The summer break of 2023 was supposed to be a release. Three months of freedom from the tyranny of thermodynamics and engineering graphics. Three months of home-cooked food, sleeping in past noon, and catching up with old friends. Instead, it became a masterclass in how to be a ghost in your own life.
My hometown, once a comfortable backdrop, had transformed into a museum of a dead friendship. Every street corner, every cafe, every movie theater was an exhibit. Here is where you and Parveen once argued about the physics of a superhero landing. Here is where she stole the last piece of your chili paneer. Here is the theater where you were supposed to watch that new sci-fi movie you'd been hyping up for months.
I became a curator of these painful memories. I'd walk past our old haunts and feel a physical pang in my chest, a phantom limb ache for a person who was still alive, still breathing, probably just a few kilometers away, but might as well have been on another planet.
My parents noticed the change. I had returned from my first year of college quieter, more withdrawn. I was a ship that had come back to port with a massive, unexplainable hole below the waterline.
"Everything okay, Arjun?" my mom asked one evening, placing a cup of tea on the table beside me. I was staring blankly at a cricket match on TV, not having registered the score for the last twenty minutes.
"Yeah, just tired," I'd say. "Exams were rough."
It was the perfect excuse. The all-purpose shield for any student's emotional turmoil. They accepted it, because what else could they do? I couldn't exactly say, "Well, Mom, I recently discovered I'm in love with my best friend after I made her hate me with a stupid Instagram video, and now my entire emotional infrastructure has collapsed." Some things just don't fit into casual dinner conversation.
The worst part was the humor. My life had been narrated by an internal monologue that was 50% my own thoughts and 50% what Parveen would say in response. A politician would come on the news, and I'd think of the perfect, scathing joke to send her. I'd see a ridiculous outfit on a stranger, and my thumb would already be moving to open our chat. Each time, I'd be met with the same gray silhouette, the same dead end. The jokes would die in my head, unspoken. It felt like half of my brain had been amputated. A life without my primary witness felt like a life lived in secret.
My phone became a torture device I couldn't put down. It was a constant, glaring reminder of the silence. I developed a set of obsessive, masochistic rituals.
First, the profile check. At least ten times a day, I would navigate to her profile. I knew what I would find. The blank profile picture. The inability to see her posts. But I did it anyway, a desperate, hopeful idiot checking a locked door to see if it had magically opened. Sometimes, through a mutual friend's post, I'd see a tagged photo of her. A picture from a birthday party, or a day out with her college friends. She'd be smiling. Laughing. Living a life that was continuing, uninterrupted, without me. Each photo was a fresh stab. She was okay. I was the one stuck in the wreckage.
Second, the online status. Through the chat windows of our mutual friends, I could sometimes see the little green dot next to her name. Active now. Those two words were a special kind of hell. She was there. Right there. A few clicks away. The digital equivalent of seeing someone through a soundproof window. She was alive, online, talking to people. Just not to me. I would stare at that green dot, my chest tight, a thousand unsent messages piling up in my throat.
The muscle memory was the cruelest part. My thumbs had her name hardwired into their DNA. I'd see something funny, something she'd love, and my fingers would fly across the keyboard, opening our chat, typing out a message, all before my conscious brain could catch up and remind me, Oh, right. You can't do that anymore. It was a digital phantom limb, reaching for something that had been severed.
Kapil, my dear friend and the unwitting architect of my romantic revelation, became my only, tenuous link to her world. And he knew it. Our phone calls took on the tense, awkward rhythm of a bad spy movie.
"So… hear from anyone lately?" he'd ask, his voice dripping with forced casualness.
"Not really, man. Just been chilling at home," I'd lie.
"Right, right. Cool." A pause. "Parveen posted a story yesterday. Looked like she was at the beach."
"Oh. Nice." My voice would be flat, betraying nothing. I couldn't let him know that I had already seen a screenshot of that story from another friend and had spent an hour analyzing the background for clues about her emotional state.
I couldn't tell him the truth. I couldn't tell him about the love. The fight was one thing; it was a simple, understandable story of a friendship gone wrong. But the love? That was a complication I had to keep locked away. Admitting it out loud would make it real, and I wasn't ready for that. More than that, I was ashamed. Ashamed that my feelings had, in my mind, poisoned a pure friendship. I felt like I was the one who had ruined everything, that my unspoken love was the original sin that led to the fight.
My secrecy frustrated him. He was trying to help, trying to be a mediator, but I was giving him nothing to work with.
"Dude, you have to talk to me," he said one day, his patience finally snapping. "What is really going on? This is more than just a fight over a reel. You're acting like someone died."
Someone did, I wanted to scream. The me who was just her friend. He's dead.
"It's nothing, man," I said, my voice quiet. "I just… I miss my friend. That's all."
It was the truest lie I had ever told.
As the summer dragged on, the narrative in my head began to shift. In the immediate aftermath of the fight, I had been a mix of confused, hurt, and defensive. I felt her reaction was extreme, an unfair escalation over a stupid mistake.
But now, in the silence, with nothing but my own thoughts for company, that perspective crumbled. All I could feel was the crushing weight of my own guilt.
I replayed the incident a thousand times, each time seeing it more clearly through her eyes. It wasn't just a reel. It was a thoughtless act from the one person she trusted to be thoughtful. She had confided in me about her insecurities, her family pressures, the casual cruelty of people who called her "weird." She trusted me to see her. And I had turned around and tagged her in a joke that, however unintentionally, played right into those insecurities. I had been careless with her trust.
My new realization—my love for her—only amplified the guilt. I started to wonder, subconsciously, had I sent the reel for another reason? Was it a clumsy, idiotic attempt to bring up the topic of relationships? A Freudian slip of the thumb? I couldn't be sure, and the uncertainty was maddening. It felt like my feelings had made me reckless.
The anger I had felt towards her vanished completely, replaced by a profound self-loathing. She hadn't overreacted. She had reacted appropriately to a betrayal. I was the idiot. I was the one who had broken our most important rule: we were each other's safe harbor. And I had steered the ship right into the rocks.
The summer ended. The days grew shorter. It was time to go back to college, back to the dorm room where I had last heard her voice, back to the life that now felt like it belonged to someone else. There was no resolution on the horizon. There was no hope of a message. There was only the quiet, grim acceptance that this was my new reality.
I had to learn to live with the ghost.