The playful energy on the video call vanished as if a switch had been flipped. My words, "We need to talk," hung in the air between us, heavy and cold.
Parveen's smile faltered, replaced by a look of cautious confusion. She sat up, pushing her hair out of her eyes. The fun, goofy friend from ten seconds ago was gone, replaced by someone bracing for an impact.
"Okay…" she said slowly, her voice losing its light, playful tone. "You're making that face again."
"What face?"
"The 'I'm about to say something incredibly serious and probably blow up the universe' face," she said, a nervous flicker in her eyes. "I haven't seen it in a while. What's wrong, Arjun? Did you fail a class? Did your favorite cricket team lose? Did your hate-toaster finally achieve sentience?"
She was trying to deflect, to pull us back into the safe, familiar waters of our banter. But I couldn't go back. I was already over the edge.
"Parveen," I said, and the sound of my own voice was unnervingly calm. "I need you to just listen. Please."
She went still, her expression shifting from nervous to genuinely concerned. She nodded, her eyes locked on mine through the screen.
I took a breath. The tightrope was gone. There was only the long, terrifying fall.
"The last two months," I began, my eyes fixed on a crack in my wall, unable to look at her face. "They've been… amazing. Having you back in my life has been like learning to breathe again. But I haven't been honest with you."
I could feel her watching me, waiting.
"When we had that fight… the one about the reel… and you blocked me… I was a wreck. For fourteen months, I was a wreck. And I spent all that time trying to figure out why. Why it hurt so much more than a fight between friends should. I thought it was the guilt. I thought it was just because I missed my best friend."
I finally forced myself to look at the screen. Her face was a mask of concentration, her brow furrowed as she tried to follow my train of thought.
"But that wasn't it," I continued, my voice starting to tremble. "The reason I was so broken wasn't just because I'd lost my friend. It was because, in the middle of that pathetic, desperate panic, as I was trying to figure out how to stop you from leaving, I realized the truth."
I paused, the words catching in my throat. This was it. The point of no return.
"I'm in love with you, Parveen."
The words came out quiet, almost a whisper, but they felt like a sonic boom in the silent room. I saw the shock register on her face. Her eyes widened. Her mouth opened slightly. She didn't move. She just stared at me, her expression a chaotic mix of disbelief and something I couldn't quite read.
"I think I have been for years," I pushed on, the words tumbling out now in a rush. "I was just too stupid to see it. Our friendship, our talks, everything… for me, it was always something more. I just didn't have a name for it until I thought I had lost it forever. That's the truth. And pretending to just be your friend for the last two months has been the hardest thing I've ever had to do."
I finished, my chest heaving, my heart pounding a frantic, desperate rhythm. I had laid my entire soul bare. The silence that followed was the loudest sound I had ever heard.
Parveen finally blinked. She looked away from the screen, her eyes darting around her room as if searching for an instruction manual for this exact situation.
"Arjun…" she started, her voice barely audible. "I… I don't know what to say."
"You don't have to say anything," I said quickly. "I just needed you to know."
"No, I…" She took a shaky breath and looked back at me, her eyes full of a gentle, painful pity. "Okay. Look. It's probably just an infatuation."
The word was a slap in the face. It was a clinical, dismissive term for the feeling that had defined my entire existence for the past two years.
"No," I said, the word sharp. "It's not."
"It could be!" she insisted, her voice gaining a bit of strength. She was trying to build a safe, logical box around my messy, chaotic emotions. "We just started talking again. You're emotional. You missed me. It's easy to confuse those feelings for… for something else."
"I'm not confused," I said, my voice cracking. A cold dread was starting to seep into my veins. Deep down, I'd always known she'd say no. I knew it in my bones. But hearing her try to gently invalidate everything I felt was a special kind of agony.
I had to end this. I couldn't live in this limbo.
"I did something I should have never done," I said, my voice breaking completely. "I'm sorry. I've ruined this. Even if we continued to talk, it would just… it would fade out. There'd always be this… this thing between us. I've broken our friendship, and I'm sorry."
I was giving her an out. I was trying to be the one to make the clean cut, to save us both from the awkward, painful future I saw stretching out before us.
"No," she said immediately, her voice firm, her eyes flashing with something that looked like panic. "Don't say that. And I'd still talk to you. Because you are my friend."
It was the kindest, most brutal thing she could have possibly said. She was rejecting the love but refusing to let go of the friend. She was offering me a front-row seat to my own heartbreak.
Tears started to well up in my eyes. I couldn't do it. I couldn't be her friend. Not like this.
"Please," I whispered, my voice thick with unshed tears. "Just… reconsider. Think about it. I'll call you tomorrow. Please, just think about it."
I was begging. Pathetically, desperately begging. I needed a clean verdict, a final answer, even if it destroyed me. I couldn't live in the space between her "no" and her "you're my friend."
She looked at me, her own eyes glistening. She nodded slowly. "Okay, Arjun. I'll… I'll talk to you tomorrow."
I didn't say goodbye. I couldn't. I just ended the call, the screen going black, plunging me back into the suffocating silence of my own room.
I dropped my head into my hands. A sharp, throbbing pain began to bloom behind my eyes. It was a headache born of pure, undiluted stress, a physical manifestation of the storm raging in my mind. I was anticipating her final response, her real, considered decision. And the weight of that anticipation, the sheer terror of that impending call, felt like it was going to crush me from the inside out. My day was over. My week was over. My life was on hold, pending her decision. And I had a terrible, sinking feeling that I already knew what it would be.