People in love are like street dogs. We scrape off whatever is thrown towards us and adapt quickly to live on the dwindling ration.
We don't know when and where the next morsel will come from, we only know from whom. We wait and wag our tails when we see them, our self-respect jumping off the tall building and dying a shameless death. We are hungry, always hungry. We walk with our dripping tongues out, looking and sniffing for our masters. We know where they live, what time they come from work, and what time they might think about us. We linger around a little and a little more, till we see someone like them walk out of the gate, smelling like love and bones. It is not them most of the time. But sometimes it is them. And we live and justify our existence for that ‘sometime’.
We are not stalkers, you see. We are just street dogs with two legs, two arms, a job, a house, a few people on our emergency contact list, some memories, a few dreams, a lot of pending chores, credit cards and EMIs, and a to-do list.
We wake up from sleepless nights hungry, looking for a breakfast of a tiny glance or a small talk about how bad the traffic is. Sometimes breakfast is served at night, sometimes we go without food for days and sometimes we get a heavy dinner served where unexpectedly our masters throw towards us hours of conversations, a little ruffling of the hair, a peck on the cheek, and slow and dizzy eye contact. We live on that diet for weeks. That’s how life on the street is. We attune our bodies and needs to the available supply.
We don't complain or make demands to our masters. We are street dogs. We don’t speak the same language. They are higher up in the hierarchy of relations.
Who has put them up there, you ask?
We have.
Do we have the power to bring them down?
No, we don’t.
We wouldn’t be street dogs if we had any power to begin with. Either we are born this way, or along the road somewhere we sold or were robbed of our self-worth and esteem. But that’s something of the past — full of winding roads, slippery downhills, and unpaved dark corridors that we do not dare visit anymore. The present is that we are street dogs now and we have found a master. We live under their mercy. We are loyal to them. We only accept food from them, no one else.
They can kill us any moment they want. Most of the time they don’t. They keep us alive with just enough strength for us to wag our tails and lick their feet every time they come to see us.
No, they won't kill us. We don’t have to worry about that. What we need to worry about is that they need us more than we need them.
