Vindication via text message, no greater than fourteen characters

To the best of my recollection, I've only written about expectation from personal relationships twice before. Once, really directly, in July last year and once more, really tangentially, in December last year. The second experience was, like I said then, more a matter of awe than of broken expectation but the first one, the July one, took much longer to get over. And this evening, it confronted me again.

I know it is horribly self-congratulatory, but I really do believe I've grown up a lot since last July. Realising that no solution was ever going to really suffice, I decided that I would just do my best to make the most of any such situation and look on the bright side once the moment had passed. It wasn't, I admit, particularly original or brilliant, but I figured that, given my obvious weakness with regard to this sort of thing, we'd both be best served if I just chose to give myself up to loneliness and work hard.

But a close relationship, whatever it means to you, isn't ever that simple. And, slowly but surely, my "give yourself up to loneliness and work hard" mantra evolved into "give yourself up to loneliness and work hard, but when you can, give it some effort, give it some time, be a little selfless and don't get upset quite so much".

However, the last six months or so have made me realise that perhaps a lot more that is between us is compromisable. A lot more than I initially thought, anyway. And because it has happened slowly (and every step along the way has been explained to me with a patience that I find truly admirable), it hasn't triggered my irrational sense of self-worth so much. In fact, far from it, I've been able to accept all this and apply the modified mantra afresh every time it hasn't quite worked out.

This evening again, that expectation came knocking. And as I soaked in the joy of the McLaren one-two at Shanghai, took in Arsenal's implosion after being two-up at Wigan and watched helplessly as Delhi batted themselves right out of the IPL, quietly, in the back of my mind and thirteen kilometres away, equally quietly, in the back of her mind, we saw the expectation slide away into obvilion.

But the way I just described it makes it sound a lot more depressing than it actually is. It isn't depressing at all, in fact. Because as we watched what was meant to be six hours shrink to what eventually became no more than five minutes (with a forty-five second interruption), we became increasingly certain that those five minutes would end in a smile.

And even though it brought home to me more sharply the fact that I'm leaving in exactly two months, if I was put in that moment again, I'd take the five minutes every day over any six-hour long grand plans that my old enemy--expectation--might tempt me with.