Veeresh — The Year I Broke Myself to Not Lose Her

I didn’t go to the Himalayas to find God.

I went there to escape myself.

The moment I left her—left Poornima standing in that penthouse with hope trembling in her eyes—I knew something ugly had settled inside me. Fear. Not of losing power. Not of revenge failing.

Fear of becoming the man she was scared of.

That look in her eyes that night…
It wasn’t hatred.
It wasn’t anger.

It was fear wrapped in love.

And that terrified me more than anything my past had ever done.

So I ran.

The Himalayas didn’t welcome me gently. The cold was cruel. The silence louder than any scream. Every breath felt earned, like the mountains were asking me a question:

Who are you without anger?

Days turned into weeks. Weeks into months.

No phone.
No company updates.
No Poornima.

And that was the punishment.

I stayed in ashrams, then caves, then small stone rooms where the nights were long and merciless. I woke before sunrise, my body aching, my mind restless. Meditation wasn’t peace—it was war. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw her crying on the floor. I heard her voice begging me to come back.

I remembered the slap.

Not because it hurt my face—
but because it shattered my illusion of control.

I had built my life on dominance, revenge, silence. I thought fear kept people close. But in the mountains, stripped of everything, I understood something brutal:

Fear doesn’t bind love.
It poisons it.

Some days, I hated myself.

Some nights, I punched stone walls until my knuckles bled—not out of rage, but regret. I remembered my childhood, the betrayals, the reasons I had sworn never to be weak. I realized I had confused strength with cruelty.

Poornima never tried to control me.

She tried to understand me.

And I punished her for that.

I met monks who spoke little but saw everything. One of them said to me once, quietly:

“You don’t need to kill your anger.
You need to stop letting it speak for you.”

That stayed.

I learned discipline—not the violent kind, but the quiet one. Long walks in snow. Fasting. Silence. Letting thoughts pass without acting on them. For the first time, I didn’t react. I observed.

And slowly, painfully, something changed.

I stopped blaming the world.
I stopped justifying my darkness.

I started taking responsibility.

At night, I lay awake staring at the wooden ceiling, wondering if she was still waiting. Wondering if I deserved that wait. The divorce papers haunted me. I had given her freedom not because I wanted to leave—but because I didn’t trust myself not to destroy her if I stayed as I was.

Distance wasn’t abandonment.

It was restraint.

I marked time differently there. Not by dates—but by control. The first month I stopped drinking. The third month I stopped lashing out. The sixth month, I could think of her without my chest burning with possessiveness.

Love, I realized, shouldn’t feel like ownership.

It should feel like safety.

As the first anniversary approached, fear returned—but softer. Not the fear of losing her.

The fear of facing her.

Because change means nothing if the person you hurt no longer believes you.

Standing at the edge of the mountains one dawn, watching the sun bleed gold over white peaks, I made a promise—not to God, not to fate—

To her.

If she is still there, I thought,
I will come back as a man who can hold her without hurting her.

The Himalayas didn’t make me pure.

They made me honest.

And with that honesty, I finally turned back—
ready to face the woman who waited through my silence,
and the love I almost destroyed.