Icarus Was Warm

The thing about stories—real stories—is that they give you something to believe in when nothing else will. Maybe that's why the Greeks turned heartbreak into myths. They knew what falling meant.

Lately, I dream in fragments—bits of love, bright and blinding, always slipping out of reach. I am Icarus, and the ground is far. The ache is a living thing, coming alive at night, painting salt tracks down my cheeks at two in the morning.

On restless nights, my phone is a lifeline. I cradle it, thumbs stamping out old numbers that pulse like a wound, the screen glowing against my shaking hand, my breath stuck in my throat. Maybe I’ll call. Maybe his voice will make sense of this wreckage, piece me back together. Maybe we can invent a version of the future that belongs to us.

But I never do.

Instead, my mother's voice cradles me, soft over clustered idols, weaving ancient stories into prayer. My father’s silence, thick as ritual smoke. My sister, giggling as she dots my hand with kumkum, each red smudge an old promise. Every tradition is a thread, pulling me backward even as I strain forward. My life split down the center, between faith in us and faith in what made us.

Arranged marriages are the norm, expected and understood. When a girl from my family is married, region, religion, caste, subcaste, astrology, financial position, social position plus a million other conditions are examined and cross examined. It's natural, it's obvious, it was done for my mother, her mother and every mother before that.

But, I wanted more.

That was my curse, I always want more. And so, I kept flying, unaware that my wax wings were softening.

It was youth and foolishness that led me to think I might leave this unscarred. I neither knew the cost nor the price to be paid and I didn't understand that I might not be the one paying that price.

My life was to be mundane, I had long accepted that. I would be nobody in the big picture. But with him, I thought, I had a chance to change something, if not the larger world, maybe even just my world.

He was my sun and sanctuary. The boy who laughed with his whole body, who held doors for six and sixty year olds, who believed love—true love—could tilt the world back into place. He taught me how to listen for joy in mundane moments: heart shaped pancakes for his sister, downpours that floated flowers from the sky, stories traded with strangers at dusk. Because that’s just who he was. And that's why I fell for him.

Every Saturday evening he would declare that the next morning, he'd go to Sunday church. But the next morning, he’ll postpone, until a point where Sunday Church never came. But even with his church going patchy at best, he was, still, the first person to ever take me to one.

In the hush of his chapel, shadowed by colored light. He looked right at the altar, like he was daring the earmarked, leather‑bound book to oppose him.,

“I’ll convince them, I’ll convince them all and if I can’t convince, I’ll fight, Both your gods and mine”

"They can spurn me, but you're worth every curse"

I was precious, I was important, I, who was the side character in everyone else's story was the protagonist in his.

But he didn't understand what he was suggesting. His sister who he alone spoils, his doting mother who calls him thrice a day, his proud father who taught him to tie a Windsor knot, maybe it didn't quite occur to him that he might never be able to have them and me at the same time.

That my family would sooner bury my laughter than bless my leaving, choosing grief over change, silence over acceptance. That they would rather lock me up than let me go with a boy who wanted to go to Sunday church instead of morning Gita.

And so, tradition is a fortress, and I am its trembling guard. Loving him meant war: within me, within the walls I call home, against a world that carves borders into flesh and prayer.

Someday, maybe a different girl and boy will be luckier with a different fate, and just like my boy does, he’ll shush himself when she offers up a thanks to her Gods at the end of the day.

And he’ll draw a cross while she motions an Ohm when an ambulance passes by at full speed, because good blessings are good blessings, whichever God it belongs to.

Maybe their beliefs will circle each other, and their worlds of mothers, fathers, sisters, relatives or strangers won't have anything to say, even as they celebrate Christmases in front of fireplaces telling stories from Mahabharata, or sneak into churches quietly for sermons after having the leftover vermicelli pudding from the local temple for breakfast. Their worlds wouldn't clash and crash, they would meld, bloom and grow.

But we won't survive this. We are not the lucky ones.

So we broke. Not for lack of love, but because love alone can’t thread the gap between worlds. I learned the cruelty of soft endings: how goodbye isn’t a word, but hope unspooling, unmaking, gone.

The phone glimmers with morning light. My mother hums a prayer for gods with a thousand heads, but one heart. I memorize the warmth of loving him, knowing I will tuck it away—an ember buried deep.

Perhaps, in another skin, another time, marble men on crosses and jasmine strewn dark stones will wind together, and no one will bleed.

But for now, I am both longing and survival, both flame and ashes. I will not tell him my truth, my understanding of what he doesn't, I will not have him pining for me. So this is my goodbye, to another lifetime, to another chapter, and I will turn the page because this myth will die out in the moonlight, in my tear streaks, in the days when I want to turn everything back and the sun will live on, because the sun must not hate the world.

“So, Icarus,

I will burn, fall, and end like you.

But Icarus,

was your sun as warm as mine?”