Not so gentle yawns

Some nights he yawned continuously on our once-weekly scheduled video calls. Yawn after yawn, a few minutes apart. The kind of yawns that made his jaw hinge wide to expose the whiteness on the back of his tongue. The kind of yawn that I averted my gaze from when he did not shield it with the front or back of his hand.

So, I guess it’s not surprising that I was caught off guard when he told me he had been in love with me since the first moment I spoke to him and that the second time I spoke to him that love suddenly started to feel a little like fear.

He made these admissions to me after we had permanently parted ways. At the time of those yawn-filled video calls I had no idea that I had converted someone to a believer in love at first sight and truthfully, I don’t think he knew it either.

Love is so much easier to feel when something or someone is gone, maybe because the fear is gone with it. When love meets its moment of fruition I think the ticking begins and the ticking marks the moments, the hours, the months, or even the years until it's gone.

I have never been in romantic love with a man but I have felt love for people and places and I know the feeling of ticking more than most people. And just like my dear video call yawner, I did not know that I was feeling love until the ticking reached its moment of fruition.

I loved and do love India but I didn’t necessarily know that when I had my life there. I can’t tell you a cliche travel story and say each day I was in that place I was my best and most brave self because that’s not true.

Yes, I found myself vibrating on a different frequency but I yawned a lot. Somedays I would grow tired of choosing my biggest life and I would invite the ticking in sooner than it demanded. Standing in plastic flip-flops in my open-air shower that was stained with soap scum, I would tick down the minutes until I would be reunited with the white subway tiles that lined my steamy shower at home.

When I grew tired of eating authentic Indian food I would tick down the moments until I was reunited with my mother’s lasagna and a McDonald's drive-through.

When I invited the ticking into tired moments of my life it comforted me. It comforted me until it did not because eventually, that ticking did not wait to be invited in. It grew louder and more violent and each tick marked months, weeks, or days until I was reunited with what I thought had to be my real life.

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To smell, feel, see, hear

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India on my skin