Unrequited love and all that

How to draw the boundary between liking a girl and falling in love with her? That is something that I have found increasingly hard to define as I have grown older, right from my first tryst with love while in school till up to the present day. The fact that it has almost always has been a one-way street has not helped either. Well a girl liked me once (at least I think so) when I was not fat for a brief period of time; I was between school and college and had not started balding then. But as Graucho Marx said and which Woody Allen reiterated in Annie Hall, I don’t want to belong to a club that will accept people like me as a member. So I ignored the arguably better looking girl who liked me and sought to woo the girl I thought I was in love with.

To quote the evil Anakin, I am still in love with the idea of falling in love. So even as I am a couple of years away from touching thirty, I am often in a dilemma, trying to decide for myself whether I like or love the girl whom I have recently become friendly with. The whole thing is so confusing and painful at times but thankfully it takes me back to my teenage years. It is those years I look back at with lot of fondness; I would like to believe the reason is not because I am still in love with the girl I liked back then, although I was sad when I heard she got engaged and subsequently did not attend her marriage. It was the in last few months of school that I really began to like her; though she flatly refused my proposal, I tried to become friendly with her after school was over and even in the first year of college. It truly was the age of innocence; the things I did to impress her and talk to her, right from losing weight, to writing awesome answers for her on Shakespeare’s plays in the English literature syllabus, to visiting her house miles away to give her a book she had casually mentioned, to being awake the whole night before an exam thinking of what to tell her when I would meet her the next day at school, to missing Laxman’s 281 at Eden Gardens, well the list is endless. It was not only a different time, but a different me as well. I had dreams in my eyes and a passion in my heart; I would love to go back to that time maybe not for the stupid things I did then like selectively flunking non-Calcutta college exams (I cannot believe I chose to be in Calcutta for college to have a chance with her) and liking the movie Mohabattein, but I would surely like to write as well as I did back then and lose some weight. It is a pity that back then when I used to write well, I only wrote in a diary whose pages I tore off and threw away into the EM Bypass one day in a fit of rage and today when I just about make the mark of being readable, I have the courage to put this up on a public forum, where at least ten people will be reading it.

Back to the present and I am still grappling with whether I like or love someone and if unrequited love is really love or just liking someone and which did not go beyond liking? The way it goes is that some girl is friendly with me and then I really start liking her, with man main laddu futting and all that. The desperation of the school days is not there, of calling her and boring her to death on the phone with hour long conversations. While the zeal of youth is no longer there, there is at least some control on the mind, of trying to get her out of the mind space when I get hints that she is seeing someone else, but then again sadness creeps in when I actually see her with that someone else, and the realization of the future, the future where she is not part of my life.