MISSING SOMEONE...

"Dei ******, I'm scared if we'll if we'll stay this way forever da, as best friends. I'm scared if something would separate us."

"Don't worry ****, nothing like that would happen. Now sleep, it's 2 in the morning."

How wrong I was. The days we were together, without a care for the world, always a smile dancing on our lips, a twinkle in our eyes, standing up for each other at all times. I could almost say everyone around us was envious of our friendship. Many of them even revealed traces of their envy. We didn't care, we were reckless juveniles carting through cloud nine.

I still remember those days, when our friendship was at its blooming best. The number of days he had stayed back at the lab with me, just because I wanted to complete some program we needed to submit the following week. The instances he came along with me on boring journeys just because I'd feel lonely, the way he used to tease me about -, well, that's another issue altogether, the way he used to tease me, it's all etched in my memory. And I don't think it'll be erased anytime soon. The time when he was down with fever and couldn't eat normal food, I still recollect the way I rocketed down three flights of stairs taking four steps at a time, to get him a loaf of bread and a jug of warm milk. And I don't think he knows it, but I stayed awake that whole night, watching over him. It was all so natural, we were extremely attached to each other. The nights before the semester exams when he'd declare in dismay that he was definitely going to fail the exams. I'd sit with him and we'd study together, boosting up his confidence. It just came, no one asked us to be that way, it was something along the lines of Damon and Pythias or Achilles and Patrocles or -, cut it, like those fellows.

If you ask me how Fate can screw you till you're in deep shit, I'd show you our friendship. Over a period of one year, I don't know what happened, it could have been development of other outlets, it could have been because we couldn't spend as much time together as we did, it could have been because both of us were too consumed by our ego to confront the other and talk it out, it could have been due to a hundred other reasons I can quote, but fact remains that we're not the same anymore. I don't say I'm not happy, I have friends who care for me and keep me going. The same applies to him too. Still, it feels like a part of me is missing, like how a person who has recently had his arm amputated feels for his hand involuntarily and realizes with a pang of shock mixed with sorrow that it is not there. It feels like a vital organ of mine has been removed. In all other aspects of life, I'm on top of the world, and I've got every reason to feel so, having almost got to undergraduate college with a good academic record and having made great friends in college. Yet when I try to tell myself that I feel on top of the world, a nagging voice inside me mocks at me, "Try saying that again". I know I can't. In reality, I don't give feel on top of the world. It's like being the richest man on earth with all possible avenues for pleasure, yet cursed with paralysis, unable to enjoy anything. Some part is gone, something you sorely miss.

I almost feel that the secret desire of some people has been fulfilled. We were that enviable, almost to the extent of being arrogant that nothing would or rather, could separate us. Ironically, it's Fate's way of reminding you "Man proposes, God kicks him on his backside".