A Little More Than Something!!!

In my last post (link here), I introduced you to Siddhant & Ishika. Let me tell you what happened next. So Ishika and Siddhant lived in two opposite ends of the city. Thanks to the traffic and road conditions, reaching her would usually take Siddhant nearly two hours. So, this may qualify as a long distance relationship. Sorry, a long distance friendship. Because Ishika had friend-zoned Siddhant on day one. But Siddhant just couldn’t see her as ‘just a friend’. Their meeting had started something of a chain reaction in his mind, and it was taking a life of its own.

They started face-timing from the very day they met, rather regularly. Every evening, she’d call and Siddhant would have to tidy up a little before receiving her call. And they’d look at each other for hours, talking, listening to music together and just smiling at each other. You see, over the past several months, Siddhant had faced numerous bad dates. Dates who weren’t serious, dates who were rude and dates who were deceitful. It had started feeling tedious and sometimes transactional. For instance, the absolute lack of initiative had bothered him in one of the dates. But with Ishika, it felt different. 

Siddhant realized that even her rejection felt better than anything he’d ever experienced. And furthermore, he realized that he really didn’t care about how it played out. The consequences seemed meagre and inconsequential at this point. And the moment this realization hit him, he was liberated. Within days of meeting, she had become a part of his daily routine, something he looked forward to. And Ishika would try her best to push him away, by mocking him and poking fun at his quirks, but she never stopped talking to him. And that made him feel special, because even if she didn’t look at him the way he looked at her, she at least felt like talking to him every day, and that was something.

Every day, looking at Ishika’s face, her glowing skin and her toothy smile, and that twinkle in her eye accentuated by that one dimple that formed on her cheek, drove Siddhant crazy. Somewhere between her smile and her rebuke, Siddhant’s days rose and fell. He was feeling ‘something’. And this something was growing stronger with each passing day, becoming more. And they’d managed to meet only that one time. But they saw each other every day and shared their thoughts and dreams. Siddhant was slowly and steadily falling for Ishika, even if she’d have preferred he didn’t. She insisted that he’d be better off if he liked someone else, but the heart wants what the heart wants. Even though Siddhant didn’t “really know” Ishika, he felt close to her, like it was something that was meant to be.

For the last several years, Siddhant had lost touch with his emotions. Somewhere between being an adult and being responsible, he had forgotten how to be vulnerable. And Ishika changed this in a matter of moments. While they looked at each other, through their phones, and talked about who they were and who they wanted to be, they broke each other down to bits, only to build each other up. They laughed, they cried and they laughed some more. They didn’t understand it, not even a little, and while Ishika tried to make sense of it, Siddhant accepted it, as something inevitable and all consuming. But Ishika was scared that she’d end up hurting Siddhant even though she really didn’t want to do that. 

You see Ishika had been in love once. And it had shattered her. She had lost the heart to love anyone again. And here was this guy, who was being earnest, crazy and vulnerable. And she liked it, every bit of it, but she didn’t love him. Yet. And she was afraid she might never be able to. And for some reason, she felt like breaking this guy’s heart would hurt her more than it would hurt him. And she was right too. Siddhant had never loved like this, maybe he’d never loved before. Like twinkling stars at dawn, everything else in his life had just faded away, replaced by Ishika’s bright shining form. 

Siddhant had problems, big problems. He was struggling in a thankless job, battling with panic attacks and severe anxiety and meeting this girl had just made all of those things feel like background noise. He looked at her and he thought about her and when he wasn’t doing either of those things, he’d dream about her. He wanted her happy, even if it meant being pushed away. He knew his happiness was, forever, linked with her now, and he also knew she might never feel the same, but instead of obsessing over whether he’d ever have her affection or not, he focussed on making her smile. Because when she smiled, he felt like it’d all work out, like she was already his, which in a way, she was.

Siddhant had a plan. It was outrageous, outlandish, unlike anything he’d ever done before. He was just going to be there, trying to make her smile, trying to make her happy, forever. Irrespective of whether his feelings would ever be reciprocated. Being loved back had always been important to Siddhant, but this time round, that didn’t matter at all. He was surprising himself, every day, with this new-found resolve. And every day, he could feel Ishika’s heart melting, a little by little. Every day, he could see her eyes soften for him, a little more than the day before. Then one day, she made him a promise: “I will not leave you, even though I’ll never love you and you’ll be hurt by it, disappointed by it.” Siddhant knew that she’d not be able to keep that promise, especially the part about never loving him back.

He wasn’t being cocky or over confident. He was just being hopeful, incredibly hopeful. He couldn’t fathom something so pure and intense not reaching fruition. But what was the endgame? What did he desire? Where did he want this to go? The truth was that Siddhant was enjoying the journey too much to care about the destination. He wanted Ishika to keep being a part of his day, smiling and laughing at him. Maybe seeing her happy was what this whole thing was all about. Maybe that was the endgame. And at the end of each night, when Ishika would fall asleep in front of Siddhant’s eyes, he’d let out a sigh and smile to himself and hang up, and go to bed happy, something he never did before.