Recovery is a quiet, thankless job. After leaving the hospital, I spent another fifteen days at home, a ghost haunting the familiar rooms of my childhood. My body was a stranger to me—weak, thin, and prone to sudden waves of exhaustion. My parents tiptoed around me, their faces a mixture of relief and a deep, unspoken worry. They knew I had been sick, but they could sense a deeper malady they couldn't name.
During those fifteen days, Parveen and I didn't talk. A few texts were exchanged—her asking if I was okay after my sudden silence, me replying with vague excuses about a "bad viral fever." I couldn't tell her the truth. Telling her about the dengue, about the timing of it all, felt like emotional blackmail. It felt like taking my pain and using it as a weapon to make her feel guilty, and it was the one thing I wouldn't do. My love for her might have been unrequited, but it was not manipulative.
When I finally returned to the hostel, the first real conversation was a masterpiece of avoidance.
"Hey! You're alive," she said when I called, her voice bright and relieved. "I was starting to think you'd been abducted by aliens."
"Close," I said, my voice still raspy from a lingering cough. "Just a really nasty fever. Knocked me out for a couple of weeks."
"You should have told me!" she said, a note of genuine concern in her voice that was both a comfort and a tiny, sharp knife. "I would have helped. Sent you notes or something."
"It's fine," I said, the lie tasting like ash in my mouth. "I'm fine."
And just like that, we established the new rules. Rule number one: We do not talk about what happened. Rule number two: We definitely do not talk about the feelings. Rule number three: We pretend, with every ounce of our energy, that we are just friends and that everything is perfectly, wonderfully normal.
We became actors in a play about a friendship. We hit all our marks. We said all our lines. We talked about classes, complained about professors, and dissected the latest superhero movie. But the script was hollow. The easy, effortless intimacy we once had was gone, replaced by a careful, deliberate performance. Our conversations were like walking through a beautiful house that had been gutted by a fire. From the outside, it looked the same, but inside, it was just a fragile, empty shell.
Being her friend was a special kind of torture. It was like being a recovering alcoholic who is forced to work as a bartender. Every interaction was a test of my willpower, a constant, painful reminder of what I had lost and what I couldn't have.
Her laugh, the sound that had once been my favorite music, now just highlighted the distance between us. Her casual use of a pet name, a holdover from our old friendship, would send a jolt of pain through my chest. I was a ghost at a feast, able to see and hear everything but never truly able to touch or taste it.
The worst part was the advice. A few months into our new, fragile peace, she started talking about a guy in her department.
"He's really smart," she said one night, "but he's so awkward. I don't know. He asked me out for coffee."
My entire body went cold. I felt the blood drain from my face. My carefully constructed composure threatened to shatter.
Scream, a primal part of my brain urged. Tell her he's an idiot. Tell her you love her.
But the new me, the one built of scar tissue and discipline, took over. "You should go," I said, my voice a marvel of calm neutrality. "What's the worst that can happen? Free coffee."
"You think so?" she asked, her voice full of the same trust she had always placed in me.
"Yeah," I said, my heart feeling like a lead weight in my chest. "I think so."
I was her friend. This is what friends did. They listened. They gave advice. They helped the person they loved find happiness with someone else. And every word of it was like swallowing broken glass.
The months crawled by. The end of 2024 gave way to the beginning of 2025. I was surviving. My grades were excellent. My routine was solid. My performance as "Just a Friend" was, by all accounts, Oscar-worthy. But I was lonely. A deep, profound loneliness that no amount of routine or academic success could fill.
In early February, an opportunity arose. My college was hosting a two-day, inter-collegiate technical workshop on advanced robotics—my final year project on steroids. It was a big deal, with guest lecturers from major tech companies.
A thought, a dangerous, hopeful, stupid thought, sparked in my mind.
I called her.
"Hey," I said, my heart starting to beat a little faster. "So, my department is hosting this big robotics workshop in a couple of weeks."
"Oh yeah? The one you've been obsessing over for the last month?" she teased.
"That's the one," I said, taking the plunge. "It's open to students from other colleges. I know it's not exactly your field, but I thought… I thought maybe you'd want to come? I could show you around. We could… you know. Hang out."
The silence on the other end of the line was deafening. I had just broken an unspoken rule. I had tried to move our friendship from the safe, digital realm into the messy, complicated real world. It was the first time I had asked for anything since the rejection.
"You want me to come to your college?" she asked, her voice careful.
"Yeah," I said, trying to sound casual. "No pressure, obviously. It's probably boring for an ECE person anyway. Just thought I'd offer."
There was another pause. I was already preparing my retreat, my casual "no worries, see ya."
"Okay," she said.
I blinked. "Okay?"
"Yeah, okay," she repeated, and I could hear a smile in her voice. "It sounds cool. I'll come. It'll be fun to see your nerdy robot stuff."
I ended the call, my mind reeling. She had said yes.
For the first time in three years, I was going to see her in person.
A dangerous, treacherous hope began to bloom in the barren wasteland of my heart. It was a mirage, I knew it was. A beautiful, shimmering illusion that would disappear the closer I got. But after so long in the desert, I couldn't help but start walking towards it.