love is poignant and pungent as a clementine and not as a pomegranate, clementines don’t stain but they leave a residue and I’ve the residue of all the relationships I’ve ever had. Pomegranate stains too crimson to be ever truly removed, it’s unpleasant. Pomegranates are complicated to peel as compared to clementine. I would peel both clementine and pomegranates for the people I truly value. I can spend hours peeling them. I’d peel a clementine even if it stings my eyes. But would you ever do the same for me?

.    .    .