Thursday, August 21, 2025.
The air in the robotics lab was thick with the smell of solder, hot plastic, and the low-grade, collective anxiety of twenty final-year engineering students. Outside, the Chennai afternoon was a furnace, but in here, the air conditioning hummed a steady, monotonous tune, creating a cool, sterile bubble where the only thing that mattered was the clean, unforgiving logic of the machine.
This was my sanctuary. A place of circuits and code, of servos and sensors. A world where every problem had a solution, even if it took a hundred lines of code and a thousand failed simulations to find it.
My project partner, a perpetually stressed-out boy named Rishi, was having a minor meltdown.
"It's not working!" he hissed, his face inches from the complex tangle of wires that was supposed to be our robot's nervous system. "The proximity sensor is giving junk data. Again. This whole project is cursed. We're going to fail."
The old Arjun would have been right there with him, drowning in the shared panic, the frustration feeding on itself until it became a monster. But the old Arjun was gone.
I leaned over, my eyes scanning the breadboard. I wasn't feeling Rishi's panic. I was observing it. I could see the intricate web of his anxiety: the fear of a bad grade, the pressure from his parents, the simple, exhausting frustration of a problem that wouldn't yield. I understood it, but I didn't share it. It was just data.
"You've cross-wired the VCC and the ground pins for the sensor feed," I said, my voice calm. I pointed with the tip of a screwdriver. "Right there. The red wire is in the ground rail. The machine is doing exactly what you told it to do. It's just that you told it to do something stupid."
Rishi stared at the wires, his frantic energy deflating instantly. "Oh." He looked up at me, a mixture of relief and embarrassment on his face. "How did you even see that?"
"I wasn't panicking," I said with a shrug, turning back to my own monitor.
It was the truth. I didn't panic anymore. I didn't get angry. I didn't get swept up in the emotional currents of others. The fire of my own heartbreak had burned away all the trivial, everyday anxieties. It had left me with a strange, quiet clarity. A detachment. I was a better engineer for it. I was probably a worse friend.
My phone, lying face down on the workbench, began to vibrate, its buzzing a jarring, organic intrusion into the sterile world of the lab. I glanced at the screen. Kapil.
I gestured to Rishi that I was stepping out and walked into the hallway, the cool, quiet air of the lab replaced by the humid, noisy chaos of the college corridor.
"Hey," I said, leaning against the wall. "I'm in the middle of a lab session. What's up?"
"Dude," Kapil's voice was a frantic, breathless thing, a stark contrast to the calm I had just left. "I need to talk to you. It's important."
I listened, my back pressed against the cool concrete wall, as Kapil recounted his conversation. He spoke in a rush, the words tumbling over each other, a chaotic mix of guilt, frustration, and a strange, misguided sense of triumph.
He had been on a conference call with her. She had wanted to talk to me.
The words were like stones dropped into a deep, still pond. I could feel the ripples spreading through me, disturbing the calm I had spent more than a year cultivating. The old pain was there, a faint, phantom ache in my chest, a ghost limb tingling with a memory of agony.
Then came the gut punch.
"...and she said you were her best friend, but you just ruined it."
I closed my eyes. The hallway around me seemed to fade away. The image that flashed in my mind wasn't of her face, but of the rooftop. The cold concrete beneath my knees. The desperate, bone-crushing grip of Kapil's hug. The long, silent week that followed. The slow, painful work of laying one brick at a time, building a new life on top of the ruins.
My mind, the new, analytical mind I had built, went to work. It took the pain of her words, isolated it, and examined it from a distance.
Analysis: Her statement is an expression of her own hurt and regret. It validates the depth of the friendship that was lost. The pain you are feeling is a residual echo of a past trauma. It is significant, but not fatal. You have survived this before. You will survive it now.
The emotional tailspin, the one that would have sent the old me crashing to the ground, lasted for approximately ten seconds. Then, the logic kicked in. The training took over. My breathing evened out. The phantom ache subsided.
I opened my eyes. The hallway was just a hallway. I was just a student, standing in it.
"Kapil," I said, and I was surprised by the steadiness of my own voice. "You said you were like my brother. Be like one, please."
It was a plea. A plea to let it go. To let the dead rest. To not force me to walk back into that graveyard.
But he wouldn't. He couldn't. He was a man on a mission, a well-intentioned friend trying to fix a wound he didn't understand was already scarred over.
"No, man, you don't get it!" he insisted. "This is the chance! To fix it! I'm rescheduling a call between you two. For tomorrow."
"Don't," I said, the word cold and sharp. "I don't want to talk to her."
"What are you talking about? Of course you do!"
"No, Kapil, I don't," I said, my voice low and firm. "I don't want to hurt her anymore. And I don't want to hurt myself. I'm… I'm at peace. For the first time in years, I'm okay. Please don't take that away from me."
It was the most honest I had been with him in a long time. I was laying my fragile, hard-won peace at his feet and begging him not to step on it.
There was a long silence on the other end of the line. I could hear his frustration, his confusion. He couldn't understand. To him, this was a love story that needed a final chapter. To me, it was a war I had barely survived, and he was asking me to revisit the battlefield.
When he finally spoke, his voice was softer, but his words were a dagger aimed at the one weakness in my logical armor.
"Before your feelings," he said quietly. "Before all of this. You were her friend, Arjun."
I ended the call a few minutes later, having numbly agreed to talk to her tomorrow. I walked back into the lab, the hum of the machines a stark contrast to the sudden, renewed turmoil in my mind.
Rishi looked up at me. "Everything okay, man? You look like you've seen a ghost."
"Something like that," I muttered, sitting back down at my station.
Before your feelings, you were her friend.
Kapil's words were a variable I hadn't accounted for. My entire recovery had been built on a foundation of self-preservation. On logic. On gratitude. On moving on. But I had never factored in my duty.
What if she was hurting? What if her words—you ruined it—were a cry for help, a plea for closure? My peace had been my ultimate goal. But was my peace more important than hers?
I stared at the lines of code on my screen, but I wasn't seeing them. I was running a new calculation. I was weighing my own hard-won stability against the possibility of offering her a final moment of understanding.
The old Arjun would have jumped at this chance, driven by a desperate, selfish hope. But hope was not part of this equation. There was no illusion of a happy ending. This wasn't about winning her back. It was about something far more complicated. It was about responsibility.
I didn't know what I would say to her. I didn't know what would happen. The prospect of hearing her voice again was a terrifying, exhausting thought.
But Kapil was right. Before I was the boy with the broken heart, I was the boy who listened to her rants. I was the boy who made her laugh. I was her friend. And maybe, just maybe, I owed that friend one last conversation.
I took a deep breath and turned back to my project. I had a robot to fix. And tomorrow, I had a ghost to face.