You meet her at the court square. The rain, which had been falling all day, made the night fall early. She is disgusted, her mouth is hard and she walks with her fists bunched up. You hug her and try to kiss her mouth. She turns her face away, saying no not now, not here. You say but I haven’t seen you in so many days and I have suffered. She says this cannot go on.

She feels trapped and she wants her freedom back. You would give it back if it was a book you had borrowed from her to read. You don’t say anything but look at the statue in the distance. She sees you have looked away and turns her head to sees that you are looking at the statue. You had passed by it many times before without noticing it till she pointed out to you. This was before she lost her freedom somewhere.

You sigh and say what do you want me to do? She closes her eyes and says I don’t want all this. Does this mean the talk you had at this statue about wishing to grow old together like that old couple cast in bronze? You say she has always been free to do whatever she wanted and make whatever choices she wants to make. She looks at you as if you didn’t understand her at all, which of course you didn’t.

You know she feels responsible for your need for her, responsible for letting your need for her happen. You don’t know how to flush yourself of this need but you have been struggling with it for a while. You say what can I do to help, to make you feel better? You know that there is nothing you can do to help her. The choice is hers to make. And based on that choice, the suffering or joy is both of yours to bear.

She says she didn’t know that it would come to this. What is this? This meeting on a rainy evening? This whirlpool of emotions which seem to be sucking both of you in? She says she talked to her friend who had advised her to first sort out her priorities, determine what she wants from her life and not compromise with anything till she finds exactly what she wants. You say that is what you also believe in but you wonder how this is different from being selfish? Is freedom then a selfish instinct? You have no answers, you only have been talking about freedom, or as he said preaching the freedom gospel.

That’s why you have come to this country, haven’t you? You had termed it escape, in your poems. Escape from all that you said. Only now you are beginning to question, what is that you have escaped? You have answers on the surface; oh I didn’t want to waste days trying to access a printer as it was in that damn country. It was also suffocating and tribal. You had enough of that. You wanted to jump into a crucible of intellectual creativity and set the world on fire. You didn’t know the crossing would also mean heightened loneliness.

You say mournfully fine do what you please. Perhaps you should listen to what your family says and cut this off. She says don’t drag them into this but yes they think I am being foolish. You say yes they may be right, because you see those equations on the board as well. You are poor and still are a nobody to a large part of the world. You haven’t proven yourself. You also have fallen into the habit of flagellating yourself with her words. She says you don’t understand what she is going through. She hasn’t slept for more than a few hours in the last 48 hours. You hold her hand. What can you do? Can you take her place at the hospital so that she can sleep? Can you learn for her? Can you take the pain and suffering, this young girl with cancer, that woman who was infected by her former husband with AIDS, this color of blood from a gunshot, that junkie who has shit all over himself and can barely speak, instead of her?

These individual sufferings, how to make them vanish? You want her to be playful but how can you expect her to be playful always? She is also like you, a human being. She says I just want to have fun. She says she doesn’t want to deal with all the concomitants of this relationship. She would like to do her work, learn as much as she can and occasionally go out on random and fun dates. Is this a comment on how she views being with you? Or is she just being brutally honest? This cuts you to the quick, you flinch but don’t say anything.

You think if that is what she wants to do, she should do that right away, perhaps even this evening. You are sure she will find enough entertainment. But is that which is entertaining satisfying? Doesn’t what is satisfying have to be entertaining? How does one know the difference?

You talk to him and he says you are full of noise. You should let her have it, have this disgust and anger you are feeling. He says you should cuss at her, call her right away what you might call her later in your own mind. He says you don’t have to take this shit. You know you want to do what he says and that you will feel better if only momentarily. But that won’t give you any answers, won’t give her any answers. You have been seeking answers like a madman, but you always stop short of being desperate, being institutionalized.

Later that night you pick up Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and read … “be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves… do not … seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will… gradually without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”