Crushed, Crashed. {PROLOGUE}

My mind is an art gallery of emotions. If you make me feel a particular way, and if it's something I've never felt before, I'll hang that emotion on display on my mind and I'll write your name underneath it.

And that's how I recognise people. Not by names or identities, but by my relation to that person. The relation tagged by an emotion.

Emotions are like snowflakes. Minute, but invincible. Each one its own sort of inexplicable. Each one different in a mind-bogglingly intricate way.

Emotions may take turns to make me feel overwhelmed. And when they do, it makes me borderline creative. And when I'm that, I start thinking of emotions, trying to describe them in the worst relatable way possible and ending up staring at the ceiling.

Humans are masochistic by nature. More the cynic, less the sanguine. Whenever an emotion hits me and overwhelms me, I try to judge it and place it under one of two broad categories. Happy. Sad. And since I'm human by birth, I characteristically spend more energy on Sad. Hence, the staring at the ceiling.

I can hear my mom rapping at the door. She'll open it soon enough, remove the chair and poise by my bed, hands caressing my forehead, fingers wiping away my tears. But, right now, she's behind that latchless door, respecting my privacy, calming me down just by making me aware of a gentle presence behind a door.

I can hear my mom saying, "Lanya dear, you always have me." I guess she heard me too, heard me screaming your name, heard me reacting to your putting a foot down to our relationship.

"I thought you loved me!" I howled.

"I thought you did too," you hung up.

***

My mom's gone now. She patted hope in me, delivered a quarter of her goodness to me and almost lullabied to sleep.

But that won't stop the ceiling from being my new best friend. That won't stop anyone from laughing at me for losing my old one.

That will stop me, though, from ever living a good life.

Being creative and misplacing emotions won't give me you back. But they'll help me recover, while my time, doing nothing, staring at my new best friend, searching for answers in glow-in-the-dark stars.

I realise my hopelessness as I call you sixty-two times in a row, you declining thirty-eight times and letting it ring for the rest.

I'm past shrieking, past kicking the air around the bed, past relief, past motion.

I take up my phone once again. Looking at it with a blurred-out sight, I open Call Log and swipe the screen across your number. This is the one last time, the one last chance that determines whether I win or lose, that decides whether I should live or die. You reject the ringing at a time slightly ahead of my insides revolting. I lose.

I lie calm, bribing sleep into my system as sleep clearly evades me. I lie calm, hoping it'll come, hoping it'll come in a more exaggerated fashion, hoping it'll kill me.

I don't exactly want to die, but I don't exactly want to continue on either.

"You can't do this to me!" I yelled.

"I don't care." Your voice was calm.

"I'll die, Dhruv. I'll kill myself."

"You won't. And I know that."

You don't know anything. You only know how to hurt and how to pain.

***

I don't feel any pain. Maybe that's ultimate pain? To be so overwhelmed by the pain emotion that you forget how to breathe but that doesn't hurt you because you know you'll breathe anyway?

The deafening silence rasps at my ears, polluting me with words I don't know meanings to, words I'll thus die to scout meanings behind, words that are ambiguous in the first place.

Is this how it feels like? To have won over someone else so much that you lose yourself? To love someone else so much that you forget how to love yourself?

I can see it clearer than I saw it an hour back. Three phone calls changed my life. This past week changed my life.

The fragility with which we were woven together got shattered to pieces in a tiny tunnel of hope. We both got tired of hope in the end and we both eventually made it out of the tunnel. But when you moved forward and out, I moved backward and out. I've relapsed, I've become who I was before and that is not good.

You first broke up with me a week back. Last Saturday. You downright insulted me, even disdaining the little dream I had of myself that didn't include you. You kicked me out of your life. I spent most of the next two days, lying on the bathroom floor, crying, panting, crying. I had started thinking of myself, I had began feeling pity on myself, I was growing truly suicidal. But thank god I didn't cut myself open like the past distressed times. I thought of my parents and I didn't engrave your name deeper on my left arm this time. I choked on my spit and rasp and tears instead. I kept calling you, texting you. You just couldn't be as adamant as I was. You finally picked. I insulted you back. You cried. A tit for a tat. We patched up.

That had been all until two hours back, before my calling you sixty-two, vain times. You didn't insult me this time. You knew the tactics by now. You had figured the perfect plan to get rid of me and it was going to work out. You shrugged responsibility instead. You said we were 'dragging on' a relationship that had lost its fruiting ability. Instead of trying to make it better - 'which would be futile anyway' - you gave up. You said, "I'm leaving this to you." You said, "You decide what we do with this. I'm giving up and walking away." You held your hands up in surrender. I didn't say anything. I knew what it meant. I knew you were trying to put a blame on me for something you were doing. Instead of accepting your faults, you were just going to leave me. Was an ego that hard on you to make you do good?

All that I'd ever tried to do was help you. To go out of my way, leave my past, my dreams behind and help you. And you put an end to it, in your words 'putting an end to something that lost its shine.' Was it all about the shine then? The bling, the romance and the mush? A little argument and the shine's gone, huh?

I was tired by then. Tired of trying to make you understand that this is not how it works. I am tired now. Tired of calling you. So, I fall asleep. To make my thoughts go away. To find you in dreams I'll hope I never relive.