The next twenty-four hours were not lived. They were endured. Time stretched and warped, each second a slow, agonizing drip of dread. My world shrank to the size of my phone screen, a black mirror reflecting my own pathetic anxiety.
The headache that had started during our call bloomed into a full-blown migraine. It was a physical manifestation of my thoughts, a relentless, pounding rhythm of what-if and if-only. I didn't sleep. I lay in bed, staring into the darkness, my body rigid with tension. Every creak of the hostel building, every distant shout, was a jolt to my frayed nerves.
I tried to distract myself. I opened a textbook, but the words swam before my eyes, meaningless squiggles. I put on a movie, but the cheerful dialogue felt like a personal insult. The world was moving on, laughing and living, while my entire existence was paused, hanging by the thread of a single, impending phone call.
Food was out of the question. The thought of eating made my stomach churn. I was running on a toxic cocktail of adrenaline, caffeine from a coffee I couldn't finish, and pure, uncut dread.
Every buzz of my phone was a micro heart attack. A notification from a food delivery app. A message from my mom. A meme from a college group chat. Each one was a false alarm that left me more drained than before. I was a prisoner on death row, and every footstep in the hallway sounded like the executioner.
I replayed our conversation a thousand times, dissecting every word, every pause, every inflection in her voice. Had her "no" been a real "no," or a "maybe"? Was her offer of friendship a genuine desire to keep me in her life, or a gentle way to let me down easy? My mind was a frantic, desperate detective, searching for clues in a case that was already closed. I was torturing myself, and I couldn't stop.
The call came late the next evening. My phone lit up with her name, and my heart seized in my chest. I stared at it for a full ten seconds, my thumb hovering over the green icon, a part of me wanting to let it ring forever, to live in this state of terrible uncertainty rather than face a devastating certainty.
I answered.
"Hello?" My voice was a dry, cracked whisper.
"Hey, Arjun," she said. Her voice was soft, gentle, and full of a sad, resolute finality. I knew the answer before she even said it.
"I thought about what you said," she began, and I could hear the deep breath she took on the other end of the line. "I thought about it all day. And I'm… I'm so sorry."
There it was. The gentlest, kindest, most destructive word in the English language. Sorry.
"I value you so much as a friend," she continued, her words careful, as if she were trying to disarm a bomb. "More than you know. But I don't… I don't see you that way. I don't have those feelings for you. And it wouldn't be fair to you or to me to pretend otherwise."
I didn't say anything. There was nothing to say. My frantic, hope-filled mind had gone completely silent. All the arguments I had prepared, all the pleas I had rehearsed—they vanished. There is no argument against the simple, unchangeable truth of someone else's heart.
"I still want to be your friend, Arjun," she said, her voice pleading now. "Please don't shut me out again."
A single, hot tear rolled down my cheek. "Okay," I whispered. It was the only word I had left.
"Okay?" she asked, a hint of surprise in her voice.
"Okay," I repeated, my voice numb. "I get it."
"I'll… I'll talk to you later, then," she said, her relief palpable.
"Yeah. Later."
I hung up the phone. I placed it face down on my desk. I didn't throw it. I didn't scream. I just stood there, in the middle of my room, as the fragile structure of hope I had built over the last two months collapsed into dust around me.
The devastation was a quiet, internal thing. There was no dramatic breakdown. There was just a great, hollowing emptiness. The pounding in my head intensified, and a sudden, violent chill wracked my body. I started shivering, my teeth chattering despite the humid Chennai air.
I stumbled to my bed and crawled under the covers, pulling the thin blanket up to my chin. The shivering wouldn't stop. My body felt like it was simultaneously on fire and frozen solid. The world began to tilt, the corners of my room blurring into a hazy, indistinct mess.
The next few days were a fever dream. I didn't leave my bed. I drifted in and out of a restless, nightmare-filled sleep. My head felt like it was splitting open, and every muscle in my body ached with a deep, relentless pain. I vaguely remember a friend from the next room knocking on my door, his voice muffled and distant. I remember telling him I had the flu.
On the fourth day, the fever was still raging. My skin was hot to the touch, and a strange, blotchy rash had started to appear on my arms. The friend from next door took one look at me, his face pale with concern, and made a decision. He called my parents. He called the campus health center.
Things moved quickly after that. I remember being half-carried out of my room. The blindingly bright lights of the clinic. A needle in my arm. The worried face of a doctor asking me questions I couldn't answer.
The diagnosis came back a few hours later. It wasn't the flu. It wasn't just a psychosomatic breakdown. It was real. It had a name.
Dengue fever.
The hospital was a sterile, white limbo. For a week, my life was reduced to the beep of machines, the rustle of nurses' uniforms, and the IV drip in my arm. I was too sick to think, too weak to feel. The heartbreak was still there, a massive, unexploded bomb in my chest, but I didn't have the energy to even look at it. My body had taken over, and its only mission was to survive.
My parents were a constant, worried presence. Kapil called every day, his voice tight with a guilt he didn't need to feel.
Parveen didn't call. She didn't text. I didn't expect her to—she didn't know. No one had told her. My illness was a secret, a private consequence to a private heartbreak. The silence from her, which had once been a source of agony, was now a strange, numb mercy.
The fever broke on the fifth day. The weakness lingered, but the fog in my brain began to clear. And as my body slowly, painstakingly started to heal, the emotional pain rushed back in to fill the void. It was still there. Waiting for me.
I was discharged a week after I was admitted, five kilograms lighter and a hundred years older. I walked out of the hospital into the bright, unforgiving sunlight, my legs unsteady beneath me. I was physically and emotionally shattered. I had been rejected, hospitalized, and hollowed out. I was at the absolute bottom of the pit.
And now, somehow, I had to be her friend.