I Loved Him Best in Winter
Our love had seasons, and I only learned that too late.
Daniel proposed to me in July, and my first thought, before the yes, before the crying, was: wrong season. I did not say it out loud. I said yes on a rooftop in Defence Colony with sweat pooling at the backs of my knees, and I meant it, and I also knew something I would spend the next four years refusing to know.
We met in December. A friend's terrace party in Delhi, the fog so thick you could have folded it up and taken it home. I was shivering in a dress I had chosen for vanity instead of survival, and a man I had never seen before took off his scarf, wrapped it twice around my neck without asking, and said, "You can be brave in April. It's December." The scarf smelled of cigarettes and cardamom.
I wore it home.
I never gave it back.
That first winter we were ridiculous. We ate soup like it was a religion. His flat had one of those old two-bar heaters that glowed orange and smelled faintly of burnt dust, and we would sit in front of it on the floor, backs against the sofa, playing the same Chet Baker record until I knew every crackle in the vinyl better than I knew the trumpet. Power cuts did not scare us. Power cuts were an opportunity.
In winter, we were geniuses at each other.
Then came April.
I want to be fair to April, because it was not dramatic. Nothing about us was ever dramatic. It was just that the heat pulled us to opposite sides of the bed, and the ceiling fan filled the silences that the heater used to warm.
He worked late because the office had better air conditioning. I got short with him about things that were not the things.
We were fine. Everyone said we were fine.
But I remember standing in the kitchen that first May, watching him eat mangoes over the sink so the juice would not touch anything... and feeling like I was watching a stranger perform a man I loved.
October fixed it. October always fixed it. The first cool evening would arrive like an apology, and we would find each other again, easy as breath. Blankets came out. Soup came back. His hand found mine in the dark without either of us deciding it.
For four years, I let the weather do the work of the marriage.
I kept a diary in those years, badly, in bursts, and if you read it now you can chart us like rainfall. November entries: long, warm, full of him. June entries: three lines about work and then one sentence, always some version of the same sentence. "D quiet. Me quiet. It's just the heat." Friends would ask how Daniel was doing, and the honest answer was... what month is it?
The refusing to know is the part I want to explain, because people think you either love someone or you do not, and nobody warns you about the third thing... loving someone in installments.
Falling out of love slowly does not feel like falling. There is no lurch, no floor rushing up to meet you. It feels like a tide going out so gradually that you keep calling it the sea.
The fourth year, winter came late and left early. It was warm by the first week of February. I remember the exact moment I understood, because it was so small it was almost funny. I was standing at the fridge at eleven at night, drinking water straight from the bottle, and Daniel came and stood in the doorway in his old gray sweater, the cardamom one, wearing it even though the night did not need it. He looked at me for a long time...
"You love me best in winter," he said. It was not an accusation. That was the worst part. It was the voice you would use to tell someone their taillight is out. "I worked it out around year two. I've been living for October ever since."
We didn't fall out of love. We ran out of winter.
I wanted to argue. I had the whole architecture of an argument ready, and then I looked at him standing in that doorway in a sweater the night did not need, a man dressing for a season that would bring his wife back to him, and I put the bottle down and said the truest thing I had said in four years: "I'm sorry it took me this long to notice what you noticed."
We cried, both of us, sitting on the kitchen floor with the fridge humming behind me. Nobody shouted. The end of a slow love is mostly admin: dividing the books, deciding who keeps which friends, one strange and gentle afternoon spent negotiating over a heater. He took it. He said he was owed it, and he smiled when he said it, and I laughed until I could not tell what the tears were doing.
Here is what no one tells you about endings like ours. There is no casserole for it. When someone dies, when someone cheats, the world knows its lines. When something simply, slowly stops, people do not know where to put their hands. "But you two never even fought," my mother kept saying, as if peace were proof of love and not, sometimes, the polite face of its absence.
For a long time I could only write about the leaving. Angry little paragraphs, deleted by morning. Then, almost a year later, on the first properly cold night of December, I sat down and finally wrote about the love instead: the scarf, the soup, the orange glow of the heater on the floor of that flat. It turned into a poem about memory, about how a season can hold an entire person. I entered it into a monthly poetry contest, mostly so I would stop editing it at two in the morning. It did not win... It did not need to. Sending it somewhere was the sound of a door closing softly instead of standing open forever.
People ask me now, carefully, over coffee, what happened with Daniel, and I have learned to say it plainly: nothing happened.
That was the whole tragedy.
Nothing happened, twelve months a year, and for three of those months, nothing felt like everything.
Last December the fog came back thick, the way it was the night we met. I stood on my balcony with one cup of tea and caught myself, out of four years of habit, curling my free hand around a second cup that was not there. The cold bit my ears. Somewhere below, someone's radio was playing something with a trumpet in it.
I drank my tea. Then I went inside and, for the first winter in five years, switched on a brand-new heater I had bought for myself, and sat down in front of it alone, and it was warm, and it was mine, and it was enough.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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