Second Love

Yeah I know I probably am being unfaithful. And yeah I know its too early to tell. And I know most of you at the end of this post will shake your heads and say "It'll pass. Its just a silly crush" and maybe it is. I mean, how can anyone fall in love in a matter of a few months, right? I used to be the girl who scoffs at this notion of first love. Come on, life is not a Gautham Menon movie. But here I am, a few weeks from my last post (Sorry about that!) gushing about my new found love. To some of you this may be no surprise having already guessed this would happen from the first few signs of amor (Look at me! I just used a French word in my sentence. I am so sophisticated!) in my last post. To others it may be as much of a shock as it was to me. Or maybe shock is the wrong word, maybe pleasant surprise is more like it. (Mindvoice: Have already used 'surprise' previously. Must check thesaurus for substitute. Oh forget it!). But all-in-all I am now officially head over heels. And what timing! When you least expect it, love smacks you in the head and leaves you all woozy. (I like Hobbes' definition better).

I've always hated it when people in love gush to their lesser-by-half friends. "Divya you should get committed too. Its so nice to have someone to take care of you"-so not the thing you want to hear at 2 in the morning when you have a project due in a couple of days and your stomach's rumbling because you've had no proper meal and there's nothing in the fridge to eat and no time to go buy groceries and no mommy to cook it for you. To all fellow members of 'Sidekicks-of-lovestruck-friends Anonymous', respect. And farewell. I know the look my friends give me when I talk to them about my new amor (ooh look again!). I know the look because I've been on the other side giving the look-part happiness for your pal, part jealousy, part exasperation, part get-on-with-it-will-ya. But just because I know it, doesn’t mean I am refraining from doing it. Quite the opposite in fact.

There is so much further to go I know. One autumn's romance does not a relationship maketh. And as time goes and the excitement of the novelty of it all has worn off and the flaws that were hidden at the start seem obvious, my love might waver. But for now this is enough.

For all of you who have lasted this long and come to this paragraph, I must congratulate you on your patience. Make yourself a nice cup of coffee. You deserve it.

So yes, I am in love. Totally. Completely. In. love. With. This. City. They don’t call it the City of Angels for nothing. There is not a day when the sheer beauty of this place cant cheer me up. Like today when I had to wake up at 4 to get to an early morning exam (8 o clock shall henceforth be referred to as early morning in my blog) and it had rained the previous night so the roads were still damp but not muddy like I'm used to , and the air is crisp and clean yet not irritatingly sticky and humid and your breath congeals in front of you when you breathe out and everything is vibrantly green and colorful even though its fall and I walk into the building and a man holds the lift for me just because and a lady gets in carrying roses the size of my fist (everything's big here. Lemons are the size of oranges. God knows why) and the entire lifts smelling of roses and….. (my internal grammar radar is screaming at me to break the sentence and stop adding more 'ands' so I'll stop. Btw I did the test horribly for those who are, you know, genuinely interested in those sorta things). And the people….god bless the people. In all my 21 years of existence in India, I have never met a man or any person for that matter who held open a door for me. And I haven't done it either for other people (See I am a fair person). But here I am so used to it, its become a part of my instinct to do the same. When people are kind to you, you want to be kind in return. And it makes you feel nice to do it. I swear, holding open doors and other related girl-guide-category-activities actually cheer me up. And I like the way I can wear anything and not worry about what people would say or what random strangers on the road would do and I don’t have to look back every few seconds when I'm walking home alone in the night (the only time I've been assaulted at night was when a bunch of Trojans[1] drove past me when I was walking home alone at 2 a few days before our game against each other and yelled '"SC Rocks" at me. Bunch of idiots!). I love the way people are big on school spirit. I love the football and the footballers. I love….. Ok now am boring myself so I'll stop. And I know I am buffered and am living inside the bubble of my university and life outside the university is not as rose tinted (I get reminded of that everytime i go downtown to Walmart or to USC) but inside this cozy little world, I am happy.

What plans for the future? I don’t know. They change every few seconds. But am beginning to enjoy this indecision, this not knowing. So I'm going with the flow as of now.

P.S. The quarter officially comes to an end its time for acknowledgements. To all my friends who bore the brunt of my quarter blues, thank you. To Maya for being the person I respect the most, the next post will be on you, I promise. To Anjana, you may have won and may know how to kick a ball better but UCLA still rules 4eva! To you, I have quoted you but not cited you but you know who you are and thanks a lot for everything. I think survived this quarter on coffee and you. And to all my family member who secretly read my blog to check up on me, I hope you've stopped hyperventilating now.

[1]Trojans-students of rival university USC. Rivalry between UCLA and USC is gigantafuckingpopular. For more information refer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCLA%E2%80%93USC_rivalry. Look at me, I'm using footnotes! I'm so grad student-ish!