That night, I open the chat box and freeze. Every message has been marked as read. My chest tightens, panic surging through me as I scramble to remember—did I write something I shouldn't have? My fingers hover over the screen, and before I can stop myself, I start scrolling, rereading every word like sifting through wreckage.

I smack my forehead. This is exactly what I didn't want, and the way I wrote it—God, it's awful. How could I type out break your heart and he could have a chance at you like I was parroting Shlok's words as if they were gospel? It's cruel. Unforgivable. If I were her, I'd be offended.

But you were eighteen. You didn't know any better, I tell myself. This is seven years younger Romil. Not you.

The memory swells unbidden—the night stretched infinitely beyond me as I typed those words, each second pulling like taut thread, refusing to snap. The tick, tick, tick of the clock wasn't a comfort, wasn't a friend, just a soft reminder of how far I still had to go to make it through the night.

I shake off the creepy feeling and scroll up. 

I want to know how she felt reading this. If only she'd reply. Her status says online. She's still there, probably still reading it, letting my words sink in, deciding what to make of them.

I scroll through the chaos—endless audio calls, voice messages, texts that blur into nothing. Gibberish stitched together with too many typos, fragments of thought repeating themselves again and again, as if saying it enough times would make it make sense.

And then there are the photographs—a flood of faces and moments, people I met there. None of them friends, not really.

I keep scrolling, the images blurring together until my fingers still over one. A single photograph.

This is the photograph that always surfaces when I think of Maithili. It was taken two months after the scarring, her hair chopped short was already growing back wild and unruly, like it was trying to defy everything that had happened.

Now, I imagine her frail frame, her hollowed cheeks, her pale skin. Her hair, longer than it's ever been, spilling past her hips like a veil of shadows.

She's the same, but she's not. A different Maithili, caught in the shell of the old one. All the light and warmth and sun and stars—gone.

I kept writing to her after that. Texts she'd never respond to, words cast into the void. Rambling about my fights, spinning stories about the second-year guy who thought he could humiliate me in front of the most popular woman in college. I wrote about her, how she made passes at me, detailed every glance, every awkward attempt at flirtation, hoping—just maybe—that one day jealousy would pull her back to me.

And then Arjun called, and everything shattered. Every ounce of hope, every once I see her or when I get back to her vanished in an instant, leaving nothing but silence in its wake.

Arjun was crying when he told me about her marriage. He knew I was the only one who would truly understand. And in that moment, I felt a jealousy so sharp it nearly split me open. How dare he take away the last piece of her that was mine—the grief of losing her to someone else? It's strange, almost cruelly ironic, that my jealousy wasn't for the man she married. He was a spectre, a shadow I knew not. But Arjun—I had seen him with her. I'd watched the way she smiled at his jokes at the fest, the way they conversed in the library.

I burned that day, with a rage I couldn't name, and in the aftermath, I wrote to her. I poured out the most naked, unfiltered truths of my heart, shaping the wreckage into something that almost looked like poetry.

Then I deleted everything, took a day's time, and euphemized my feelings, wishing her all the best as if I hadn't been pulled apart like an open crochet loop snagged on a spike.

I breathe in. It came out well. I didn't want to mar her memories of Arjun by imposing my hatred on them. I wasn't selfish enough to do that.

I stopped writing as often after that. Only fragments of thoughts, scrawled in broken, harmless poetry.

I glance at my recent messages and see her typing. I hold my breath, waiting, each second stretching longer than the last.

For a moment, I am numb. I can't tell if I should feel relief—that after all these years, she found me worthy enough for her words—or despair at the sharpness of them, so quick, as if they'd been lying in wait on her tongue, ready to cut.

I don't reply. I've said everything I could, poured every piece of myself into those messages. If that's still not enough, then to hell with words. I'll prove it through action.

*****

Author's Note:

Thank you for reading this chaotic little experiment. I tried something different with the fake chat app to bring the conversations and the cast members to life, and honestly, I had way too much fun doing it.

If you enjoyed it (or even if you didn't but feel mildly sorry for me), hit that star button to vote. It's like giving me a virtual high-five and saying, "Keep going, you delightful weirdo." And trust me, I need all the encouragement I can get to keep this circus running.

PS Romil's picture is of actor Abhay Verma
And Maithili's picture is of actor Pratibha Ranta

XOXO,
Shailey (your friendly neighborhood overthinker)