Cheaters ✓

Selfish

25 December 2020

This was the longest we had gone without talking or meeting. Neither was to be blamed. Christmas was a few days ago. Yoongi's husband's family was visiting, while Jungkook and I were in Seoul.

Jungkook mostly stayed with me at my parents' place in CR Park except for two days when he went to live with her folks.

My mother always told me how much she hated my father for being overtly serious about everything. They were part of the same group of friends in college but were never that friendly. When I asked her what made her choose Dad, she said she knew if she had gone with her parents' choice she would have had to leave her professional aspirations and move to Canada. When she got to know Dad better, she realized he was a man who would always listen to her. She took the first step. Dad said yes. And they have been married for thirty-seven years.

I thought that was a little selfish of my mother. She married my father because she thought he was someone who would listen to her all his life. My father had a rather funny answer when I asked him the same questions,

'I knew I had to listen to someone all my life. And I had never seen anyone as beautiful as your mother. So I chose to listen to the second most beautiful woman I'd seen after my mother, and that was your mother.'

It sounded funny but it was also a selfish choice. Choosing someone for their beauty. And then I started wondering, why did I choose Jungkook? The only answer I could think of was that nobody made me feel as comfortable as he did. That too was selfish.

To be with someone because they made you feel comfortable. It really doesn't matter how much we romanticize the larger-than-life selfless element in the concept of love, the choices we make, one way or the other, are always selfish. It's more about us than the other person. We only believe the opposite to feel better about ourselves.

I also noticed that my parents took each other for granted, so much so that they were used to it now. The more I observed them, the more convinced I was that they had only existed with each other all these years. Not lived. It scared me. I didn't want the realization that I had not lived life to the fullest to dawn on me at their age. It made me value the importance of the present. And the choices we made in that moment.

This thought made me miss Yoongi even more. He'd told me not to message him till he messaged me since he was busy taking care of his relatives and his phone may not always be with him.

We finally connected on the phone when Jungkook had flown back to Gwangju. We decided to meet for a quick coffee since his relatives were still in town and he had to take them shopping. The last time we met, he had told me he'd bought a suit for our wedding. It was a joke which he had clarified immediately. It was for a wedding in his family.

An unusual thing happened that evening. It started raining in December. We sat in the café and sipped our coffee, looking at the rain lashing the streets.

'I wish this wasn't a café but our home.'

That second last word-our-made me sigh. It had been two months now, and we had used the days as straws to make a nest for ourselves.

'Don't you ever desire to be a part of a story which you can't live?'

'Like?' I said, finishing my coffee.

'I always wonder what it would feel like to be a young boy's fantasy, an artist's muse, a married man's mistake, a sugar daddy's hedonist, a sportsman's motivation or a politician's secret.'

'Basically, to escape what you already have,' I said.

'Exactly. What we already have is also a kind of prison, isn't it? Even if what we have is what we always wanted.' A thought flashed across my mind and brought a smile to my face,

'What happened?' he asked.

'I was just thinking. Is it like two characters of a novel meeting characters of a different novel by the same author? Living multiple stories in one life.'

'I like the way you put it. Something like that, yeah. Tell me, can a character complain to the author? Like I have had enough of being in this story, let me hop into another, pretty please?'

I smiled and said, 'I wish. I so wish.'

Yoongi held my hand from across the table. I looked at it and wrapped my fingers around it.

'Let's begin another story?' he said. I was quiet.

'A story where I don't have to go to my house and you don't have to go to yours after this coffee is over. A story where we can go to our home together. Where we don't have to text on the phone in the dead of the night. Where we can talk face to face. Where,'

he lowered his voice, ',we don't have to sext. Where we can make love even at 4 a.m.'

Neither of us spoke after that. Maybe I had lived my story with Jungkook enough. Maybe he too had lived our story enough but had just not realized it. Maybe we needed to, respectively, appear in another story. Sure, there would be repercussions. Explanations and justification would be needed. I thought of the conversation I had had with my parents. And a question popped up in my head:

Was it a sin to be selfish?

There was a deafening clap of thunder. Everyone was taken aback. But not us. We didn't budge an inch. Or blink an eye.