To You~ My Girl With The Questions

(Back-Story: Unlike so many others, I don't despair at rules of marriage which so many around us re-makeand re-define everyday. Countless friends, found people they loved and careers they wanted to shine at and often both these things were in separate geographies, underlined by separate latitudes. That's the thing with wanting to have it all, it's hard, takes effort, sacrifice and sometimes an old school handwritten birthday letter to remind you of a kind of magic that Snapchat and WhatsApp can't. Love is goofy, frustrating and riddled with questions, no matter what side of the GMT you're on.)



To You
Mansi Bhagwat Malhotra,




Analytics Geometry uses an xy plane formula to calculate it. I discarded that immediately. Although it might have worked for centuries on everyday objects and everyday people, it wasn't for us babes. There’s nothing everyday about you and I.

I considered then, the generalisation formula that Euclidean distance uses (for higher dimensional objects) which factors in space and time. While this was closer, it didn't in anyway completely contain, define or explain how distance can simultaneously be about multiple things and one singular ache and longing. How could I have known you since the fall of (2009), been married to you since February(2014), eaten bagels with you at Pamela's in Pittsburgh (2010), been away from you for 7 weeks now and still stand in my bathroom every morning staring at my hair products wondering if none of the time chronicled above had happened, would I have ever learnt to put the cap back on my hair product on my own?

Think about it, can the Euclidean formula determine exactly how I could be in the middle of a meeting in Gurgaon sitting across a client who is asking me about scalable opportunities and be suddenly and grippingly reminded of how you have the unique talent to test my patience by asking me the same question, a million different ways? A talent I find adorable and appalling, depending on which side of my morning coffee I am. How strangely, now that you're in Manhattan and I'm in Gurgaon I would rather fill the silences of each day that we’re apart with that same question, asked a hundred different ways.

Did the Greeks, while computing the formula, take into account that my wife, while geographically 462,500,000 inches away from me, is somehow less than 4 inches away each time I'm about to take a bad decision? Or how her raised eyebrow and trademark smirk can feel whisper-close when I'm telling new friends our story and embellishing it? Admit it babes, you would have doodled my name across every wooden surfaces of CMU had I turned my charm on completely. Or how sometimes, after a really rough day when I'm an ironical inch or two away from sleep, I can almost watch the smell of your skin soak into the sheet on the bed and I forget how time-zones were meant to work.



I decided next, to approach this distance problem with scepticism, using the age old method of disbelieving my own hypothesis and embracing chaos theory, hoping for a breakthrough. If someone were to observe our culinary conquests, they'd detect a similar pattern. 
You and I, we’re proud of never having gone to any restaurant more than once. We’re the culinary revolutionaries of our generation which makes me think, love, that this is what I want to spend my lifetime doing with you- Starting our own revolution, winning wars at work and quoting Fight Club whenever we get a chance. 
Ok, so maybe that last one is just me, but you’re the other half of everything else. 
The half of a marriage, which right now may not resemble everyone else’s, but will beat theirs one day. Yes, you may interrupt me to remind me that everything is not a competition. But it might as well be, given that I found my teammate and we’re prepped for battle, cake, adventures and victory. 

Happy Birthday, to my constant and the one thing in our ever changing plans- of travel, where to eat, when to meet and which one of us is right- that steadies me, anchors me and keeps me busy working on drafts of the speech that we will need to use when the world is finally ours.




Yours,
Rohan.



(To You is a letter writing project I started because there are not enough letters and love going around. If you have something to say with love-- for your ex girlfriend, you current husband, pizza (promise not to make it cheesy), your landlord who let you skip rent or even Ryan Gosling-- I'll write that letter for you.
The final letter will be up on my blog and a copy will be handwritten/typed on a typewriter and posted to you or to an intended recipient. Kisses on the envelope only on my discretion.
Give me a shout at: kakulgautam@gmail.com )

                                                   (Because stamps were art)