The Love Journey of Lakshmi
There is this reel on Instagram I keep on watching.
Over and over again. The same video’s.
It has been weeks already.
So much of his reels and posts I have seen.
It is beginning to understand for me, that this repeatedness of this content is trying to show me something that is there for me to comprehend.
A lesson to be learned or something to be said.
‘You know’. Is how I started.
I needed some time to think about what I wanted to say.
What he had told me was very personal and I could see he was still trying to understand for himself what he actually had said.
His face was looking down.
We were sitting a bit apart from each other.
I was looking at him.
Where do I belong?
A question I have thought of.
Many times.
We think of home as a place we can always return to.
Something that is touchable.
Visible and perhaps even something that is not even movable.
Although we move places and we can differ from a physical place.
I wonder.
The tears that fell on my pillow were soft.
The love for a city is perhaps something a bit unknown.
We say. ‘I love New York’ and ‘I AMsterdam’.
A known love or a heart’s desire.
Who knows?
But there is something with Lisbon.
Hidden in Europese’s corner.
I stood in the shower. The water touched my skin, my body was silent and still.
I stood there so quiet, that I almost thought I had done something wrong.
Words that I wanted to write to you came to my mind.
But I have already written it to you someday.
Writing to you once again, would make me a fool.
So I am writing it here.
Leaving it up in the air. Up to chance.
A message in a bottle.
I don’t know exactly anymore how we finished the conversation.
But I remember turning around again and sitting behind my computer.
I was at work, having this conversation.
While staring at the screen of the computer, I had to think of my mother.
How I could still feel her. Around me.
Tears were coming up.
‘Why do you write in English?’ He asked.
‘Aren’t you Dutch?’ He continued.
‘Do you still speak the language where you come from, Indian?’
He asked.
Lately my mind goes to the word commitment.
What that means and how that looks like in life. Perhaps it is not only about being committed, but even more about what happens before.
Binding.
‘Do you understand that when you unfollow someone on Instagram it is hurting their feelings?’
‘No’, I replied. ‘I don’t understand that’.
‘I don’t experience it in this way, because it doesn’t say anything, besides the fact that I am not following you on Instagram anymore’, I continued.