Met with a friend on Monday for what was planned to be a one hour session in helping him with English. We hung around for three hours discussing love, life, religion, politics, education, freedom, economy, liberty, history, culture, and of course, there was gossip too. We talked of marriage. We talked of commitment and lifestyle. We talked of possibilities and of souls and soulmates and adventures. We talked of ground and footing and stability. We talked of the idea of the concept, of waking up every morning and seeing the same face to coming home every night to tell the same "what did you do today?" Q&A story. I think what it boiled down to, above all else, was the fact that he had given up on that marriage-commitment type of love and he was afraid of going back home to India to visit his parents, where at the age of 30, single and very very unmarried, he would be set up with a bride. In order to appease his parents and their wishes for him, he would have either the choice to comply - which would sit with him as a decision he would be stuck with forever and a day, or not to comply, the repercussions of which would involve his move of disappointing the people in his life that he loves most dearly: his parents. He is one of my nearest and dearest to the heart of soul searching and I know, that over the 8 months of knowing him and developing our friendship, he has a most formidable story to share. I know too many people to reevaluate my connections with each of them, but they help me shape who I am and what I want to be. He taught me a lesson on freedom: a liberty that is not our own. He's been strapped to the confines of circumstance as a consequence of choice and matter-deliberation. It is not that he is unable to love freely, or that he is afraid to love truly and deeply. It is that he is looking for a soul who will not have him bound to the confines of life that he's experienced already and to find such a soul is far and few between the rift raft that makes it's way into the pages of his story. When I got into the car and asked him about her, he said to me "you know, there are just some chapters that are meant to be closed." And that was how we started our three-hour connection of understanding, of sharing, and of compromise.
