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?