Crossroads | ✓

t w e n t y t w o

I guess people haven't forgotten my science lesson in the back of the chapter where I mentioned about Catatonic depression for the first time. If you don't, for this chapter, you just need to know this. Motor reflex simply refers to muscle movements following impulses from brain. And without impulses, our body is as good as a paralysed man's body.

Song attached: Mary's song (oh my my my) by Taylor Swift. The song that actually made me want to make Varun and Kiranya childhood friends <3 Do watch the video. Took me ages to find this video.

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t w e n t y  t w o

[ s a y  l e t  u s  f l i r t]

The thing about real life was, time and responsibilities didn't wait for teenagers like me who liked to imagine that their life had problems bigger than a surprise test on calculus and trig. Life wasn't a wattpad teen fiction story where the biggest problem was acting cool around the hundred and fifty packed shirtless bad boy (these writers are insane, I'm telling you). Life wasn't a shoujo manga where the biggest problem was trying to hide a student-teacher relationship. Life wasn't all about big problems. Life was just a female mutt (unlike Yuvan, I like to censor).

Days went by between me worrying about Kiranya and her family. The doctor was against us taking Kiranya's mother home. From his point of view, it was something any doctor would do. She was a depressed woman. In addition, she had catatonic depression. Her motor reflex used to be in the gutter. Now she was moving almost freely. Her attention span was  okay. Everything was improving. And maybe, so was her demons. After many reports and coaxing, it was finally decided that she'd come to the hospital to get her treatment and other than that, she was free to be like any other normal person. Kiranya had smiled. Her father had his back to us, but I knew that he cried.

And before we knew, final exams came.

I wasn't Valedictorian material to begin with, but with the amount of things that happened in the span of a few months, I knew getting a pass in all my subjects would be harder than trying to make Sahara snow (I wasn't that funny haired guy from Cloudy with a chance of meatballs, so yeah).

I spent all my hours studying (I swear I did). Yuvan, literally, started living at my house, only going to his house to spend the night and sometimes to bath. A big stress on sometimes. He says it made him smell like a 'man.' But to me, the word 'cave' was dancing before 'man' in invisible ink. 

My nonexistent relationship with Kiranya was... well, it was simply there. She decided not to ignore me. She talked about wattpad and her mother. But nothing more. Both of us didn't breathe out about my confession. Sometimes I would find her looking over at me, eyes half closed half opened, an indescribable expression filling her eyes. But whenever her eyes meet mine, they would snap and the foggy emotion would clear. Sometimes it made me think that getting rejected directly would be better than trying to figure her feelings out. Seventeen wasn't an age to end up bald, seriously.

Sometimes I waste time wondering how simple life would've been if I hadn't transferred back here impulsively. Boys were less complicated. Boys were rough. If a guy wears your underwear, you punch him, burn that underwear and then you're back to thumping him on his shoulders. I didn't have to pay attention to expressions there. We had those moody closed off classmates too. But that was just a part of them. Being silent didn't mean you carried a grave secret. Being silent meant you simply didn't want to talk.

There was nothing to blush about there. There was no need for a quiff there. There wasn't any room for guilt there since there were no girls we could fight over for. There was only unity as we all sighed in union about the occasional young female teachers and made fun of each other with imaginary girls. Yeah, life would've been so, so simple if I hadn't come back.