The night Rahul and Riya forced open his door lingered in his memory. He didn't say much, barely responded, but their faces—their tears, their worry—stayed with him. For the first time in weeks, he felt a faint sting of guilt for what he had become.
The next morning, the bottles on the floor were still there, but he didn't reach for them. He sat quietly, staring at his phone screen, not opening it, not calling anyone, but staring. It wasn't much, but it was different.
When Rahul dropped by again that afternoon with a packet of food, he found him sitting on the chair, not the bed. Rahul raised his eyebrows. "Well… at least you're upright today."
A tired smirk tugged at his lips. "Don't get your hopes up."
Still, he took the food. And though he barely ate half, it was more than the untouched plates of the past two months.
Riya, ever persistent, began visiting in the evenings. She'd bring chai and sit across from him, talking about random things—classes, gossip, how Rahul got scolded by a professor. At first, he barely listened. But slowly, her words started seeping in. One evening, she caught him hiding a small smile.
"You laughed," she said softly, almost as if afraid the moment would vanish.
He looked away quickly, mumbling, "No, I didn't."
But he had.
Smoking became his next silent battle. The ashtray remained, but the pile of butts didn't grow as quickly. One night, Rahul caught him tossing a half-burned cigarette out the window.
"Didn't like the taste?" Rahul teased.
"Didn't like myself," he replied quietly.
Rahul froze at that. For weeks, he'd heard nothing but silence or bitterness. This was different. This was… honest.
But the nights were still cruel. Alone in his room, when memories clawed at him, he sometimes poured himself a drink just to numb the ache. The whispers of her words—"There was nothing between us, at least I never said so"—echoed in the silence. He would sit there for hours, bottle in hand, staring at the ceiling, wondering where it all went wrong.
And yet, when Riya knocked the next morning, he answered the door. When Rahul dragged him to the tea stall one evening, he followed, though his eyes stayed lowered.
It wasn't healing. It was surviving.
One evening at the tea stall, Rahul pushed a steaming cup toward him. "You know," he said, "we don't want the old you back."
He blinked. "What do you mean?"
Riya leaned forward. "The old you is gone. And that's okay. We just… want you. However broken, however scarred. Just don't disappear on us again."
For the first time in months, his throat tightened not from smoke or alcohol, but from something else—something he thought he had lost forever: a sense of being needed.
He didn't reply, but his silence carried weight. Rahul and Riya didn't push further. They knew.
And so, slowly, painfully, he began to crawl out of the hole he had dug for himself. Not all the way out—not even close. But he had stopped sinking deeper.
And sometimes, when the night was quiet and the world seemed kinder, he almost believed that one day, maybe, the scars wouldn't burn so much.