Healing, I discovered, is not a dramatic event. It's a construction project. It's the slow, tedious, unglamorous work of laying one brick at a time, day after day, until you've built a wall strong enough to keep the ghosts out. After my conversation with Kapil, I became an architect of my own recovery, and my blueprint was brutally simple.
Brick One: Order. My room remained clean. Making my bed every morning was a non-negotiable. It was a small, stupid act, but it was the first promise I kept to myself each day. It was proof that I could exert control over at least one small corner of the universe.
Brick Two: Routine. I created a rigid schedule and clung to it like a life raft. 7 AM wakeup. Class. Library until 6 PM. Dinner. Two hours of homework. One hour of mindless television. 10 PM call with Kapil. 11 PM sleep. The routine was a cage I built for my grief. It left no empty spaces for my mind to wander into the dark, familiar corners of memory and regret. It was monotonous, it was boring, and it was saving my life.
Brick Three: Study. I poured every ounce of my remaining energy into my coursework. Mechatronics, with its unforgiving logic and absolute truths, became my sanctuary. A differential equation didn't care if my heart was broken. A circuit diagram wouldn't judge me. In the clean, predictable world of engineering, every problem had a solution. I started to excel, not out of passion, but out of a desperate need for a world that made sense.
The daily calls with Kapil were the mortar that held it all together. He never mentioned the rooftop again. He never asked, "How are you feeling?" in that loaded, therapeutic way. Instead, he'd ask, "Did you see the match last night?" or "My professor is a certified lunatic, let me tell you what he did today." He treated me like I was normal, and in doing so, he gave me permission to believe that one day, I might be.
Slowly, painstakingly, I built my wall. The days turned into weeks, the weeks into months. The second year of college ended, not with a bang, but with the quiet satisfaction of exams passed and a routine successfully maintained. I was functioning. I was surviving.
Part 2: The Observer Effect
Something strange began to happen in the quiet spaces of my new life. The pain, which had once been a roaring inferno that consumed all my thoughts, had subsided into a low, pilot light of an ache. It was still there, a constant companion, but it no longer demanded my full attention. And with this newfound mental bandwidth, I started to notice the world again. But I was seeing it through a different lens.
The experience on the rooftop had fundamentally changed my perspective. It had taken me to the absolute edge of my own existence and shown me the vast, impersonal machinery of life and death. My own problems, which had once felt like the center of the universe, now seemed incredibly small.
I became an observer. In the college canteen, I'd watch the dynamics of different friend groups. I could see the subtle insecurities in the loud, boisterous leader. I could see the quiet longing in the shy girl who never spoke up. I could see the fault lines in couples, the tiny, almost invisible cracks in their smiles that betrayed a recent argument.
Before, I would have projected my own feelings onto them. Now, I just saw them. My own emotional volume had been turned down so low that I could finally hear everyone else's. It wasn't a superpower. It was a scar. The part of me that was capable of fiery, self-involved emotion had been burned away, and in its place was a calm, quiet, and sometimes lonely clarity.
This new insight made me withdraw even further. I found it hard to get angry at people. A friend would lie about something trivial, and instead of feeling betrayed, I'd feel a wave of pity for the insecurity that made them feel the need to lie. It was impossible to hold a grudge when you could so clearly see the pain or fear that motivated a person's actions.
My friends found me… different. Calmer. More distant.
"You've gotten so serious, man," one of them remarked one day. "You never get worked up about anything anymore."
I just shrugged. How could I explain that I had used up a lifetime's worth of getting worked up in the span of a few months?
My third year of college began. I was a year removed from the fight, a six months from the rooftop. My wall was strong. My routine was solid. The ghost of Parveen was no longer a constant, haunting presence. She was a memory, locked away in a room at the back of my mind. I still felt the ache, especially late at night, but it was a familiar pain, one I had learned to live with.
Then, one afternoon, a mutual friend, someone who wasn't in our inner circle and didn't know the extent of our fallout, sent me a photo on WhatsApp. It was a group picture from a recent college festival. There were ten people in the photo, smiling, laughing. And in the center of the frame, her arm slung around a friend, was Parveen.
My heart stopped.
It was the first new picture I had seen of her in two years. She looked different. Her hair was shorter. She looked happier, more confident than I remembered. She was beautiful.
My meticulously constructed wall cracked. The old, familiar pain rushed in, sharp and breathtaking. My hands started to shake. The room felt cold. For a terrifying moment, I was right back where I started, a mess of hurt and longing.
The old me would have spiraled. I would have stared at the photo for hours, dissecting her smile, torturing myself with questions. Who is she with? Is she dating someone? Does she ever think of me?
But I wasn't the old me.
I took a deep breath. Then another. I forced myself to use the new, logical part of my brain, the part that had been forged in the fire.
This is just a picture, I told myself. It's a moment in time. It has no power over you. She is living her life. You are living yours. This is okay.
I looked at the photo one more time. I allowed myself to feel the sadness, to acknowledge it. I missed my friend. I missed the girl I loved. It was okay to feel that. But I didn't let the feeling consume me. I accepted it, and then I let it go.
I typed back a simple reply to my friend: "Nice pic!"
Then, I deleted the photo.
It was one of the hardest things I had ever done. It felt like a betrayal, like erasing a piece of her. But it was an act of self-preservation. It was a choice. I was choosing my hard-won peace over the sweet, familiar poison of nostalgia.
That night, on my call with Kapil, I didn't mention it. We talked about our projects, about his plans for the weekend. We talked about normal things. Because that's what my life was now. It was normal. It was quiet. It was a structure I had built with my own two hands, brick by painful brick.
The love for her wasn't gone. I knew it was still there, buried deep under the foundations of my new life, an unexploded bomb I would have to live with forever.