The Stranger She Made

The message came at 2:14 in the morning, and I

read it the way you read a diagnosis — slowly,

twice, hoping the second time would say something different.

Don't talk to me again. Let's be strangers. You are a stranger to me.

I sat on the floor of my room with my back against the bed and the phone glowing in my hand, and I remember thinking, absurdly, that the fan was still turning. That the world had not stopped. That somewhere below my window a dog was barking and a train was passing and the man at the tea stall was still boiling milk for people who had somewhere to be.

I was twenty-three years old. I was six foot two and weighed sixty kilograms, which is a polite way of saying I was a scarecrow in a t-shirt. I had no job, no money, no degree — I had stopped going to school in the ninth grade and never gone back — and no plan for my life that extended past the next chapter of whatever I was writing. I was, by every measure that mattered to the world, nothing.

But I had one thing. I had her.

And at 2:14 in the morning, she took it away.

I want to tell you I cried. I didn't, not then. I sat there for a long time with my thumb hovering over the reply box, typing and deleting, typing and deleting, because what do you say to a sentence like that? Why? I typed. Deleted it. What did I do? Deleted it. Please. Deleted it. Because I already knew the answer to all three, and the answer was: nothing. I had done nothing. That was the whole problem. I had spent five years doing nothing, and now the bill had come due.

Five years. I did the math on the floor of my room at 2:14 in the morning, because math is what you do when you can't feel anything yet. Five years is eighteen hundred and twenty-five days. It is roughly forty-three thousand hours. I had spent most of them loving a girl who had never once, in all that time, looked at me the way I looked at her.

Her name was Nila.

I'm not going to pretend I didn't know. That's the thing nobody tells you about one-sided love — you always know. You know it in the way she says your name, friendly and flat, the same way she says the waiter's. You know it in the way she hugs you goodbye, one arm, quick, the way you'd hug a cousin. You know it in the way she talks about other boys to you, easily, trustingly, because you are safe — because you are her best friend, and best friends don't count as people who could want you.

I knew. I knew for five years. And I stayed anyway, because the alternative was not having her at all, and I would rather have had a fraction of Nila than all of anyone else.

That's not romantic. I know that now. At the time I thought it was the most romantic thing in the world.

I finally put the phone down at some point past three. I lay on the floor because the floor felt honest. The ceiling of my room had a water stain shaped like a bird, and I stared at it and thought about the first time I saw her.

It was a Tuesday. It's always a Tuesday, isn't it. She was standing outside the coaching centre where I used to loiter because it had air conditioning and I had nowhere else to be, and she was arguing with a boy about a book — some fantasy novel, I don't even remember which — and she was losing the argument and she knew it and she didn't care, she was laughing, and I remember thinking: I want to be on her side of an argument for the rest of my life.

I never got to be. I got to be the friend who agreed with her. That's different. That's the waiting room, not the room.

The phone buzzed once more, and my heart did the stupid thing it always did, the leap, the hope — and it was a notification from a recharge app. Twenty rupees cashback. I laughed, and the laugh turned into something else halfway through, and I pressed my palm against my mouth so my mother wouldn't hear me through the wall.

She was asleep. She had work in the morning. She had spent her whole life working so that I could have a room with a water stain and a phone with twenty rupees of cashback and no future, and I lay on the floor and thought: this is what I've made of it.

I don't know when I fell asleep. I know I dreamed, and the dream was the same one I'd been having for as long as I could remember — the one I never told anyone about, not even Nila, because it was too strange to say out loud.

A corridor. Long, and dark, and lined with doors. And behind one of the doors, at the far end, something was waiting for me. Not a monster. Not exactly. Something patient. Something that had been waiting a very long time, and would keep waiting, because it had nothing but time.

In the dream I always walked toward the door. I never reached it. I always woke up just before my hand touched the handle, with my heart pounding and the taste of copper in my mouth.

I woke up that morning the same way. And for the first time in five years, I woke up and did not reach for my phone to text her good morning.

That was the first day of the rest of my life. I didn't know it yet. I thought it was the last day of it.