by Nikita Singh
By the time I reached their offices – with bags under my eyes, my lips chapped, almost bloody with worry, my palms sweaty – I felt as if the battle was already half lost. I did my best, but instead of taking charge and showing them everything I can do for them, I was more … grappling to find things from my portfolio that best reflected my skills and my default tone was please-hire-me-I’ll-do-anything.
Sometimes I feel like I can do anything I set my mind to. Yes, I know that’s super cheesy, but if I’m working on something I love and truly believe in, even if I don’t have all the skills and experience necessary to finish a job, I can learn. I’m excited to think up innovative marketing ideas, and then do whatever needs to be done to arrive at the result. All I need is for someone to take a chance. Give me a shot and I’ll prove myself. I just want them to give me a chance.
I don’t think they’re going to call me back. But at least from this experience, I now know what not to do the next time I go to an interview. I started on the wrong foot, and kept slipping. Next time, I’ll prepare more. I’ve always sucked at interviews.
Do you remember the interview you drove me to, one of the first ones I got, right after graduation? In the car, you kept telling me to calm down, while I aggressively jumped from article to article, trying to find out everything I could about the company and the work they did. I was looking up their competitors and their work, when you finally put your foot down.
‘Okay, I have to take this away from you now,’ you said, snatching my phone.
I reflexively lunged to get it back, but you wouldn’t let me have it. I was exasperated. ‘Are you serious right now? I have an interview in twenty-two minutes!’
‘Are you serious right now?’ you repeated without flinching. ‘You have an interview in twenty-two minutes.’
‘What’s your point?’
‘You have got to chill. You can’t go in there like this.’
‘What is that supposed to mean?’ I asked heatedly, wiping my sweaty palms on my pleated trousers.
You motioned towards all of me, and said, smiling, ‘This. You look like a cartoon character. With your knitted eyebrows, pink cheeks and beads of sweat on your forehead. And while I find this funny, people who are meeting you for the first time and are potentially going to pay you money to work for them might not see you as a candidate to invest in.’
‘You’re saying I’m not good enough!’ I yelled.
‘What do you think? In all the time that you’ve known me … please answer this question for yourself. Do you think I think you’re not good enough?’
I glared at you, puffing angrily. After a moment, I muttered, ‘The answer better be no.’
‘Of course it is! You deserve this, and so much more. I know that, you know that, but they don’t. You have to show them. And they won’t be able to see the best of you if you present this … mess to them. No offence, but I wouldn’t hire this girl either.’
‘My God. Do you have a point here, or are you just trying to kick me when I’m down?’
‘I’m not trying to kick you. I’m trying to question why you’re down in the first place. You are in the top ten per cent, wherever you go, whatever you do. You’ll be amongst the people in the room that are doing it the best. You’re organized, you are attentive to details, you think things through, no one can beat your planning and reasoning skills – you have all the raw materials. Your OCD is one of your biggest strengths, when it comes to this job role. The only problem I see here is this crippling lack of confidence that seems to have come out of nowhere and overtaken everything.’
I thought about that for a second. ‘First of all, thank you for making fun of my OCD. And it’s not unreasonable to be nervous before an interview. I really need this job. I can’t mess it up!’
‘Do you?’ You turned towards me and raised your eyebrow in question.
‘Want this job? Yes! Why do you think I’m panicking?!’
‘I’ve been trying to figure that out. Okay, tell me why you want this job.’
‘Because it’s everything I want to do with my life!’ I said angrily, getting more frustrated than ever. ‘Why do we have to do this now? The interview is thirteen minutes away.’
‘We don’t have to do this now, but please let me finish. I promise I won’t say anything that’s not helpful.’ You grabbed my hand and placed in on the gear stick, under yours.
I took quick breaths, trying to calm myself. I felt like I was going to break down crying. It’s only been a few months since we graduated, but there was so much pressure on me to find what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I clearly wasn’t handling it too well. ‘Okay,’ I whispered.
‘This sounds like a good job. It definitely wouldn’t hurt to have an offer from them; always good to have options. But I’ve known you for years, ever since you started to actively think about what you want to be doing with your life … and babe, this isn’t it. That doesn’t mean that this couldn’t be a great first job, something to have to bring you confidence, money, stability, shut up the neighbours … whatever else is the immediate need. But at best, this is something you do while you chase your dreams. This is not the dream,’ you said, squeezing the hand you held under yours. ‘It’s not your dream.’
I thought about that for a minute. You knew me so well … even better than I knew myself. I finally voiced my insecurities. ‘What if … I never achieve my dreams? What if this is the best I can do?’ I said quietly, even as my body relaxed and my breathing began to return to normal, because you were there – touching me, listening to me, calming me down.
You laughed. ‘Seriously? I know you tend to exaggerate and it’s one of the things that I love about you, but this is ridiculous, even for you. You finished college three months ago. There’s all the time in the world. All we have to do is start somewhere and we’ll build on it till we get to the dream part. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and all that. They were right. But also, look at this job objectively. It’s not your dream. You’re good at lists – make lists of things this job offers and what you really, really want. Compare the overlap. There’s very little.’
‘How do you know this?’ I asked, genuinely confused.
‘Because I know you,’ you said simply.
I thought about it. Sitting next to you in the car, in the last few minutes before we reached the office, I thought about what the job offered and what I wanted, and how it didn’t really align with my plan at all. ‘I got so caught up with finding a job, any job, that I stopped thinking about what I wanted. That was moved to the bottom of my list of priorities.’
‘Of course you have a list of priorities.’ You chuckled.
I snatched my hand back and pushed your arm lightly. ‘So, what do we do about this interview?’ I asked.
‘We go in and blow their minds. Ask yourself what they have to offer you, not only all the things you can do for them. This isn’t life or death. This is great practice for the real jobs. If you get an offer, we can think about our next steps then. Nothing to lose.’
‘Nothing to lose,’ I repeated.
That had become my mantra for every job I applied for after that interview. I never got an offer for that job though, but it didn’t bother me as much as it would’ve without your inputs.
But this job … this is the one I really want. It’s the perfect balance of everything I want to do and learn. It hits the most points on my checklist. I’m worried that I blew the interview, but we’ll find out soon. I wished you were there to calm me down before I walked into that interview. I don’t know how that had become your job. But I liked how you took it on without complaints. You were my anchor in the little storms I seem to face constantly in my life. You grounded me when I was all over the place…
I wish you were here.
October
Abhay,
You have to know that, under normal circumstances, I would never do this. If you were in love with Simran, and she was in love with you, and both of you were happy togethe
r, I would never send you this letter. In fact, I have written to you several times over this past year, and kept the letters hidden in a folder on my computer, never to be discovered. I could never bring myself to send you those. They were obsessive and repetitive, circular – like my thoughts.
They helped me though. Sometimes, when I feel unsettled and I don’t know what’s causing that feeling, I write. I write whatever’s going on, whatever I feel, and I speculate. I call it writing therapy. Because when I go back to the page and read what I’d written, it helps clarify things in my head. I wrote to you every once in a while. These letters, I never sent you, but they were like a friend … a safe place where I could share things.
I found out last week that Simran and you broke up. I don’t want to assume that I was part of the reason why, but I have to believe that I played some minor role in this happening. I feel terrible about this. I hope you two didn’t end on terrible terms, or get hurt. But knowing how love works, that’s probably too much to hope for.
You don’t have to tell me what happened with Simran. We don’t have to talk about her and your relationship at all. That is not the reason I’m writing to you.
The reason I’m writing to you … is because, Abhay, I’m in love with you. I have loved you for as long as I’ve known you, and in this past year, no matter how many times I have tried to deny that, even to myself, I have failed.
I can’t stop thinking about you. Leaving you, making that decision … was hard. But it wasn’t the hardest thing I’ve had to do. That would be … staying away from you. When every fibre in my body revolted against it, unwilling to accept a life without you, I still kept telling myself that it was okay, I was okay. But I wasn’t. I’m not okay.
Wasn’t it supposed to get easier and easier every day? To be away from you, and stay away from you? I was supposed to get used to it. Continue living, as if a part of me wasn’t missing. I couldn’t do it. I can’t do it, Abhay. Please don’t make me live without you, because that life sucks. I don’t want it.
Is it too late? Do we still have a chance? For months, I told myself that this was the right decision, and slowly, we’ll reverse the damage, life would be normal again. I thought that if I set a path for myself, consciously wrote down my steps and followed them through, my head could guide me, one day at a time, till enough time passed, and I could begin to let my heart make decisions for me again.
Turns out, it doesn’t work like that. My entire being revolted against this decision my head made. Leaving you that day, and then staying away from you every day … every single day away from you has been miserable. A special kind of hell I’ve built for myself.
These letters I’ve been writing to you every month, they’re full of thought spirals that are often obsessive and do not make any sense. But somehow they keep me grounded. It feels as though through these words, I’ve been tracking my progress since the breakup. Most of it probably doesn’t make sense, but I’d hoped that it would eventually get to a point where my words would start making more and more sense … as I approach sanity.
Life still feels pretty insane. I’m discarding my plan for life. My brain doesn’t get to make decisions for me anymore. The more I try to be in control, the more control I lose. Deciding to be without you and move on didn’t work. No matter how hard I tried, it just didn’t work. So, I should let my instincts guide me, right? I don’t know what to do anymore. Nothing else works.
If I had to, could I live without you? Yes. I would be unhappy for a while, but I wouldn’t die. With time, things would get better, and I would move on eventually. But do I want that? No. I don’t want a life without you. I’m willing to risk everything again, wear my heart on my sleeve and dive into this with you again. I’m choosing to love you. Will you choose me too?
Abhay, I’m still in love with you. I always have been, and it looks like I always will be. No matter how hard I try to deny it, I know how my heart really feels. I come up with these elaborate plans, the reasons why we don’t work, the reasons why we shouldn’t be together. Sometimes, it feels like there are so many. At other times, no matter how hard I try, I can’t think of even one. Not one reason why we shouldn’t be together.
I know, it sounds crazy, because so much time has passed, I did something terrible to you when I ran away without explanation. You’ll probably never be able to trust me again, we will probably never be able to build the trust again, to get to a point where we’re not broken anymore. Then there’s family, and friends … they’re still getting used to the idea of us not being together. There’s so much bitterness between our families since the breakup … I don’t know if that can ever be fixed. I don’t know where we would even begin.
Biggest of all: you. How do you feel? Do you still love me too? Do you think you can try to give me another chance? Do you think we can go back to the way things were before?
This is such a shot in the dark, but if I don’t take this chance, I know I will always regret it. I love you, Abhay. And I want to be with you. I want to work with you, to put together all of the broken pieces of us … make us whole again.
The first thing that comes to mind, the one you pointed out, the incident with … that girl. I don’t want to say her name. It’s inconsequential to our lives. I will try to explain to you to the best of my abilities what that one incident did to me. Maybe then we can try to work on fixing things, if you still love me…
When I first met you, I fell in love with you as instantly as you fell in love with me. We were so different from each other, but there was this undeniable chemistry. We had the most random things in common. Even though our personalities were exact opposite of each other’s, as we got to know each other, we realized that we were more alike than different.
Deep down, we have the same values. We live by the same principles. We have the same definitions of right and wrong. But all of that we discovered later. In the beginning, all I saw were differences.
You were outgoing, with a big, happy personality that shone through in any room. You took over any space you were in. No one could ignore you; you were never a part of the background. When I got to know you, I found out that you were patient and kind. And also kind of a jerk when you needed to be. I liked that. You took shit from no one. You were confident, always knew exactly what you wanted and went for it.
When I first met you, I wasn’t the most social being. I liked to be left alone with my books. I liked to read, spend time thinking about things, hang out with my friends. I liked listening to music, looking for meaning in words. I didn’t care that I was a cliché. I was happy with my small existence. I was so anxious inside, wanted such big things from life. I didn’t have the time or energy to impress others, and I never felt the need to do that either.
Now that I think about it, I realize that you were always more of a businessman. You set out to seek what you wanted, and always won. Driven, focused, sure. You never hesitated, never questioned anything. You weren’t crippled by doubt or uncertainty. You decided your own path, and made sure things went your way.
I, on the other hand, was always more of an artist … one without a form of art. I drew, but not very often. I spent time with ideas – reading books, watching films, having conversations with close friends. From my first job, I’ve established that I like to create. That’s what makes me feel productive and brings me fulfilment at the end of the day. Coming up with ideas for campaigns, creating content of all kinds for different platforms, engaging audiences in our narrative – that’s what I thrive on.
If our jobs say anything about our personalities, it’s clear that you’re the person who single-mindedly sets out to reach goals. I’m always looking for more … what else can we be doing, how to get more people to engage with us, raise more awareness. I’m not saying that your life is easier … just that mine’s messy. My head is always full of flying fragments of thoughts and ideas, I’m always working towards something.
You grounded me. When we were together, you were my pillar. A
s I lived my life stumbling from one idea to another, you were the only constant thing that brought me happiness, loved me when I needed it, shook me out of my own self-dug holes whenever necessary. I depended on you.
I showed you all of me, gave you my everything. You became my everything. I couldn’t imagine a life without you.
So, when one day, after all we’d been through, you presented me with this information that went against everything I had ever known to be true … my mind could not process it. I could not believe that you would do that. To me, when you knew you were my everything.
If this new piece of information was true, everything else that I had ever believed in was a lie. These truths could not exist together. They simply did not belong in the same world.
The world under my feet shifted. I questioned everything you’d ever said to me. Everything I’d felt. Everything I believed you felt towards me … it was all a lie. I couldn’t pick and choose based on what I wanted the reality to be. I couldn’t assume that you meant one thing, but maybe not that other thing. You meant nothing. All of it was a lie. I was betrayed by the one person I shared everything with. Someone I thought I knew better than I knew myself. If I couldn’t believe in you anymore, I lost trust in myself, and the world.
Maybe it’s that blind first-love thing. I gave you my all, without questions. I never doubted anything, just put all my faith in you, until one day everything changed and I forgot how to think or be anymore.
How could you do that to me, Abhay? How could you even think about someone else? I knew that we had problems. It wasn’t the easiest time for either of us. Things were rough at home. You had started working for your dad’s company, and that took a lot from you. I couldn’t find a good job, and that was taxing. After college ended, we had less and less in common. Our lives were very different now.
I know all of this. I know how hard it was. Somewhere along the way, as we grew, we grew apart.
It was painful, and disappointing. I missed you, I was unhappy … but not once during all of this did I think about someone else. It was never that bad. Our love was still very real. Maybe the romance had faded a little, maybe we weren’t as carefree and happy anymore. But we still loved each other, didn’t we?