Phantom

Written by – OliverPan

Art – Nikolas

Psychologists say, when someone has a body part amputed or an organ removed, the amputee feels the presence of the missing part in the form of eerie sensation or pain. It happens because your brain is so used to having the part and taking it for granted that it still cannot believe it’s not there. That’s the theory of phantom limb sensations.

Maybe that’s also the reason why the smell of your cologne is still lingering around.

The other day the 12 year old girl from the apartment downstairs came running into my apartment and asked me where half the books from the bookrack went. “Why? Doesn’t it look good?”, I tried asking without any hint of sorry in my voice. “It’s not about looking good, it just looks incomplete.”

True, the Psychology books missed Shakespeare and Keats.

It isn’t easy, no. The breakfast table does not require another plate, the second pillow is no more beside mine but almost always on the couch, the toilet seat isn’t left gaping and remains the way I leave it, and the study table does not have loose sheets scattered with words of beauty and ugly carved with expertise. It isn’t that I’m not coping up; my patients have told me how divorce had devastated their lives and invited mental ailments like anxiety, depression, masochism and neuroticism, and I’ve helped many of them get back on track. But how do you operate on your own body?

They say you should never fall in love with a writer because you can never match their standards of love. I’ve found out otherwise. A writer is a dreamer who has a very substandard version of love. The issue arises when you love them very hard ,way above their standards of love- they imagine it all to be a dream. And just because they almost certainly know that every dream breaks, they savour the sweetest parts and when they are convinced that the dream is now supposed to be over, they wake up and leave.

Even today I thought I heard your phone ring and almost called out for you from the balcony. Then my heart skipped a beat and I realized it was just one of the many phantoms I feel throughout the day.

I don’t know about you, but I wish Psychology had discovered the kind of exorcism required for removing phantoms of love.