Conflicting thoughts.

Random encounters. Pretty smiles. Strange beautiful faces. New acquaintances. Change. 

Was Nandini ready to embrace it? She wondered, as she drowned herself in endless thoughts, fighting her alter ego of what meant right and what was out rightly wrong. She felt a spasm of hypocrisy building in her veins, of becoming everything that Aryan was, and what he did, or not? After all, the care she held for the world was too much to clasp, consuming every bit of her emotion, and putting together a selfish act was an idea too gruesome and unlikely to her in all regards.

Karan was everything she liked. A shoulder to support her conflicting thoughts, her bizarre emotions, a shield to protect her from pessimism, which she tried drifting towards now and again, and more than anything a good change. But, was he just all of that? When she first saw him, she felt a queer connection, and each word of conversation that flowed between them was as smooth as ice, unlike all the awkwardness and odds she experienced with people generally. Funny, charming, shy yet confident, extremely sweet, and someone she thought she should've met like 6 months later, but was glad anyway to have around, in whatever twisted sense of relation that they shared. These thoughts were suppressed by emotions of guilt, fear and chaos. It was too soon for her to let her thoughts wander in this direction. Was it just a phase, or she had begun to weave a new apologue with him altogether? He didn't just make her smile, but made her jump around in her bubbly attire, throwing away any signs of despair, forgetting for a few moments the dejection that Vishal had caused, making her stop believing in herself. After ages, she felt important and well, pretty. But was this feeling enough to let her mind lose? To consider the idea of believing again, and let the walls she built so high tremble by a few degree, or vanish altogether?

The place where he let his heart open, his mind straight and truth aloud, was a stinging scene of deja vu. What kind of a game was god playing with her? Testing her to make decisions in which regard? She didn't understand any of this. 

It had only been two months since things went from bad to worse for Nandini. She lost on confidence in herself, than anything or anyone else. The word "trust" sent jitters down her spine, and she camouflaged her feelings into a shell, so that no one could anymore see the real her. It wasn't like she wasn't happy, but there was certainly something missing. Missing reasons, missing people, missing times, and well missing out on knowing where she went so drastically wrong. He had moved on far ahead, maybe even started on the journey of love again, but why it still bothered her, she couldn't grasp. She wanted to feel indifferent, for when love was gone, did only hate deserve to take up its place? She kept waiting...for what, she couldn't decipher. She had given up on him, but had she really let go? She knew for a fact that he was never coming back, but did she even want him to? Every broken promise, made her lose faith in the idea of love and chances to another level. What had she achieved cutting her soul open to the one who crushed it into pieces, stomped his way forward, leaving her broken and faithless? Now and again he jolted her back into that melancholic trance, to remind her of the pain, just to contract the guilt that had taken seed in his heart.

Yes, all that he took her for was guilt. The cruelty of this fact crushed her. But what could she have done? Nothing could be done. He was gone.

In the midst of such venomous thoughts, did she deserve to hurt someone innocent? When she seemed so indecisive about what she wanted in life, could she really give Karan what he expected? All she knew was she could forget about the past, for those few moments she got to be with him. Like a forbidden fruit, and against the odds she decided not to succumb to, she felt herself drawn to him more and more by the ticking of the clock. What were these butterflies that rambled her stomach each time he looked at her, justify? Did these conflicting thoughts make her exactly what she hated, and what was once done to her? If not, then did Aryan really deserve the cold shoulder she gave him all this time? Or the hypocrisy made her forgive him after all these years?

Coming clean might be the soothing factor, where she wasn't messing up to that extent, however complicating her life to another level.

He told her to take a leap of faith, to let things flow...and that he was ready to wait. Selfish thoughts prompted her to make him stick to that stand, but was that a right thing to do?

She was not ready to take a chance so soon, to be judged, to get hurt, and most importantly to lose him and her belief in something good...

Or was she?

The road not taken.

Time. It has the power to heal, break, crush, revive, hope and change. It opens up the frontiers to choices of the path we'll lead, to make us what we should be and what we are. But the alternative we accept is an individual's decision, with no assistance from whomsoever. Sometimes going down the memory lane, we wish to have made some decisions differently, or made none at all. Contrary to belief, I think choices are easy to make, but memories are impossible to erase. Every choice comes with a consequence, which we realize in the least bits, but haunts our present like a parasite engulfing on each step already taken. It is rightly said that we must not live in our past, for its gone, and also not make speculations about the future, but try to keep our feet on the present and learn to accept it. However, I ask you, isn't every bit of you a reflection of your past? Would you have got here without making all those decisions that you did? What would it have been like had you changed your answer, or well, not answered at all?

Eight months, wow this is going incredibly well, too well actually, for all I expected, thought Nandini. She was happy, for having the perfect job, perfect home, and the perfect guy. What more would a girl just having stepped out in the real world want out of her normal routine life? It was as if everything was falling back in place. But still she had an intuition, that something was going terribly wrong. The problem was not able to find the problem, yet feeling so hollow inside. Like someone was picking out the pieces from her life's jigsaw puzzle, one by one with the ticking of clock. She wanted to snatch back all those moments, which were slipping out, no matter which side she turned to or which road she decided to take. Her priorities had deluged her into darkness of the degree, that she started falling behind the opacity of a wall, afraid to let anyone see the softness of her heart and her overpowering emotions. Anyone but him. He helped break through those stern pieces of bricks, and made her believe that he'll not leave. He pestered her mind with the thought that people will disappoint you, leave, and never turn back, but some will stay, no matter how difficult the road chosen gets, because they are destined to. For once in forever, she let go of her fears, showing her real self, not afraid of the consequences that awaited her, to twist it all into a ball of entangled difficulties, impossible to find a way out of.  

But why were all lessons that she implemented on him hopeless conclusions drawn out of failures from what she grasped out of bungles in clutching on to Aryan? Was life really this perfect, or was she just pretending of having understood every inch of pain she carried that buried her deeper in the ground with every step she took to embrace the feeling of letting go? She didn't understand her thoughts, emotions, or well, herself. How could she expect to drop the veil to another soul, when she couldn't decipher her own self. She knew she had let go of the past, but was she in a state of mind to handle this level of commitment, which was eventually turning into slow poison, capturing her will, mind and body to the insecurities and fears of his. Was it fair? She didn't give it a thought, and acted naive to just go with the flow. How terrible was the idea to act on your instincts for a change, than a chalked out careful plan? How unrealistic did the thought of acting her own age and seize things as they appear seem? Well, for once she implemented rationality and insanity in a perfect blend, which she thought would do wonders, and she was right. For how long, well, that was a different story. 

She realized she cared too much, and pretty much about every intrinsic detail in the world. This included the ones who mattered, the ones who didn't, and the ones that once did. But he had a different story to look forward to. The failures of his epic love with Anahita, brought him to a stand still, letting go in the belief of something that could really last. She impaired his thoughts, attitude and life altogether. His commitment towards Nandini was nothing but a step towards change from the painful memories of the past. How much he loved her, or if he loved her at all, was an answer he himself searched for. She was the astonishing female version of him, making him believe that this was right path to have taken, unaware of his detachment that would follow with every step he took on this new road. Unaware of the melancholy of hearts that would soon follow, they held on to the idea of each other, the grip of which started to abscond with every breathe taken. The pretence couldn't last forever, the cracks in the foundation were too severe, however beautiful the illusion seemed to be, it had to come to an "unexpected" halt. 

That is the thing about humans. Perceptions. The attitude which forces an individual to believe in the action and consequences of ones right and wrong. We fail to access the weight of the past realities that the other person is carrying, affecting their decisions, and in turn changing our stars. We are told to not judge a person on their defeats, but hang around to support them in future endeavours. But can we tell if this is all going to turn out in a fruitful exercise? How can we alter the course of our present, when it is determined by the vivacity of the counterpart? Does this person you put all your effort and thoughts into, consider you even remotely important enough to give away a pebble of thought or piece of heart, to make it last? Or is this just a selfish, cruel and harsh world, where you and I are just two bubbles, waiting to push the other one down and strive to go a little higher? If that's the case, why don't we realize that eventually the bubble will succumb to the pull of karma, and burst?

The multitudinous thoughts drowned her in a sea of pensive despair, as she tried to fight back and create a new bubble of hopes, expectations and realities to hold on to in the fate that she was creating, as she let him go...