The week after the workshop was a strange mix of afterglow and emotional hangover. My mind kept replaying the day in a continuous, bittersweet loop. The way she'd laughed at my stupid jokes, the familiar comfort of walking beside her, the brief, beautiful illusion that we were just two normal friends without a mountain of complicated history between us.
Our texts and calls resumed, but the dynamic had shifted. The mirage had ruined me. The safe, digital friendship we had rebuilt now felt like a cheap imitation of the real thing. I had spent a day in the sun, and now I was being asked to go back to living in the shadows, and it was colder than ever before.
I found myself rereading our text exchanges, searching for the same warmth, the same easy intimacy we'd had in person. But it wasn't there. A text message can't replicate a shared glance. An emoji can't capture the sound of a real laugh. The performance of being "just friends" had become a hundred times harder now that I had been reminded of what I was truly missing.
She felt it too, I think. Our conversations became a little more careful, a little more guarded. We were both acutely aware of the line we couldn't cross, and the memory of our day together had made that line feel brighter and more electrified than ever.
In March, a new complication arose, an external wall that made our own invisible ones seem even more insurmountable. Her parents.
They had always been strict, a fact she had complained about for years. But as she entered the final stretch of her degree, their scrutiny intensified. They were old-school, their worldview forged in a different generation. To them, a daughter spending hours on the phone with a boy who wasn't a relative was a problem that needed solving.
"My dad saw your name on my phone last night," she told me during a hurried, whispered call. "He gave me a whole lecture. 'Who is this Arjun? Why are you talking to him so late? You should be focusing on your studies, not on boys.'"
"We're just friends," I said, the words tasting like a familiar lie.
"I know that! You know that! But try explaining that to a man whose idea of modern technology is a landline phone," she sighed, her voice laced with a deep, weary frustration. "It's just… it's a lot of drama, Arjun. I'm so tired of fighting with them."
The subtext was clear. Our long, rambling, late-night calls—the very foundation of our rekindled friendship—were now a source of stress for her. They were a risk.
So we adapted. The calls became shorter, less frequent. She'd phone when she was out of the house, her voice low and hurried. I stopped calling her, waiting instead for a text: "Can I call?" It was a small change, but it fundamentally altered our dynamic. Our friendship, which had always been a free and open space, was now something that had to be scheduled, hidden, and conducted in whispers. It was becoming a secret, and secrets, I was learning, have a way of dying in the dark.
From March to May, our communication began to fizzle out, not with a dramatic bang, but with a slow, agonizing fade. The daily good morning texts became every-other-day check-ins. The constant stream of memes and shared thoughts slowed to a trickle.
Life was pulling us apart. We were both drowning in the stress of our final year projects, the looming dread of final exams, and the terrifying, existential question of what we were going to do with the rest of our lives. We were busy. We were tired. And the effort required to maintain our careful, complicated, semi-secret friendship started to feel like a luxury we couldn't afford.
There was no fight. No single event that caused the drift. It was the slow, inevitable erosion of a connection that had too many obstacles to overcome. A week would pass where we only exchanged a handful of texts. Then, a full week went by with no communication at all.
The first time it happened, a familiar panic seized me. I typed out a dozen different messages, my thumb hovering over the send button. Are you okay? Did I do something wrong? Are we okay?
But I deleted them all. This wasn't a fight. This was the new normal. Forcing a conversation would feel needy, desperate. So I stayed silent. And she stayed silent. And the silence stretched. After seven days, she sent me a simple, "Hey, sorry, crazy week. How are you?" and we'd fall back into a stilted, brief conversation before drifting apart again.
The ache in my chest had returned, but it was a dull, resigned pain now. The sharp agony of the initial heartbreak had been replaced by the quiet grief of watching something you love slowly fade to gray.
May 26th, 2025. It was a Monday. The first day of the summer holidays. The last week had been another silent one. It was becoming normal. I was learning to live with it.
My phone rang in the afternoon. It was Kapil. His voice was a chaotic mix of exhaustion and excitement.
"I'm home, dude! Well, almost. My flight is delayed. Massively."
"Everything okay?" I asked.
"Yeah, some bomb threat at the Jaipur airport. Some nonsense about the Indo-Pakistani war flaring up again. Total chaos," he said, his voice muffled by airport announcements. "Listen, my flight should land late. Can you pick me up from the Guduvancheri railway station around 6:30?"
"Of course, man. See you then."
I picked him up as promised. He looked like he'd been through a war himself—his hair was a mess, his eyes were bloodshot, and he was moving with the slow, groggy shuffle of the profoundly sleep-deprived.
"Food," he mumbled as he threw his backpack into my scooter's storage. "I need food. Real food."
We lived in Guduvancheri, and she was in nearby Perungalathur, a fact that was always a quiet, humming presence in the back of my mind. I drove us to our usual spot: a small, roadside stall by the Guduvancheri lake that made the best fried beef strips in the district.
We got our food, wrapped in newspaper, and walked along the edge of the lake as the sun began to set. We talked about his flight, about his exams, about Priya. It was normal. It was the comfortable, easy rhythm of a friendship that had survived everything.
We finished eating and were about to leave. Kapil was stretching, trying to work the airplane-induced kinks out of his back. He looked tired. He just wanted to go home.
Then he stopped, his expression turning serious. He looked at me, and the casual, friendly energy of the last hour vanished.
"Dude," he said, his voice suddenly heavy. "I have to tell you something."
He paused, and in that moment, a cold, familiar dread began to creep up my spine.
"Parveen called me," he said, his eyes not quite meeting mine. "A few days ago. She was really stressed. She asked you to forget her. I talked for you, man, I really did. But she was insistent."
He delivered the news with the flat, detached tone of someone who was too exhausted to soften the blow. It was the end of the conversation. He was tired. He promised to call after he'd had some sleep. He turned and started walking towards the road to get an auto.
I just stood there, a piece of greasy newspaper still clutched in my hand, the world narrowing to the echo of his words.
She asked you to forget her.