The two months that followed our first call were a blur of delirious, sleep-deprived joy. It was a second honeymoon phase, a frantic and beautiful attempt to cram fourteen months of lost conversation into a few short weeks. We were addicts who had been cut off from our supply, and now that we had reconnected, we couldn't get enough.
Our phones were in a constant state of communication. We texted from the moment we woke up to the moment we passed out. We sent each other the stupidest memes, the most random thoughts, pictures of our terrible hostel food, and screenshots of our even more terrible lecture notes. We were rebuilding our shared universe, one inside joke at a time.
The phone calls were the best part. We'd talk for hours every night, the backdrop of our lives a familiar soundtrack of whirring fans, distant traffic, and the occasional shout from a neighboring dorm room. We fell back into our old roles with an ease that was both comforting and, for me, deeply terrifying. I was the overthinking philosopher, and she was the sharp, witty pragmatist who kept me from floating away.
"The inherent paradox of free will," I mused one night, staring at my ceiling, "is that our choices are often predetermined by a complex web of environmental and genetic factors we have no control over."
"You're right," she said, her voice serious. "For example, I have no control over the fact that if you don't stop talking like a fortune cookie and help me with this circuit diagram, I am predetermined to fail this class."
I laughed, a real, genuine, stomach-aching laugh. It was a sound I had thought was gone for good. Having her back was like regaining a lost sense. The world was in color again. Food tasted better. Music sounded richer. But underneath it all, my secret was a constant, humming current of electricity. Every laugh, every shared memory, every moment of easy intimacy was charged with the unspoken truth of my feelings.
I was walking on a tightrope, stretched between the ecstatic relief of having my friend back and the agonizing torture of wanting more. And the only thing keeping me from falling was Kapil.
Kapil had appointed himself as my official handler. He was my mission control, my voice of reason, my one-man Idiot Prevention Squad. Our nightly calls, which had once been about his romantic crises, were now entirely focused on mine.
"How are you feeling?" he'd ask, his tone like a bomb disposal expert asking about a ticking package.
"Good," I'd say. "We talked for three hours last night. She told me about this guy in her class who tried to explain quantum physics to her using a half-eaten samosa as a prop."
"Okay, good. That's friendship stuff," he'd say, relieved. "And what about the… you know. The L-word." He said it like it was a contagious disease.
"It's there," I'd admit, my voice dropping. "It's always there, man. Sometimes she'll say something, and it's like a gut punch. I just want to blurt it all out."
"Do not blurt!" he'd command, his voice sharp. "Blurting is banned. Blurting is what got you into this mess in the first place. You are on a strict no-blurting diet. You need to rebuild the foundation. You can't build a skyscraper on a pile of rubble, Arjun."
He was right, of course. His metaphors were getting increasingly weird, but he was right. I had to earn back her trust as a friend before I could ever hope for anything more. I had to prove that I could be the person she remembered, not the thoughtless idiot who had hurt her.
So I followed his rules. I kept the conversations light. I focused on being the best, most supportive friend I could be. I listened to her rant about her projects. I helped her with her assignments. I was a model friend. A perfect, platonic, paragon of pal-ship.
And it was slowly, quietly, driving me insane.
Living a lie is exhausting. Every conversation was a performance. I was an actor playing the role of "Just a Friend," and the script was getting harder and harder to follow. There were moments, small, insignificant little earthquakes, that threatened to bring the whole production crashing down.
One evening, she was telling me about her parents, who were pressuring her about her future, nagging her about her grades, and generally being… well, parents.
"I just wish I had someone who got it," she sighed, her voice small and tired. "Someone who was just on my team, you know?"
I'm on your team! my heart screamed. I would fight a dragon for you! I would build you a castle out of the bones of your enemies! Pick me!
"I get it," I said, my voice calm and even. "I'm always on your team, you know that."
"I know," she said, and her voice was so full of simple, platonic affection it felt like a knife twisting in my gut. "You're the best, Arjun. Seriously."
Another time, she was talking about a movie she had just watched, a cheesy romantic comedy. "It was so dumb," she laughed. "The guy spends the whole movie secretly in love with his best friend. Like, who does that? Just tell her, you idiot!"
I almost swallowed my own tongue. "Yeah," I choked out. "What an idiot."
These moments were torture. They were reminders of the vast, unbridgeable chasm between our two realities. In her world, we were the triumphant story of a friendship rekindled. In my world, we were a slow-motion tragedy, and I was the only one who had read the final page.
The pressure was building. The tightrope was starting to sway. I knew, with a grim certainty, that I couldn't keep this up forever.
The end of August arrived, bringing with it the suffocating humidity of late summer in Chennai. It was a Tuesday night. We were on a video call. She was lying on her bed, her head propped up on a pillow, her shorter hair falling across her face. She looked tired but happy. We were talking about our plans for the upcoming semester break.
"I was thinking of trying to learn the guitar," she said, her eyes lighting up. "I've always wanted to. Imagine me, a rock star."
"I can't," I said, grinning. "You have the coordination of a newborn giraffe. You'd probably find a way to strangle yourself with the strings."
"Rude!" she said, throwing a pillow at her laptop screen, which just made it wobble. "For your information, I am very coordinated. And I'd write a song about you."
"Oh yeah? What would it be called?"
She thought for a moment, a mischievous smile playing on her lips. "It would be called 'My Friend, the Overthinking, Lovable Weirdo.'"
And that was it. That was the moment the tightrope snapped.
It was the word "lovable." She had said it so casually, so innocently. It was a simple, friendly adjective. But in my ears, it was a spark landing in a room full of dynamite. The force of my feelings, the ones I had been suppressing for two months, surged up with a violence that left me breathless.
The performance was over. I couldn't do it anymore. I couldn't sit here and pretend that being her "lovable weirdo" of a friend was enough for me. It wasn't. It would never be.
Kapil's warnings, his rules, his stupid skyscraper metaphors—they all evaporated. All I could feel was the raw, undeniable truth. I loved her. And I would rather risk losing her all over again than die a slow death in the friend zone.
She must have seen the change in my expression. Her smile faltered. "Arjun? You okay? You look like you just saw a ghost."
I took a deep breath. My heart was hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. This was it. The point of no return.
"Parveen," I said, my voice quiet but steady. "We need to talk. For real this time."