I Can Just Do Things

People like to say that if you know your destination, you’re already there. These are usually the same people who claim that “pain is just weakness leaving the body” or that a kale smoothie tastes “just like a milkshake.” If they are correct, however, I am currently residing in a state of pre-emptive heartbreak, a destination I seem to book a ticket to with alarming regularity.

I had flown back to India to escape the Scottish winter, a season that is less a weather event and more a personal attack, a psychic shearing of the very paltry amount of wool keeping me warm. The goal was to thaw out. Instead, I found myself running a familiar experiment: meet someone nice, become infatuated, and then watch as reality arrives like a wet dog at a picnic.

Some time ago, I had attempted to catalog the women I’d dated, which is the sort of neurotic bookkeeping one does when procrastinating on actual work. There was one particular entry: a fashion designer. My notes described her as “very cute, very sweet, and very depressed.” It sounds like the tagline for a memoirs section at a bookstore.

Our early courtship was a non-starter. A few dates, no touching. Then, inevitably, the dramatic medical emergency. She messaged me in a panic because her brother was at the ER. I went, of course. I’d like to say it was entirely out of altruism, but I was mostly willing to brave a hospital haunted by my ex-girlfriend just to get in the good graces of a new one.

I arrived to find the brother sweating and complaining. He’s a difficult person under the best of circumstances, and kidney stones rarely bring out the best in anyone. The doctors were performing that unique hospital dance of terrifying the patient while offering absolutely no useful information. I worked in Oncology before I caught the psych train, I’m not an emergency physician, but I took a quick history and laid hands on him and felt fairly certain it was a stone. This was soon confirmed by imaging. The hospital staff, sensing a customer with insurance, wanted to perform surgery on a pebble the size of a grain of couscous.

I couldn’t exactly go argue with them. In India, contradicting a senior doctor is a social crime on par with kicking a cow. So, I did the passive-aggressive thing and slipped the brother some medical PDFs, instructing him to argue his own case. It worked. He peed it out, he was fine, and I got a pity date out of it.

It went well enough, though I got the distinct impression she was only there to pay off a karmic debt.

There was also the time she called me in the middle of my shift, suicidal. I was in the ICU. People were literally dying around me, monitors were screaming, and I was on the phone using my “soothing voice”, which usually just puts people to sleep, to convince her to put down the scissors. It worked. She went to bed, and I went back to restart someone’s heart.

Then, silence. She vanished. I was in Scotland. I had my share of problems. I had more than my share of other people’s problems, that’s just my job.

Months later, I noticed her Instagram was deactivated. In the language of modern dating, this is the equivalent of a boarded-up house with a pile of newspapers on the porch. It means a breakdown. I messaged her. Four days later - an eternity when you are waiting for a reply from a pretty girl and genuinely concerned about her wellbeing - she wrote back.

“Heyoo pretty boy.”

She was back in town, living with her brother and sister-in-law, having traded fashion design for financial calculators. She was studying for her CFA. It was a pivot from fabrics to derivatives, which I suppose is just a different way of obsessing over tiny details and patterns.

The texting... It was sublime. I began feeling uncanny, like it couldn’t possibly be real that a pretty girl would laugh at all my jokes, even the really awful puns. And that she’d make me laugh too, hard. That we would get each other. It made me wonder why it hadn’t happened the first go around. Had we learned from our mistakes? Or had we simply been battered by the passage of time, had our rough edges sanded off? Had we learned to settle for “good enough” and call that good?

We met at a café. She refers to herself as “smol,” a spelling that makes my teeth ache, but she looked fantastic. She spent the entire time insulting herself, and I spent the entire time telling her she was wrong. We laughed until she claimed she was in physical pain. She said her cheeks ached. I pointed out the innuendo, and asked her to wait a while. I dropped her off home, and accepted an invitation that I hadn’t thought I’d ever receive. Come upstairs. Her brother would be home soon, and she told me that he usually threw a fit if she wanted to bring a boy over. But when she told him it was “the doctor”, he only expressed calm acceptance that in a more expressive person, might constitute outright approval. I guess good deeds remember their names.

I left at 3 am, after drinking quite a lot of her lemon rum. It didn’t quite drown the butterflies in my stomach and the aching desire to see her again.

We both told each other that our date had been the highlight of a rather dreary year. I know I meant it, and I choose to believe she did too. Fuck that qualifier, “choose”, I genuinely do.

Then came the family vacation. My mother dragged us to the nicest beaches India has to offer, a tropical paradise where she immediately developed a swollen cornea because she refuses to listen to her ophthalmologist, or her doctor son about contact lenses. Between applying eye drops to my mother and drinking beer by the beach, I spent most of my waking moments texting her. When my mom’s eyesight recovered, she had to ask who I was talking to all day, with a goofy grin on my face.

We wrote essays to each other. She told me about her anemia, which she treats with chia seeds sprinkled on her chocolate pancakes. I told her pretty girls will do literally anything but take their iron tablets. She told me she’s terrified of needles. I told her about the time I almost died of appendicitis because I was too scared to go to the hospital. In my defense, I was six years old. We debated whether she was “vanilla” or a “sex goblin.” I had made the mistake of assuming the former. I was pleasantly disabused. She sent me a picture of herself in a saree that was so attractive it actually made me angry. I tried keeping the messages light, PG-13. Suggest, don’t tell. I was rather shaken when she threw caution to the wind and made it rather clear that she wanted me. I blushed. I tossed and turned in bed till 4 am with a boner because she was an utter tease who I could tell was deriving great satisfaction from making me squirm.

On December 12th, I got my exam results. I had crushed them. The sensible thing to do was to fly back to Scotland, return to my job, and accept that this was just a holiday romance.

Instead, I stood in the ocean, ignoring the coral reefs and the fish, and changed my flight. I bought VIP tickets to a concert I didn’t want to see. I delayed my return to the real world for a girl who thinks her uterus is a “pink balloon.”

They say if you know your destination, you’re already there. My destination, apparently, is standing in the surf, staring at a phone screen, waiting for a “trash panda” to tell me she wants pasta. I’ve saved a bottle of my best scotch for her. It costs more per shot than the whole bottle of her rum, but it’s a fair trade for her company.

Man, self_made_human, you know this can’t work. You have a job. You live a very large and a rather small continent away. You aren’t incapable of loving well-adjusted women, they’re just thin on the ground, few and far between. Probably snatched up in uni and happily married by now, unlike you. You tell yourself they you’re happy in the market for lemons, you bite into them, skin and all, and enjoy the juices running down your face, staining that one floral shirt you intend to wear till it’s ragged. You let your dumb-ass heart override that frontal lobe, and you enjoy your limbic system running itself ragged too. You know she doesn’t want kids, and she’s adamant on that point even when you tactfully, haha only joking, attempt to suggest otherwise. You know you want those. You know you’re in for pain. You write essays about it. You intellectualize, you rationalize, you romanticize.

You’re a poor bastard trapped between two kinds of death: the slow death of “stable but boring” or the fast death of knowing exactly how the crash will feel before you even take off.

You’re a doctor who’s seen too many terminal cases, except the patient is your own capacity for unguarded hope. You’re grieving the version of yourself who could still be excited about a future with someone without immediately cataloging all the ways it won’t work. The undefended, optimistic, “butterflies and bees” version of you who could look someone you loved, talk with her and laugh and imagine and not immediately start writing the breakup essay in his head. You’ve spent several hours tracking down all the essays you once wrote about falling in and out of love. You’ve charted your trajectory: it’s a biased random walk through a minefield. You’ve looked over every explosion, remembered the pain of amputation, jettisioning who you once were, the slow healing that left your heart sclerosed and cramping. You’ve seen yourself become a better writer at the cost of becoming cynical. Your muse drinks your blood and in turn pisses out digital ink, with just enough ground glass in it to hurt.

Fuck it, fuck me, fuck you. You’re just tired, enjoy the ride and don’t look at the expiry dates on the bottle, liquor keeps.

---

(Is it a postscript if it’s written before publication? I think that’s just script.)

That was going to be it. Another neat little vivisection, another essay where I dissect my own heart while it’s still beating and call it insight. File it next to all the others in my ever-expanding catalog of romantic catastrophes, each one slightly better written than the last because at least I’m getting something out of the wreckage.

Except here’s the problem with pre-writing your own eulogy: sometimes you don’t actually die.

I had spent half my vacation in a state of wanting. Not the casual kind, the obsessive kind, the kind where you check your phone every thirty seconds like a lab rat hitting a lever. I wanted another date. I told her as much. The obstacle course was predictable: her parents had just moved into her brother’s place, trading their retirement for the privilege of asking pointed questions every time their daughter wanted to leave the house looking nice. They’re not tyrants. They’re just Indian parents, which means they’re constitutionally incapable of letting their adult children exist unobserved. Mine can be guilty of the same, but I am thickskinned enough to threaten to decamp to a hotel if they kick up too much fuss. They love me enough to relent.

The surveillance wasn’t the worst part. She could physically leave. But she was drowning in guilt, the kind that only comes from having tasted freedom and then having it revoked. She’d had her own apartment, her own money, her own life. Now she was back to being a broke student and a daughter under parental scrutiny, except with the psychological damage of knowing exactly what she’d lost. The thought of dolling herself up to see me, of explaining where she was going, of lying by omission or commission, it strangled her.

I liked her too much to push. I told her I’d give a great deal to see her again, and soon. I left it there. Sometimes the best move is to wait and see if someone wants you badly enough to navigate their own obstacles.

She did. She dropped the “going out with friends” bomb in the middle of a conversation about groceries and fled before her parents could cross-examine her. I did my part. I got the best haircut I’d gotten in months, the kind where the barber actually listens instead of just buzzing everything down to institutional length. I did skincare, which for me is practically revolutionary. I unpacked the suit that had been living in my luggage like a well-dressed corpse, travelling across continents but never actually getting worn. I looked good. Better than good. I looked like someone who gave enough of a shit to try.

I had a work meeting first, because apparently my job follows me everywhere like a well-trained dog, including on vacation. The moment I could escape, I bolted. I showed up early at our meeting spot, flowers in hand, but this time I had a plan. That cutesy Japanese store, the one that assaults you with pastel aggression the moment you walk in, I’d spotted something there last time. A plushie. Hot pink and goth black with a little skull, the kind of thing that was so perfectly her that it felt like fate. Or at least like good pattern recognition. I bought it. I wanted to see her face light up. I wanted to be the kind of person who notices these things and acts on them.

I’d offered to come get her when she arrived, but she was too proud to accept the offer. I will admit to some schadenfreude when she got lost in the building. Of course she did. The floor plan was designed by someone who hated intuitive navigation. I talked her through it over the phone. I ambushed her at the elevator, flowers hidden behind my back like some kind of rom-com protagonist. There she was, a tiny short-haired tomboy with an accent I found delicious. She’d dressed up, and she looked ravishing.

When she appeared, I kissed her hand (who even does that? Apparently I do now) and produced the bouquet. She beamed. The plushie came later, hidden at the restaurant table. She loved it, then immediately started catastrophizing about where to hide it from her parents and her klepto friends. I told her I was good at gift-giving when properly motivated. She told me I’d motivated her quite effectively.

The date was absurd in the best way. We ordered Long Island Iced Teas, which is what you do when you need liquid courage to have conversations you’ve been avoiding. They were great, or had copious amounts of liquor in them, which are interchangeable if I squint. She dabbed carbonara sauce from my moustache at the exact moment I realized she’d seen that scene from The Lady and the Tramp. We were disgusting. I loved it.

Then we had the talk. The real one, not the pleasant surface chatter and smoldering flirtation. The fact that I’d be flying back to Scotland while she was stuck here, treading water. The kids thing, that perennial dealbreaker lurking in every serious conversation like a landmine you both know is there but keep walking toward anyway.

It went easier than expected, which might mean something or might just mean we were drunk enough to be honest. I told her I’d be back if she wanted me back. I suggested, with the kind of boldness that only comes from Long Island Iced Teas and desperation, that I could fly her over for a few weeks. The idea made both of us dizzy. We sighed about the kids. We acknowledged it was big, maybe the biggest thing. She’d already told me her brother’s marriage was crumbling because his wife had sprung the no-kids revelation on him after the wedding, knowing full well he wanted them. I’d already told her they should divorce. There’s more to that story, but not for here.

We unpacked her reasons for not wanting children. The body horror of pregnancy, the way it transforms you into something alien. I told her the right man wouldn’t care about stretch marks or loose skin, which I believe is true. If it’s not, he was never the right man. Labor terrified her, the sheer physical violence of it. I reminded her that c-sections exist, that my entire family of gynecologists chose them. She told me about past boyfriends who’d been astonishingly tactless about the whole thing, who’d made her feel defective for not wanting what they assumed she should. I deployed all the tact I had like a drone strike. Call me Clausewitz. It’s one of the few things I’m genuinely good at.

The concert became collateral damage. I’d bought a single VIP ticket earlier, planning to confirm she’d be free before getting hers. She wanted details. I, being an idiot, let her see the invoice. Her eyes watered. She said I absolutely couldn’t spend that much on her. I pointed out I’d spent three times that just changing my flights at peak season, but she wouldn’t budge. I didn’t push, although I told her I’d been imagining her on my arm, showing her off to my friends like some kind of trophy I’d actually earned. We compromised: I’d go to the concert, get respectably drunk on the drink vouchers, then meet her at a hotel after. It’s not ideal, but it’s something.

Here’s what I didn’t expect: we never stopped talking. Hours of conversation without a single dead zone, without me having to fill silences like I was spackling drywall. Most women I’ve dated have required constant verbal maintenance. I can do it (I can hold a conversation with a brick wall if it’s the polite kind), but it’s exhausting. With her, words just kept coming. Machine-gun banter, jokes that built on jokes, puns that made us both groan and laugh simultaneously. Vulnerability disguised as stories. The kind of rapport that’s rare enough that, once tasted, you notice its absence everywhere else.

She said I was spoiling her, ruining her for other men by setting standards the locals couldn’t match. I told her that was the entire point. When I lovebomb someone, it’s scorched earth baby, carpet bombing, not a single daisy left standing. I told her this was completely out of character for me. My previous ex had to formally demand flowers like she was filing a complaint with management, and even then I only did it once. Changing international flights at obscene cost? Buying VIP tickets to shows I don’t care about in the hopes I could take her with me? Six months ago, self_made_human would have assumed he’d suffered a traumatic brain injury. Now I’m calling it something else, though I’m still working out what.

If this was just about sex, I could achieve it for a tenth of the investment. There’s something else happening here. I’m figuring it out in real time, which is either growth or just a different flavor of self-deception.

I told her about this essay. The version I’d written before our date, where I’d already scripted the ending. I laid out my neuroses like medical specimens: the way I sublimate my own wounds into fixing others, the way my ex with BPD recalibrated my tolerance for chaos so thoroughly that stable feels boring and volatile feels like home. The way I’ve sabotaged perfectly good relationships by simply losing interest when they proved to be well-adjusted. I told her I thought this would end in heartbreak, that the odds were stacked against us in ways neither of us could control.

She asked me not to show her the essay. She said it would hurt, that it would make her cry. I promised I wouldn’t. Not yet. Not until the dust settles, if it ever does.

Then she recalibrated everything. She told me she’d thought I was out of her league the first time around, that she’d been into me all along. I’d spent months assuming she was there out of obligation, paying off some karmic debt from the kidney stone incident. Apparently I’d just been too oblivious to notice. If we’d gotten this right the first time, my entire year might have been different. Or maybe it would have been exactly the same, just with different timing. I’m not sure which possibility disturbs me more.

We fucked up by not checking the time. Too busy staring at each other like teenagers. By the time we looked up, it was late. Her parents called, asking when she’d be home. Fuck. It was already ten. I offered to bring her to my place, break open the bottle of scotch I’d been saving, before it aged to the point where it was too expensive for me to drink. We both knew exactly what would happen if she ended up on my couch. She couldn’t do it. Guilt about being late and disappointing her parents, again. We compromised on one more glass of wine, then another, until we realized eleven o’clock was bearing down on us like an oncoming truck.

I insisted on dropping her off in an Uber. Every minute felt precious, like something I needed to hoard against future scarcity. I was taking a puff on a hookah of aerosolized gold and pixie dust, I just had to hold it all in my lungs until I gasped, till my very blood glittered and fizzed. And then I’d do it all over again. She agreed.

The car ride was everything. We were all over each other, making up for lost time, making out like we’d just discovered the concept. I won’t give you a blow-by-blow. You’re not here for erotica, and I’m selfish enough to want to keep some things private. But I will tell you this: the best moment was when I pulled her into my arms and let her rest her head on my chest while I kissed her hair. That’s the image that keeps replaying. I felt obligated to tip the driver generously for being discreet about it, since we were anything but.

I’m glad she lived far away. By the time we reached her building, we were both wrecked. Flustered, craving more, feeling like addicts who’d been Narcanned mid-high. I said goodbye with all the recalcitrance of a toddler being dropped off at daycare for the first time. She looked like she felt the same.

The moment I got home, the texting resumed. Except “texting” is far too innocent a word for what we were doing. No holds barred. Every ounce of my wordcel vocabulary bent toward crafting the filthiest prose I could manage. She matched me, word for depraved word. We’re both wordsmiths when properly motivated, it turns out.

Eventually, after what felt like both an eternity and no time at all, I told her to go to bed. I said I’d do what I always do with feelings I can’t quite process: write them into submission, pin them to the page like butterflies in a collector’s case.

So here I am. The taste of her still mapped on my lips. An essay that needs its ending rewritten because I’d already decided how this would go before it even started. I thought I knew my destination, thought I was already there in that state of pre-emptive heartbreak.

Maybe I bought a ticket to the wrong place. Maybe this me realizing it’s possible to reschedule certain flights, and stay on the beach just a tad bit longer.

I’ve got things to figure out. The distance, the kids thing, the fact that I’m pathologically attracted to women who come with warning labels. But for once, I’m not writing the autopsy report before the patient dies. I’m not cataloging the failure before it happens. I’m just here, wanting this badly enough to be stupid about it, willing to believe that maybe my diagnostic abilities can do more than just identify the disease. It feels good to undon the cuirass of cynicism, set my back straight and let the tension bleed out for once. Music hits hard - every lyric dripping with cosmic significance, the world seems brighter and more vivid. Is this what happiness feels like? Is this- no, don’t jinx it.

Wish me luck. I’m going to need it.