"Freedom" in a Fortnight ?

Day 1: 7 PM

The car door closed, and she was on her way to the airport. She doesn't like me coming with her to send her off, some theory about how I'd feel "shitty" on the drive back.

Please…I am like super resilient and independent and self-sufficient and other words. As I made my way back to the apartment, it hadn't quite sunk in that she wouldn't be around for fifteen days. We've been apart before for longer, sure - obligations, emergencies, hospitalizations- the usual suspects. We were in a long-distance relationship spanning multiple years and countries.  

But this time was different. This was chosen. Mutually. A planned trip. When I talked about this to my therapist, she told " Provided you will have additional time and degrees of freedom, you should use this to pursue things you have always wanted to"

I decided to heed her words (first time for everything). I thought I should make use of my unencumbered time/space and do things. Read books, watch films I've been meaning to see etc. Even attempt that Vipassana meditation thing everyone keeps raving about (YOLO).

This upcoming fortnight would be about me, my freedom and my quest towards finding myself.

Day 2: 3 AM

I pressed snooze on an alarm that was never useful in the first place, because an alarm is only effective when one is asleep. The flight tracking app glowed on my phone. Some film played in the background, I started it with genuine enthusiasm with intent to complete, a promise already broken.

The movie served the purpose of producing background noise, a counterweight to the silence in the house.

Tomorrow's plan: exercise, office work, eat something that isn't yesterday’s Swiggy order, read productively, clean, exercise and sleep at a reasonable hour. The plan existed. Beautiful, laminated, ready and hanging on the wall of my consciousness like a corporate motivational poster.

I waited for her message. She would be landing soon. I had kept the tracking app open like some sort of digital stalker because apparently that's what happens when you are even temporarily alone: you become obsessed with the movements of the one person who makes you feel slightly less like a malfunctioning appliance. Very normal.

Day 3: 4 AM

Sleep, as it turned out, was not happy with me. I gave up attempting it around 2 AM.

This “being alone” thing, I had convinced myself, was objectively nice. I was productive at the office (as productive as anyone can be on three hours of fractured sleep).

I managed some exercise. I even started reading a book, then promptly got distracted by Instagram and fell into a doom scroll state around midnight. Then I jolted awake, convinced I heard something in the hall. Panic.

I fumbled toward light switches in the darkness, couldn't figure out which one operated what. Gave up. Retreated to bed. I resumed scrolling until my thumb physically couldn't scroll anymore.

The narrative of the independent, self-sufficient male was already crumbling like the dosa I made last night.

Here's what nobody tells you about solitude: it's not enlightening. It's not productive. It's not even interesting. It's just quiet. And quiet, left alone long enough, starts to feel like a legitimate form of abandonment. Deep thought for the day.

Back to scrolling

Day 5: 7:30 AM

What day is it? Does it matter?

As I pulled on my pants - which I still couldn't locate a belt for - I instinctively yelled out her name. As if she will somehow yell out the belt's location, overcoming the laws of space-time continuum.

Then I caught myself. The absurdity landed. I stood there, half-dressed, holding my pants up like some sort of middle-aged teenager, and realized the actual truth: belts are the final scam of late-stage capitalism.

Think about it. They serve no actual purpose. You could just... wear pants. But society - the thing we blame everything on - decided we need belts. Need them to look "professional." It's tyranny. Colonial oppression disguised as function.

I'm boycotting belts. Effective immediately.

Spent the rest of the morning hunting for it anyway. Fifteen minutes of excavation through the house, a space that was becoming increasingly unrecognizable. Conclusion: either the belt had achieved sentience and walked away, or I had finally lost my mind.

I went to the mall after work, because apparently that's what people do when they're alone and terrified, explains most of the stores there. I found myself walking aimlessly for an hour or so.

Watching couples. Watching families. Watching annoying kids tormenting their families. Watching people with other people. Wholesome.  

When was the last time I had an actual conversation? Not transactional small talk. Not office meeting. A real exchange. The thought was interrupted by a driver calling about cab logistics.

How efficient. How ironic.

Day 7: 2 PM

The Weekend arrived. I checked my phone three times to be certain. The verification process was important. Critical, even.

I had accomplished nothing of note this week, as per the original “freedom” plan. No books were read. No films were finished. No meditation was achieved. Am I doing something wrong? I turn to the place where all the solutions are - Instagram.

Every UGC creator with 100K followers, making adverts for lingerie brands, tell me that I should be “owning my energy” or "Be present" or "Manifest your intention". That’s the solution apparently.

Today was the day I would manifest self-sufficiency. I am going to attempt real cooking. Something I liked. By myself. For myself. In this increasingly big apartment that was starting to feel less like a house and more like a crime scene of my own making.

Now to start cooking, I need to answer a simple question. What do I actually like, though? Do I even like anything?

(A Scooby-Doo reel played distantly in the background: with Scooby making his trademark "Ruh-Roh" sound)

Day 9: 7 PM

Mondays are not just bad; they are philosophically bad. Everyone agrees with this, but nobody wants to dig into why. I'll dig. I have time and need to distract myself.

Mondays represent the fundamental falseness of how we structure existence. Five days of servitude, two days of fake freedom, then back to servitude. It's a con. A Ponzi scheme of time. And we've all bought in completely. I nodded, impressed with myself.

Unlocking the apartment door, I found a towel on the dining room floor. Just... there. Strange, being annoyed at yourself, for your own incompetence. Stranger still is, returning to a space held in perfect untouched stasis. A museum of my own loneliness.

I started folding clothes. Taking out garbage. Organizing bills. These acts felt performative, like I was rehearsing for a play titled "What a Functional Adult Does." I was ticking things off the list, making progress and then……I couldn’t find my phone.

After embarrassing circuits around the apartment, checking the same places multiple times like some sort of demented hamster on a wheel, irritation set in.

One horrifying option remained: knock on the neighbor's door (the neighbor to whom I have never actually spoken to nor know the name of) and ask them to call my phone so I could triangulate its location like some sort of digital Sherlock Holmes. That thought alone propelled my search onward.

Eventually, I found it. Inside the refrigerator. Next to a Six-day-old Swiggy container and what I assumed were the discarded remains of my previous life choices.

I grabbed the phone like Gollum grabbing for the ring. “My precious” (I apparently use a lot of metaphors and references when I am antsy)

Day 12: 11:59 PM

The TV news anchor was screaming about something. I wasn't listening. I was introspecting. About why someone of ostensible caliber, talking about myself, couldn't manage twelve consecutive days of basic functionality, leave alone “freedom”.

And I landed on something: I am a symbiote. A biological parasite that only functions optimally when attached to the host. This isn't pessimism or depression, this is honesty. Schopenhauer wrote about the fundamental suffering inherent to existence, and how admission is actual rebellion. This isn't weakness. This is just... accurate accounting.

“Freedom” is for those who are imprisoned or bound. I don't have unfulfilled dreams strangling me. I don't burn with the need to escape. No grand ambitions left unpursued.

The problem isn't that I am constrained. The problem that I have been facing for the last 12 days is that I am incomplete. Not in some romantic or greeting card way. But in the way that a sentence without a full stop, is fundamentally unresolved.

So yes. I am a symbiote. And symbiotes don’t need "improvement" or “Freedom” etc. I patted myself on the back.

Day 14: 7 PM

My fortnight of "freedom" is almost over. After fourteen days of unfettered autonomy, of solitude, of all the supposed liberation, I have reached a conclusion: I am dramatically overrated without her.

Not broken. Not incomplete in some tragic way. Just lesser. Like watching a film without sound. Technically still watching, sure. But you are missing the entire point of the thing.

As listed earlier, Freedom only means something if you're constrained by something. Doesn’t apply to me. I don't want to escape my life. I don't want to escape her. I want the opposite: the most profound form of freedom, which is the freedom to be utterly and completely dependent on another person.

Day 15: 8 PM

She lands tonight.

I have spent two weeks learning what I sort of knew but couldn't quite admit: I am not a self-sufficient person. I am not the protagonist of my own story. I am, at best, the supporting character. And that's not a tragedy, that's the punchline.

That's what makes it all work.

These fourteen days have been a masterclass in absence. And absence, as it turns out, is not the opposite of presence. It is proof of it. It is the shadow that proves the light exists. It is the silence that proves that sound has meaning. I want to add more cool metaphors but can’t think of any.

So yes, I am a symbiote. Yes, I am dependent. Yes, I am the guy who loses his phone and finds it in the refrigerator next to Swiggy containers. Yes, I am annoyed by Mondays on a philosophical level and I have declared war on belts.

But I am also - after fourteen days of solitary excavation through the ruins of my own consciousness - absolutely certain of this:

• She is not only the host. She is the point of all of this (mental health, improvement etc)

• She is the period and the comma and other punctuation marks in my sentences

• She is what happens when two broken people realize that broken together somehow works. Not completed. Not fixed. Just broken, together and aligned.

  
  

And I can’t wait for the car door to open again and welcome her back to the house that will become a home, once more.