Short Story College Friends – The story
Image© Anand Vishnu Prakash, YourStoryClub.com
It was the college annual cultural fest.And that’s where it all started.
She hated college. She hated everything about it, excepting the few friends she actually had. Maybe that she expected too much from her life. She hated those beautiful people who were so charming and judged her so much. She hated how everyone was double faced. She hated how everyone wanted to be popular but not a real person.
She hated the ”How’s life?” and “What’s up?”.
She wanted to talk about meaningful things.Things like the unending universe,the mystery of life,the atoms,the molecules and how time changed it all. She was an aspiring engineer and hated absolute solution. She loved life and hated it all the same. She loved company and was attracted to solitude. She was different and nobody understood her difference.
Everyone was dancing that day; to the loud screeching music. Even if they didn’t want to. She loved to dance. But she was a bad dancer and that prevented her from dancing that day. She was sitting in a corner; a corner where the music was less loud and she was alone.
She was watching people. How they laughed. How the poised for the perfect photograph. She never understood them.
“May I sit here?”, she saw a boy standing.
“It’s a free country”,she replied. Strangely, the boy was not charmed by her answer as she had expected. He just sat there and kept watching alike her.
She was popularly known as “the conversation beginner” once upon a time contrasting to this ‘cold’ self she has become now-a-days. But that day she said”Hello”.
“You are from this college?”,she asked the boy.
He was rather skinny and of the pale complexion. He did not reply. Perhaps the music was too loud. She repeated the question again. And this time a little louder. The boy looked surprised.”You are asking me?”
She nodded.
’’Yes; Fourth year; Civil engineering.”
’’First year;Information Technology”, was her brief reply.There was no more conversation that day.
The next Monday, she met the boy again. She smiled at him and he overlooked. She thought he was avoiding her and she did not mind. She believed she was that person everyone replaces.
That night, she received a message at the facebook.”Can we be friends?”,it said. She checked the profile and found it to be him. He was not in her ‘friends list’ and has even not sent a ‘friend request’. Instead she sent one.
Their conversation , over text messages and phone calls were different.They didn’t have a particular answers to their questions.They were different and they understood their difference.
They talked about the stars, the unending universe, how life began and it’s mystery and how he was too shy and she was too awkward.
They studied in the same college and occasionally met at the canteen. Yet not a single glance exchanged. He pretended not to know her. She pretended all the same. It became a personal joke day by day.
Once in a while they would go by the lake, not far from college and talked and laughed and held hands and it seemed world had stood still.
Nobody knew about their friendship. Nobody cared. One day he said , he loved her and she did not reply. She was scared. She feared about how she knew nothing about love and he told her to leave it in the hands of time.
He was not her boyfriend. She was not his girlfriend. They were not lovers but loved each other. She was his ‘Watson’ to his ‘Sherlock’ and he was her ‘Ajit’ to her ‘Byomkesh’. Each of them could exist individually, only stories untold.
–END–
