On Leaving

21 March 2021

When I was in high school, I stumbled upon a old volume of Anais Nin’s journals, chronicling her affair with the writer Henry Miller. Nin was an ephemeral personality in Paris circles. A Spanish beauty known for her elusive magnetism, her writings and her torrential love affair with Miller, whose violent, erotically-charged novels like “Tropic of Cancer” were just being canonised in literary history.

“When he first stepped out of the car and walked towards the door where I stood waiting, I saw a man I liked.” Nin wrote about her first sighting of Miller. “In his writing he is flamboyant, virile, animal, magnificent. He's a man whom life makes drunk, I thought. He is like me.”

Throughout the journals, Nin writes often about the two dichotomous sides of her. On one hand, the loving wife of a devoted husband, drawn to tradition, consistency, loyalty. And on the other hand, the tortured creative, experimenter, writer, where “the faithful wife is only one phase, one moment, one metamorphosis, one condition.” This contradiction is a relish and a torment all at once: “I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.”

For nearly a decade, I revisited these journals as I experienced my first brushings with love. Not because Nin had a “model romance” by any standard (it was highly dysfunctional, to say the least)- but because I related to her fundamental contradiction, torn between the everyday foundation-building required for long-term relationships and the creative’s instinct to weaponise love, to scorch its grounds in search of inspiration, transcendence. A transcendence that can be achieved by unity, but more often than not — can only be achieved by pain.

For reasons known and unknown to me, I have never been very good at being in love, and even worse at extricating myself from love. I have exhausted the long list of not-recommended tactics for “moving on”, from the escapism of unhealthy distractions to the desperate ellipsis of immediately falling in love again.

“We become what we love and yet remain ourselves,” Heidegger wrote in his love letters to a young student at the time, Arendt. But in the absence of a stable, consistent self to “remain” — love becomes an all-consuming intoxicant. To “be” only in relation to another, or in relation to a Great Love, means annihilation in solitude. It means an inability to be, in quietude, with oneself. It creates an inability to mourn, and hence an impossibility to heal.

Like many of us around the world, I fell in love in the midst of lockdown. In the midst of lockdown announcements flashing across the TV screen. In the midst of an empty, post-apocalyptic Bangalore, whose streets were strewn with a thin layer of leaves within days, almost like a New England autumn. In the midst of silence.

The balcony outside my bedroom opens to a lush line of trees. Every morning, waking up and sitting with a morning cigarette, I would look out to the foliage and sense its animal inhabitants — the long-beaked crows, the monkey family who never left an open window or door unexplored, the tiny iridescent spiders — chuckling at us. Humans, with our unwieldy bodies and even more unwieldy minds. Humans, with our silly discomfort with sitting still.

I could write an entire novel about the love story itself, marked by and incubated within this generational event. I have all sorts of theories about why the sudden solitude, and necessary confrontation of mortality, made so many of us open to love and intimacy. But this post is named “On Leaving” for a reason.

We forget that “to leave,” its Germanic etymological roots, means “to allow to remain.” To leave in place, not to leave from. Yet when we leave something in modern life, we are often abandoning it— it is an act of desertion, of giving up completely. There is no space to remain, let alone to transition or evolve.

“On Leaving” because in my inner world, abandonment is not an option. One of the most trust-destroying things to do in any relationship between two human beings is to threaten this final detonation, to open the possibility of bottomless and irrevocable loss. Outside truly exceptional circumstances, I cannot think of why I could or would ever let go of someone who was, for whatever brief moment, part of an inner life, an inner circle. If you were ever a part of that — I will always have a place for you, in my heart and in my home. I was not good at communicating this to my friends, lovers or family, but I have gotten better.

“On Leaving” because beyond the surprise brilliance of falling in love when I thought I could not, this was probably the best denouement to a relationship I have ever experienced. We communicated, then over-communicated, again and again. We agreed on ground rules, transition plans. We went to counselling to understand how to extricate with minimal disruption. We wanted to know how to actually leave something in place, how to give something dying that critical space to remain. We recommended and gifted each other interventions to heal. We remained friends, in the truest sense.

To be fair, it was not perfect. We both made mistakes, we broke rules that we set for ourselves, we were weighed down by the unavoidable pains. His positive character probably ensured conditions for success more than my default confusion and anxiety. Yet throughout the process, I felt as I never had before — that I was working hard to preserve something to go back to, a neutral site of our care for each other that would endure beyond the death of our relationship — and that I had something to go back to after this death. Something to go back to that was formed, stable, waiting: myself.

We become what we love and yet remain ourselves. We leave what we love — by giving it a place to remain.

For the first time in life, I feel capable of both. And that in itself is a celebration, a gift, an evolution.