"Bro, are you alright? I texted and called you like dozen times." Krish said as I sat down on our last bench in the middle section of the classroom.
"Yeah, I'm alright! I just switched off the phone. I will not be using it for a while."
"Fair enough." He said. "So what did you do last night? You look like hell! Your eyes look like black holes."
"I read chemistry. Just a lot of chemistry."
"Holy fuck! So after a break up you have decided to become a nerd," he said and we laughed. Laughing felt good.
***
It became a routine, I would stay up all night and ready anything I could get my hands on. Just to kill time, as I was not using the internet and phone. It was no epiphany or I-will-be-successful-and-that-will-be-my-revenge-on-her bullshit, I just couldn't fall asleep. And reading kept my thoughts about her at bay. Because the silence of Mumbai at night was deafening, and my thoughts would not shut up. So I read, the books I got as gifts from my uncles and aunts. Novels my mom had. And of course my textbooks. It was not easy to sit there and read, but my urge to forget her was greater than the urge to close the book and fall into thought spiral.
On the first day of February, after school, I switched on my phone after 20 days and 14 hours. My phone exploded with an incoming barrage of notifications. 52 missed calls from Ananya, the last 3 on the 25th of January. 8 from Krish on the doomsday. and a bunch of others from random people in my contacts. I did not open messages, reading her name had given me enough flashbacks already. I fell asleep. Staying up all night and sleeping from 1 to 7 was my routine now.
After dinner, I convinced myself somehow to sit down and open the physics textbook, again from page 1. I would google things and words I wouldn't understand. For example, the word velocity comes from Latin Velox meaning 'swift'. It is a quantity to describe the speed of an object with direction. I would watch a random south Indian man in his 40s explaining the theory of relativity. By the time it was time to run. I had hardly completed 2 chapters. But I knew everything about those chapters.
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Last days
Short StoryRishabh ( 16 ) is two months away from his high school graduation. Krish his best friend, tries to get Rishabh to confess his one-sided feelings for his childhood best friend Ananya. But the future holds a big shock for Rishabh, and the last days...
