Love in micrometer

~THE FAILED EXPERIMENT ~

Shivamsha

I woke up to the ring of my alarm in my PG, where luckily, I am my own roommate. It has been almost a week after the exhibition, and my mind is consumed by her thoughts. I have been keeping my feelings in check, but the moment I saw her smile so widely to a stranger, it made me feel left out. I am her friend’s brother; I, too, deserve that smile. I snapped myself out of my thoughts, finished my morning chores, and left for the day praying that my experiment succeeds and I get a reproducible result this time.

I reached my lab and greeted my seniors who are also doing their PhD. I sat in front of my computer and sorted out my tasks for the day. I downloaded some research papers and started reading them so that I have an idea on how to tackle the problems I am facing during the experiment. I looked for different protocols, along with the availability of instruments to go ahead with it. It was a long morning. I finalised my task and got ready to continue with my failed experiment.

For the past few weeks, I have been trying to standardise the protocol so that I get consistent results. Today is day 10, and here I am approaching the same problem differently. I was running the electrophoresis today, again. I casted the gel, loaded my test samples, along with the marker into the wells, connected it to electric current, and waited for the samples to run in them.

It was past noon when I finished my work, until I waited for the results. I stretched myself on the chair and closed my eyes for a while to take a break. My mind again was consumed by her thoughts. Her beautiful face, those sparkling eyes when she smiled at Agasthya, her face turning a light shade of crimson, everything about her made my heart skip a beat…in anger.

How is it that one person who absolutely has no place in my life is bothering me as such. I was angry at her. I was angry at myself for being angry at her. It made no sense. This can not be me. Slowly, it was another episode of my overthinking about her. I am aware that I should not be doing this, but I am. I opened my eyes in a jerk when I heard my alarm.

I was brought back to reality, and I jogged towards my work table wearing my lab coat. The result did not surprise me again. The samples did not run in the correct size as I had expected. I failed the experiment again.

I was going through a spiral, wrecking my brain on why this kept happening. I sat down to think about it calmly. I opened my data book, along with my system, that had pictures of my previous results. I found that I have been failing the experiment in the same way, which is a good sign. I sighed in relief, but the problem was to find out why I was failing.

I started looking through this again by reading about it, which made me skip my lunch. I was past 2:30pm when I realised about it, so I closed my system to eat.

I was removing my lab coat when Madhuri, my fellow student and a good friend, poked her head from the door. “Busy boss?” she questioned me in her mocking voice. “Going to have my lunch madam”, I replied in her tone and walked toward the door.

“Let us go then,” she said and locked her hands with mine. I gently removed my hand from her grip.

We spoke about our day on the way to the canteen, I served myself the lunch, and we both sat on the table with our plates. We continued our conversation, though I was talking to her, I was thinking about somebody else. Soon, we were walking back to the lab.

“What happened to the experiment you have been working on?”, she questioned me.

“Same thing, it is not working”

“Do you think the sample is contaminated with something that is hampering the result?”

“That is a possibility, but I have to tackle it from the scratch, I guess”, I replied.

We bid farewell to each other, as I proceeded with my work. Then suddenly something struck me. I stopped whatever I was doing and took a deep breath because I think I found my solution. I have been failing this experiment for so many days, and the patterns are the same.

I am not worried about it because I know there is always a valid scientific reason for it and that I can figure it out. In the same way, there might be a reason for my behavior, why I can not stop thinking about her. It is because I have not been responsible enough to deal with the problem between us. I have always run away from it, and therefore keeps me disturbed. The only way to tackle the problem is to deal with it. Therefore, I must speak to her.

The answer has been so simple. I smiled widely now and took my phone to message her for the first time.

I sat down to calm my nerves because I just saw something possible, if only this was a dream, but it wasn’t. It was real. I rechecked my phone to confirm that I had received a message from her an hour ago.

“Hello, this is Priya. I took your number from Siddhi. I apologise for the unexpected message, but I am in front of your lab building. Can we talk?”. Hell, yeah, we can talk. We can do more than talk. I slapped myself for thinking like that about my sister’s friend. I strode towards the ground floor and saw her still waiting for me.

I thought.. I did not fail the experiment Afterall and jogged to her.