The academic year of 2023-2024—my second year of college—was the year of the quiet. It was a long, monotonous, and strangely peaceful stretch of time defined by the steady rhythm of my self-imposed routine. The grief was still there, a low hum beneath the surface of my life, but the sharp edges had been worn smooth by time and discipline. I was no longer drowning; I was treading water, and I had gotten very good at it.
The most profound shift during this year was not in my own healing, but in my friendship with Kapil. For the entirety of our friendship, he had been my anchor, the steady, unshakeable point in my chaotic world. But even anchors get weighed down. His storm had a name: Priya.
She was in his veterinary program, a girl with a mind as sharp as glass and a personality just as dazzling and dangerous. She had taken one look at Kapil's simple, golden-retriever heart and decided it was a fascinating puzzle she wanted to solve, take apart, and occasionally forget to put back together.
My nightly phone calls with him, once my own lifeline, became his. The roles had completely, irrevocably, reversed.
"I just don't understand the logic," he'd say, his voice a tangled knot of frustration. I could picture him pacing his small hostel room in Rajasthan, a hundred miles away but right next to me in spirit. "On Monday, she says I'm the most important person in her life. On Tuesday, she needs space. On Wednesday, she's jealous that I liked some other girl's photo. It's emotional whiplash, man. I need a helmet to talk to her."
The old me would have offered simple, useless advice like "just talk to her" or "maybe she's just stressed." But the new me, the one forged in the silence and fire of my own heartbreak, saw the situation with a calm, painful clarity.
"She's not playing games with you, Kapil," I said one night, staring at the circuit diagram on my desk that suddenly seemed much simpler than human relationships. "She's playing games with herself, and you're the battlefield."
"What is that supposed to mean?" he grumbled.
"It means she's terrified," I explained, the words feeling strangely familiar. "She's testing you. She pushes you away to see if you'll fight to stay. She creates drama to see if you're stable enough to handle it. She's looking for an anchor, but she's forgotten that you can't anchor a ship in the middle of a hurricane you're creating."
There was a long silence on the other end of the line. "When did you get so smart?" he asked, his voice softer now.
A sad smile touched my lips. "You learn a lot about architecture when your own house burns down."
I became his emotional support system. I, the boy who had fumbled his own heart so spectacularly, was now the coach. The irony was a constant companion, but it was a welcome one. My pain, once a useless, heavy burden, had been reforged into a tool. I could help him. And in helping him, I felt a flicker of the purpose I thought I had lost forever.
For the entire year, Parveen's name was a ghost word, a phantom limb in our friendship. We never spoke it. But she was there. I knew he still talked to her. He was the neutral territory, the Switzerland to our cold war.
He let it slip one night, in the middle of a rant.
"...and then Priya gets mad that I'm spending too much time studying, and I'm like, we have exams! Even Parveen said that's insane, and she's the queen of last-minute cramming."
He froze. I froze. The name hung in the air between us, shimmering and dangerous. He had said it. Casually. As if she were still a normal part of our lives.
"Sorry," he mumbled. "I didn't mean to."
"It's fine," I said, my voice carefully neutral, though my heart had just performed a nervous backflip. "What did she say?"
It was the first time I had willingly asked about her in over a year.
Kapil, sensing the shift, proceeded cautiously. "Just that Priya is being insecure. You know how Parveen is. Blunt."
"Yeah," I said, a ghost of a smile on my face. "I know."
After that, the taboo was broken, but only slightly. Her name would occasionally surface, a piece of driftwood from a long-lost ship. I learned, through these fragments, that she was struggling with a particular professor, that she had adopted a stray cat near her hostel, that she hated her final year project as much as I hated mine. Each piece of information was a tiny, bittersweet gift. It was proof that she was still out there, living a life parallel to mine. The knowledge didn't bring the sharp, stabbing pain it once would have. Now, it was a dull, familiar ache, like a joint that hurts when it's about to rain.
My second year of college ended in May 2024. I went home for the summer, the quiet stability of my life now feeling less like a cage and more like a sanctuary. Kapil's relationship with Priya continued its chaotic dance, and I continued to be his corner man, offering advice and a patient ear. The silence from Parveen had stretched to fourteen months. It was no longer a temporary state; it was a feature of the landscape.
In early July, just as I was mentally preparing to head back to campus for the start of my third year, Kapil called. He sounded different. The usual frantic energy of his Priya-related crises was gone, replaced by a tense, determined calm.
"We need to talk," he said, without any preamble.
"Is it Priya again?" I asked, settling into my familiar role.
"No. It's not about Priya," he said. "It's about Parveen."
I sat up straight. "What about her?"
"I was on the phone with her. Just now," he began, the words measured and deliberate. "She was asking about you. Same old, same old. But this time, I couldn't do it, man. I couldn't give her the same old 'he's fine' answer."
My stomach tightened. "Kapil, what did you do?"
"I told her the truth," he said, his voice gaining strength. "I told her you ask about her, too. Every time we talk."
The air in my room suddenly felt thick and heavy, like the moments before a thunderstorm. "Why?" I whispered.
"Because I'm tired of being in the middle of this!" he exclaimed, the frustration of a year's worth of mediation finally boiling over. "I'm tired of watching my two best friends act like strangers. You're both stubborn and you're both hurting and you're both pretending you're okay. It's been long enough!"
He took a deep, ragged breath. "She got really quiet. And then she said, 'I miss my friend.' So I told her, 'He misses you too.' And now here we are."
I was speechless. My carefully constructed wall, the one that had stood strong for over a year, was being dismantled brick by brick by my own best friend.
"Look," Kapil said, his voice dropping into a serious, almost pleading tone. "She's concerned. You're concerned. This whole silent treatment thing is the dumbest standoff in history. It has to end."
He paused, letting the weight of his words settle. Then he delivered the final, devastating blow.
"Dude, you both are asking about each other. Why don't y'all just talk to each other, if both are concerned about each other?"
The question wasn't a suggestion. It was a summons. A demand to face the ghost I had spent a year trying to outrun. My first instinct, my only instinct, was self-preservation.
"No," I said, the word a reflex, a shield against a pain I couldn't bear to feel again. "I don't want to hurt her again."
There was a long, thoughtful silence on the other end of the line. I could almost hear the gears turning in Kapil's head. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet, gentle, and absolutely lethal. He aimed for the one secret I had protected, the one truth I had never spoken aloud to him.
"Dude," he said. "Do you love her?"