There is a special kind of torture reserved for students who have to take a difficult exam while their personal life is actively imploding. The world expects you to care about the inverse of a matrix when your own emotional universe has just been flipped upside down and shaken empty.
After she blocked me, I sat motionless for what felt like an hour, staring at the last message on my screen. Don't talk to me again. The words were stark, absolute. My textbook lay open, the complex equations looking like a language from a dead civilization. They held no meaning. My brain, which was supposed to be a finely-tuned machine for calculating integrals, had been reduced to a single, looping error message: File Not Found. Friendship.exe has crashed.
Denial is the mind's first line of defense. It's the emotional riot shield that deploys before you can even process the attack. This is a joke, a small, hopeful voice in my head whispered. A really, really elaborate and cruel joke. She's testing me. Any minute now, she's going to unblock me and send a hundred laughing emojis.
I clung to that thought. I had to. The alternative was unthinkable.
I tried to study. I picked up my pen, looked at a problem, and my mind served up a high-definition replay of the conversation. Her all-caps fury. Her devastating callback to the trust joke. The final, crushing silence. The pen slipped from my fingers.
Sleep was not an option. I spent the night in a state of suspended animation, caught between exhaustion and a frantic, buzzing anxiety. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw her profile picture, the one that was now a gray, anonymous silhouette.
The next morning, I walked into the exam hall feeling like a ghost. The room was filled with the low murmur of nervous energy, the rustling of papers, the scent of cheap coffee and desperation. I found my seat, laid out my pens, and waited. My heart hammered against my ribs, not with academic anxiety, but with the dread of a verdict I was still waiting for. I kept my phone in my pocket, face down. I couldn't bear to look at it, but I couldn't bear to be without it, just in case. Just in case the miracle happened and a message from her appeared.
The invigilator handed out the question papers. "You may begin."
I turned the paper over. It was a collection of symbols and numbers that I knew, intellectually, I had spent months learning. But they were just shapes on a page. My mind was a million miles away, running through scenarios, drafting apologies, composing arguments.
Question 1: Find the eigenvalues of the following matrix.
My brain: Maybe I should have sent a different reel. The one with the cat. She likes cats.
Question 2: Solve the following second-order differential equation.
My brain: She said I don't think. Is that true? Do I not think? I thought I thought all the time. Maybe I think about the wrong things.
I wrote something. I have no memory of what it was. I filled the pages with numbers and symbols, my hand moving on autopilot while my soul was busy conducting a post-mortem on a friendship that wasn't even cold yet. I walked out of the three-hour exam feeling like I had been in there for ten minutes and a hundred years.
The first thing I did was check my phone. I unlocked it, my thumb shaking slightly as I opened our chat.
Still blocked.
The riot shield of denial began to crack.
For the first week, I lived the life of a hopeful idiot. I constructed an entire narrative in my head, a comforting piece of fiction I re-read to myself every day.
She's just angry, I'd reason. And she has a right to be. It was a stupid joke. She's stressed about exams. Once they're over, she'll have time to cool down. She'll realize this is a massive overreaction, she'll unblock me, and we'll have a long talk. Then we'll go back to normal.
This story was my gospel. I repeated it to myself in the shower, on the way to class, while staring blankly at my dinner. It was the only thing holding the panic at bay. Every morning, I'd wake up with a jolt of anxiety, and the first thing I'd do is check the chat. Every morning, the gray silhouette was still there, a tombstone marking a dead conversation.
By the tenth day, the narrative was starting to wear thin. The hope was curdling into a sour, persistent anxiety. The silence was no longer a temporary pause; it was an active, suffocating presence. My thumb would instinctively go to her name to share a meme or a random thought, only to be stopped by the grim reality. My phone, once a portal to my favorite person, now felt like a brick in my pocket, heavy with all the words I couldn't say.
I needed to do something. I couldn't just sit in this digital prison and wait. I needed information. I needed a sign.
I called Kapil.
He picked up on the third ring. "Dude! How were exams? Mine were a nightmare. I'm pretty sure I answered a question about thermodynamics with a recipe for chicken curry."
"They were fine," I lied. "Listen, man… have you talked to Parveen lately?"
There was a slight hesitation on his end. It was tiny, but I heard it. "Uh, yeah, a couple of days ago. Why?"
I took a deep breath. "We had a fight. A really bad one. She's not talking to me. She blocked me."
Kapil let out a low whistle. "Blocked you? Damn. What did you do?"
I explained the story of the reel, my voice getting smaller and more pathetic with every word. By the end, I sounded like the world's biggest fool, which was probably accurate.
He was silent for a moment. "Okay," he said slowly. "First of all, you're an idiot."
"I know."
"Second of all," he continued, "I don't know what to tell you, man. I've never heard her this angry. When I talked to her, she sounded… done. She said you crossed a line."
The words were a punch to the gut. I had been hoping he'd say, "Oh, she's just being dramatic, she'll get over it." Instead, he was confirming my worst fears.
"Can you talk to her?" I pleaded, my voice cracking. "Can you just tell her I'm sorry? That it was a mistake?"
"Arjun," he said, and his tone was gentle, which was almost worse. "I think the best thing you can do right now is nothing. Just give her space. Real space. If you push, you're just going to make it worse. Let her cool off. If she wants to talk, she'll reach out."
He was right. I knew he was right. But it was the last thing I wanted to hear. He was offering me sound, logical advice. I wanted a time machine. I wanted a magic wand. I wanted a quick fix for a problem that was quickly starting to feel permanent.
I hung up the phone, the last sliver of hope draining away. Kapil's words echoed in my head. She sounded done.
Weeks bled into a month. The academic year ended, and I went home for the summer break. The change of scenery did nothing to change the state of my mind. The silence followed me. It was the first thing I thought about when I woke up and the last thing I obsessed over before I fell into a restless sleep.
The anger was gone. The denial was gone. All that was left was a hollow, aching void where my best friend used to be. It was in this void, in the crushing, absolute silence, that the final, terrible truth began to reveal itself.
One night, I was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, my mind doing its usual routine of replaying our greatest hits—the insults, the rants, the laughter. I was trying to pinpoint the exact moment it had all gone wrong. But as I sifted through the memories, I started to notice a pattern.
I remembered the sharp, irrational pang of jealousy I'd felt in twelfth grade when she mentioned she was going to a movie with a guy from her chemistry class. I had dismissed it as being "protective."
I remembered how a bad day could be instantly cured by a single ten-minute phone call with her, a feat no one else could accomplish.
I remembered the deep, visceral hurt of the "I don't trust you" prank, a wound far too deep for a simple joke between friends.
And as I lay there, connecting these dots in the darkness, the picture they formed was terrifyingly clear. It wasn't a picture of a friendship. It was a picture of a lopsided, unacknowledged love story.
The reason this hurt so much, the reason her absence felt like a physical amputation, wasn't just because I had lost my friend.
It was because I was in love with her.
The realization didn't feel like a romantic epiphany. It felt like a diagnosis. A fatal one. It was the answer to a question I had been too scared to even ask myself. It explained everything. And it changed nothing.
I had figured out the most important truth of my life at the exact moment it had become utterly useless. I was in love with a girl who, at best, thought I was a thoughtless friend, and at worst, never wanted to see me again.
The silence in my room was absolute. But for the first time, it wasn't empty. It was filled with this new, impossible knowledge. A love that had been born in secret and now had to be mourned in silence. The fourteen months of quiet had just begun, but I already knew it was going to be the loudest sound I had ever heard.