Thinking of another.......

"You, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection!!!"

This was a SMS i received three years ago. From a random, middle aged stranger and I still haven't been able to fathom it.
You must be wondering why did a stranger message me? And how on earth did he got my number?
Well, it was a warm December morning. I had bunked my college to be with my best friend at Connaught Place (Delhi). We were sitting in the central park when suddenly this middle aged man came up from nowhere telling us that he was new to the city and kinda lost in CP. He was looking for his driver and requested if he could use our cellphone to call his driver up. Gullible, as I was, I promptly gave him my cell thinking he deserved to be helped.
After calling up his driver, he struck up a chat with me and my friend. Told us he was a theater director from Mumbai and was in Delhi to visit a show at IHC. I will not deny the fact that the man seemed genuine, well-read and intelligent. We chatted with him comfortably, thinking of him as a man of our father's age...(somebody who definitely wouldn't flirt with a first year college student, that's me).

Later, that evening, I got a call from a Mumbai number. Apparently, it was the same middle aged guy inviting me to attend his play at IHC. I politely refused. And, since then, rudely ignored all his calls and messages.

After a month, I got this message and somehow it sticks with me. I don't know if it was an insult or suggestion.Maybe it was his way of getting back at me, of not reciprocating to his calls and invitations. I don't know why I keep it. I've never heard from that old man again. But it has been there in my inbox since the last three years. Will delete it the day I understand it.

But today, there was something more I learned about love and affection. And won't rest till I've blurted it all out. I've learned that it's weird being in a long distance relationship It's that sometimes I forget that there's actually two people and not just one pair. I forget that there is this one person who has willingly made a choice to

• call me up everyday, no matter how tired he is!
  
• to listen to my random ramblings, pacify the bitch in me when I go mad without losing his cool (all this over the phone, being quite a few hundred kilometers away)
• to bear up with me!
  
• I forget that this person here with me is making the choice to stay with me every aching minute of every day, never mind that his physical presence is not felt;
  
• that this person is not obligated to be here, but that he simply wants to because he cares about me and loves me that much.

But then there's days I remember that this other person is not an extension of me, that he sometimes makes decisions I wouldn't make, and do things that I wouldn't do. So when something like that sets us apart, it feels weird, that one of us is not in the same page as the other, sometimes not even in the same sentence. It might be upsetting and even infuriating, but at the end of the day you realize that what's important in a relationship is just being able to work together to make it a team again and not a competition.

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous. ~Henry Brooks Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1907