She walked out of the revolving glass door of her office building, looking around. Her natural curls swayed in the chilly December evening breeze. It had been 14 months, 11 days, and 22 hours since I had seen her last, but she had changed not one bit.
My mind went back to where it had all started. In a city far away from where we were at that moment, a city where dreams came true. We had joined the same organization as management trainees, and our friendship had blossomed over a year.
A memory of sitting at a table in a cozy literary café flitted across my mind. I remember gazing into those deep, dark eyes – eyes that always lit up the darkest corners of my soul. The fingers of her right hand intertwined with those of my left, even as she urged me to keep sipping my hot chocolate to calm my nerves.
But the comforting taste of cocoa did little to unravel the knots that had been tightening inside me ever since she had texted me that morning, asking me to meet her. And then, I remember the lump in my chest melting when she said, “You know, what you said last night at my farewell party? Well, you’re not the only one who feels that way.”
The day after that, she had moved to another city for her new job. For the first couple of months, the rush of newfound love made it a smooth ride. I even managed to visit her over a weekend during that time. But things between us were too good to last. My insecurities and her priorities proved to be a lethal cocktail, and within a month of that rendezvous, it all came crashing down.
Now more than a year later, there I was right outside her workplace showing up unannounced, holding Hannah Hart’s memoir that she had lent me the last time we had met. As I stood in that central courtyard surrounded by tall glassy buildings on three sides, people all around kept strolling out to escape the confines of their cubicles for a few moments, seeking warmth in overpriced coffee and cheap cigarettes. When she finally spotted me, I saw a flicker of a smile on her face.
After exchanging an awkward side hug and making small talk for a couple of minutes, I handed her the book and told her, “Well, I just wanted to return this, since you loved this book so much. That’s all I was here for. Goodbye, then.”
“Wait,” she said, “You know what? My cab home is going to leave in ten minutes. But you’re meeting me after all this while, so I’m canceling that. Stay for a while?”
As I considered her proposal for a moment, I looked into her eyes. Damn, those eyes. How could I have not relented?
For a while, we walked around braving the evening chills and catching up with each other’s lives, before retreating into a coffee shop nearby. But the tension between us lingered.
All those unanswered questions and the hollowness within – they were a constant reminder of the pain that I had endured for months on end. Even as we made conversation, the only thought in my mind was to usher the elephant into the room somehow.
And then arrived a moment of silence when both of us ran out of things to say. No longer able to hold myself back, I looked her in the eye and asked her what had tormented me for months, “It wasn’t something I did, was it?”
It was probably one of the best decisions I have taken in my life. As we looked back upon what went right and what did not, what I realized was that things not working out between us did not make us bad people per se. True, the damage had been done and people had been hurt. But we were just two individuals who had discovered a spark but whom distance had contrived to keep apart from the very start.
Later, she told me that I had shown immense courage by coming all the way to see her. Ever the Harry Potter fan, she said, “You might just have a lot more of Gryffindor in you than you realize.”
Even last year, I met her again during a daylong sojourn in her city. As we walked around the city, lunched at a café in her favorite neighborhood and even went to a performing arts center where she had been a Bharatnatyam dancer till college, there were moments when it felt like old times. We joked and laughed in the middle of the street, made seemingly profound observations on the state of the nation, and most of all rekindled the friendship that had existed before we switched gears for a while.
There is a difference between getting over someone and moving on, I once read somewhere. Perhaps that is what happened here – my heart knows that both of our lives diverged a long time ago and we cannot be together. But am I over her? I think I don’t want to answer that yet because I already know what I would say.
But I also believe that love is a kind of energy. It does not die but merely takes a different form. For the two of us, what mattered was the bond we shared, and I consider myself lucky that we were able to sit down as ‘adults’ and put the past behind us.
So much so that only recently when I was having a bit of ‘girl trouble’, she was the first person I called for advice. What followed was a long, free-wheeling conversation where she told me where I was possibly going wrong and what I needed to do to disentangle my situation.
“Why are you so miserable? You should be happy that you’re falling in love all over again,” she said. That was her at her gracious best – being happy for me, for what we had was built on the foundation of friendship, one that survived the storms that romance often brings along it.
At one juncture of the movie Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, Anushka Sharma’s character says, “Pyaar mein junoon hai par dosti mein sukoon hai (In love, there is passion, but in friendship, there is solace).”
She’s not wrong. Love might win the heart, but friendship always wins the soul