Reaction to a rejection

For a man who did not speak much about himself, and had had no real confidant, he was driven by desperation to tell her, then, everything. Everything: the casual cruelties and betrayals, pinpricks, which had nailed him forever to what he had become since, faiths destroyed; memories so primal and gut-wrenchingly felt that he had not even acknowledged them to himself. But, to win her back, he bared himself of a lifetime accumulation of subterfuges, unshed before even in the privacy of his own company. He exposed the very underpinnings of his vulnerabilities, and waited throbbing and naked for her verdict.

A seven-day wait and then a two-sentenced rejection copied and pasted from the last mail. A few hours before the mail, she had blocked him in all the social networking sites and on her phone. It was in the end a cavalier dismissal of his stripped essence: the doorman called in to show him the way out , not granting him even the time of picking the pile of garments lying at his feet. He shivered with the pitiable indignity of a flower plucked of all its petals.

He shrivelled inside himself like a worm curling into a ball at a poke. He swore to never, never ever, tell anyone anything about himself. To never let anyone come close enough.

One day in class, a gang of pranksters from his class had cornered him to sing and he, innocent of their intention, had sang with his heart, only to be mocked by the burst of laughter when he finished. Since that day he had never sung to anyone else, and even to himself, restrained himself to humming when moved by an inspiration or notes of an old- memory wafting from somewhere, and only occasionally betrayed his resolve in snatches when alone and absolutely outside the earshot of anyone else.

To be joy, one has to sing, unfettered and unashamed. To love, one has to bare. But for him, the fear of the sting of rejection again became sharper than the pang for laughter and love.