I woke up with a bitter taste in my mouth and a head that wouldn’t stop spinning. My phone was dead and there was that old sinking feeling at the pit of my stomach. Something wasn’t right. As I made my way to the kitchen and set my phone up to charge, the events of last night started to slowly float up to my mind like bile rising up to the throat.
I had spun the biggest cliché in the book. I had, in the stupid bravery that comes from an extra peg of alcohol, confessed my love for my best friend of ten years and hadn’t even seen it coming.
K and I have been best friends since our junior college days and God knows we worked hard at it. We’d fight like children and not talk to each other for days but we’d sit on the same bench. He got me my first black dress for a college function and I taught him his tie technique. We even posed for our college year book together. Together, we could take on every single thing the world threw at us, and look what I did. I took the most perfect friendship I have ever felt and smeared it with this elusive thing they call love.
We have both seen each other through a string of failed relationships until one day he excitedly came to see me at work and tell me about this girl he was falling for. Over cups of hot tea and Parle-G, I had painstakingly drawn out a complete plan for him to woo her. Within a month, they were dating and soon, they were two years old and very serious about each other. On the other hand, I was dating men, none of them lasting for more than a couple of months. Every time, I’d come back to him and we’d make cruel jokes at their expense, laughing away whatever trace of pain they may have left in my heart. Boy problem, boss problem, mum problem, or just a bad day, he was my only goddamned happy place.
Maybe other people never worked because I was content in my world with K. I didn’t need anyone at all. I just never thought it’d snowball into feelings because I didn’t believe in it. I could never give myself that much credit. I didn’t think I could love someone, put someone else before me. I didn’t think I was cut that way.  Come look at me now, kids. I look like the girl who got owned by everything she slammed down as stuff ‘that happens only in movies.’
Today, as I sit in the kitchen, trying to figure how I am going to deal with this, the phone beeps.
There he is, my best friend K, writing to tell me that everything is fine and nothing will come between our friendships. That I must get dressed and go to work so he can come get me and we could go get pizzas.
I have something for him too.
Dear K,
It took me so many years to realize that my whole life revolves around us. You know my hangover screams for pizza. You wipe the sweat off my forehead like it was your own and you take me to the most insane places inside your heart. Of course, we will get back to doing all the things we do. We’ll still make random plans and set off into the sunset on your bike.
But I will never be able to hear you say her name again without a tiny stab at my heart. I will start a war with the skies about how unfair this entire situation is. You know me, I will become so miserable and you will beat yourself up for it. And I won’t let a slip of my heart affect you because that’s what friends do. They don’t pull their best friend into their storms.
P.S: Did you really think we’d get through life without any casualty?
Love,
Z
And just like that, I lost my friendship to love.
By Geeta Masurekar
