Here’s a story for you.

Sometime in 2020, I had a meeting by the beach in Chennai with one woman who I thought was a friend but never was. It was a weird, discombobulated meeting, one of skirting around edges, and one where I returned feeling I hadn’t said anything I wanted to.

I tried to write that feeling out. The first draft was, perhaps, terrible. I worked on it again before submitting it to Kitaab because I felt that the story of trying to make sense of nonsense should have a wider audience.

And here’s the thing with time. When I read this now, I wonder how I ever felt so much. I have this new, calmer thought that this feeling was a wasted effort. This loss wasn’t a loss in the end because you can’t lose what you never had. You can’t lose trust, compassion, kindness, forgiveness, love, and friendship.

If you lose these, it means they never were. This relationship was shambolic. A sham, a surface that never settled. A relationship of being used, cast aside, and then mocked is not one to mourn. And I don’t. I am thankful now for the end.

But for our words, for the poetry in the pain, for the raw skin of old wounds, this story still found its voice.

You can find it here on Kitaab as the Editor’s Pick for this week:

When Loss Comes Calling

Would you tell me how it is?