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this city is going to eat you alive one day. and not in one big gulp, quick and painless — but piece by little piece over the years until there is hardly anything left.

you stay up at nights sometimes and wonder if love is supposed to be so intense, so stifling. is there no middle ground? no way to be loved and to be free? why do you have to choose between being able to breathe and fulfilling this ugly, desperate, almost pathological need to be wanted, needed, accepted as you are?

but this city is big and boisterous and so incredibly lovely that you can’t help it. you know all her little eccentricities — her summers are harsh and her winters unforgiving, but you know her, perhaps better than you know yourself, with all of her nooks and crannies and winding lanes that wrap around you like arms. you would know her in darkness and in death, and she would lead you home with your eyes closed. 

this city, she is made up of contradictions, big and lively but also incredibly small and quiet. nothing ever happens here. and yet, somehow, in the midst of all that nothing, all twenty-something summers of your life came and went, seeped into your bones and indistinguishable from the marrow.

and still, you want to get away. because a love as large as this, it takes you in its arms, runs its fingers through your hair, and it chokes you. it strangles you till your eyes water and your face turns blue and your voice deserts you. but it does so because it is love and love is supposed to be intense and all-consuming and larger than life. is it not?

she is the only one who will take you, broken, bloody, and bruised when you turn up at her door, and she will shelter you and love you to breathlessness.

and yet, like an ungrateful child, you want to get away. someone once said home is the first place you run from, and you do want to. you want to run away and look back only when you want to, to take off even though you know no one is ever going to love you like this ever again. 

you want to get away. 

you don’t know if you ever will.

maybe love is supposed to be so intense and stifling. you either let it choke you or you make a choice and spend the rest of your life scrubbing the bloodstains of that choice off the floor.

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Sharmien is an English literature graduate from Aligarh Muslim University, India. Fueled by caffeine, anxiety, and a healthy dose of spite, any time she has left after her periodic existential spirals is spent reading, telling, and retelling stories.