Friday, August 22, 2025.
I woke up before my alarm, but not from anxiety. The sun was just beginning to cast a pale, gray light into my room. I lay in bed, listening to the distant, waking sounds of the city. There was no dread. There was no frantic, heart-pounding panic. There was only a profound and unnerving stillness.
Today was the day I had to talk to a ghost.
I got out of bed and began my routine. I made my bed, the corners crisp and neat. I showered, the hot water a welcome, grounding sensation. I got dressed in a clean shirt and a pair of jeans. I was an astronaut preparing for a spacewalk, each small, methodical action a barrier against the vast, unknown emptiness that lay ahead.
The boy from a year ago would have been a wreck. He would have been pacing, unable to eat, his mind a maelstrom of desperate hope and crippling fear. But he was gone. I was what was left. And I was calm.
I ate breakfast. I actually tasted the coffee. I went to the lab early, the quiet, empty building a comfort. I sat at my workbench and opened my laptop, pulling up the schematics for my final year project. The clean lines and logical connections of the circuit diagram were a balm to my mind. This was a world I understood. A world of inputs and outputs, of cause and effect.
My phone lay face down on the bench beside me. Kapil had texted earlier: "Call will be around 7 PM. Be ready."
I was ready. I wasn't preparing for a conversation; I was preparing for a data-processing event. My objective was simple: listen, understand, offer closure if needed, and disconnect. I was not a participant in this drama anymore. I was a technician, called in to service a piece of old, broken machinery.
Throughout the day, my mind, in its quiet, analytical way, began to sift through the past, not as a collection of painful memories, but as a data set.
Data Point A: The Love. It was real. A powerful, formative, and ultimately unreciprocated emotional event. Conclusion: Acknowledged, processed, and archived. Its power to cause acute pain had decayed significantly.
Data Point B: The Friendship. It was also real. A bond of immense value, characterized by trust, humor, and mutual support. Its loss was the primary source of the initial trauma.
Data Point C: The Guilt. My actions, however unintentional, had caused her pain. They had resulted in the destruction of Data Point B. This was the variable that still had weight. This was the reason for the call.
My healing had been a solitary, selfish process. It had to be. I had focused on my own survival, on building my own peace. But Kapil's words—Before your feelings, you were her friend—had introduced a new objective into the calculation. My peace was secure. But what about hers?
Her words to Kapil, "you were her best friend, but you just ruined it," were not just an accusation. They were a lament. It was the sound of someone mourning a loss. The same loss I had mourned. And if this call, this one last, difficult conversation, could offer her some measure of peace, some final, shared understanding of the wreckage, then I had a responsibility to see it through.
I wasn't doing this for the boy who was in love with her. I was doing this for the friend I had been, as a final act of service to a friendship that had once been the most important thing in my world.
At 6:45 PM, I packed up my things and walked back to my hostel. The campus was bathed in the golden, forgiving light of the setting sun. Students were laughing, heading out for the evening, their lives a vibrant, noisy tapestry that I was no longer a part of. I felt a profound sense of detachment, not of sadness, but of peace. I was an observer, and I was content with that role.
I sat on the edge of my bed in my quiet, orderly room. The phone lay on the mattress beside me. I didn't pick it up. I just waited.
At 6:58 PM, it buzzed. A text from Kapil.
Ready?
I looked at the word. The last time he had been the agent of chaos, he had thrown me into the storm unprepared. This time, I had spent the entire day calmly walking to the water's edge.
I typed back a single letter.
Y.
My phone immediately went dark as the call screen came up. Kapil is inviting you to a group call. The same notification as before. The same scenario. But the man receiving the call was a different person.
I took a deep, slow breath, held it for a count of three, and let it out. The frantic, terrified boy from the past was just a ghost now, a faint echo in the quiet corridors of my mind. I was in control. Whatever happened next, whatever she said, it would not break me. My peace was no longer a fragile, external thing that she could give or take away. It was a part of my own internal architecture. I had built it myself.
I pressed the green button.
The line connected. There was a moment of perfect, absolute silence. The sound of two years of pain, of growth, of change, all hanging in a single, suspended second.
And then, a voice. A familiar, hesitant, and very real voice that cut through the silence and brought the entire story full circle.
"Hello?"