Anand Prakash

For so long, we’re a happy couple. Even more ideal than the couple in romantic comedies, we actually never fought with each other. So, when I fought with her for first time on some random thing that I had now forgotten, that day, I felt like as if I had seen and smelled a putrefying carcass and felt like vomiting then and there. But for strange reasons, I couldn’t vomit. If you had ever felt such a feeling, where you smell something obnoxious and vomit stuck in your system, you know how horrible that is.

I didn’t have anything to compare to, like how much you fight and when you need to stop and start loving each other again. Neither did she. For this was our first love.

Whoever’s mistake it was, when I realized it had gone long, I said, “Sorry!” and touched her soft arm, she pulled her hand away from me. “Need to sleep!” she said.

It brought silence. You know me, rejections hurt me, even a simple rejection of not giving the last ice cream. I had already given the money to ice-cream vendor and he chose that girl over me and said, “Sir, sorry next time.”

Since that fight, we didn’t say a word until I said sorry to each other.

It was then I came to know how powerful that silence can be in destroying a relationship, even worse than fighting. I wish we would have fought more. At least, in those bitter and caustic words, there was truth. In silence, guilt and doubts perpetuated and tore us apart.

After couple of weeks, she did speak to me, telling me that one of her friends’ roommate had left and now she had room available for her.

“Hmm.” She didn’t even mention the name of friend; I knew all of her friends, unless this one was her new friend.

“You said I don’t have to stay here for forever. I can go whenever you feel like. Remember!”

“I said that,” I said to her.

She nodded. Her face hidden behind her raven colored tresses. So, I turned my back to her as well.

“If I said so … then you are free to go.”

She didn’t even give me benefit of doubt: she didn’t even say that I don’t remember exactly but you said something like that. Or she could have simply said, I want to go.

Did I say something like to her? I don’t remember. I might have. Those were early days! We used to tease each other by saying such things. And it has been over two years, do you think, I would remember this sentence of all the sentence she had said to me.

There were magical sentences, there were words that I would love to hear again and again from her, heck even whispers were better than remembering this sentence.