There was a strange silence in the car, and apart from the regular firecracker disrupting it, it was the most peaceful I had felt in a long time.
But there was also so much nervous energy that accompanied it. The kind that makes the most stable men start wars, the kind of energy that demands to be dissipated in the most devastating ways. Peace was never meant for humans anyway, they were always destined to destroy themselves.
It was thrashing inside me, eager to disrupt the quiet, to not be contained within a mortal soul anymore. It was bubbling and I wasn't sure how much longer I could hold it in. I could let it out, willingly comprising everything that I've carefully worked on for the past decade or let it consume me from within, stall it until I can't. Either way, I was doomed.
I felt suffocated, I wanted to look for other options, safer options, options that wouldn't unnecessarily put me in harm's way.
Maybe Princeton wouldn't so bad after all. I'd be away from my best friend and the course would keep me busy, not giving much leeway to think about a toxic crush. I wouldn't have much problem with it otherwise but it was starting to show, it was exposing me in ways I'd rather not show anyone. I was regularly flustered, blubbered at the smallest things that he sometimes said and my heart beat faster, much faster in his presence.
I knew my crush couldn't get any bigger than it was already. It would only hurt me in the end. But I wasn't sure if I wanted to let go either.
He had dazzled me when I was a wiry kid, an awkward tween and continued to do so even now. You could say there wasn't a time when I didn't love him and loving him felt easy, didn't it?
It was easy as breathing.
In all my pondering, I hadn't even noticed that we had reached our spot. I climbed down from my seat and got assaulted with the smell of the salt water of the Arabian Sea. Everytime I visited this place, nostalgia hit me, reminded me of much simpler times, times when I was still unsure about how I felt about boys but not worried about it either. Times when we had discovered this place purely out of chance, because we had skipped one particularly suffocating Math class, with Nihal saying if he listened to our teacher's droning anymore, his head would drop off his neck.
At that time, I found that really funny and it didn't help that I had just started to notice how long his eyelashes were and how the brown of his eyes changed to green in the sunlight.
Regular amateur stuff, ya know, but I would have followed him anywhere.
So the school's groundskeeper had seen us leave and chased us for a kilometre or two before we noticed that we had lost him. Our first reaction was to laugh and pant at the same time and the second was to stare in astonishment.
We didn't know where we were. But it was beautiful and I still remembered it.
The sky was bright blue with no cloud in sight, and the sea reflected it perfectly whilst foaming at our shoes and wetting the small area of skin that'd been exposed after we'd rolled our pants up. And the beach? It was just sand and stones but somehow it was the best I'd ever seen. It couldn't be bigger than the entire area of my house but we fell in love with it. Instantly.
We still came here from time to time but coming here today seemed outlandish. But if I knew something, it's that I wouldn't question my time with Nihal because God knew how much I had left.
When I had decided to take that gap year, it was with the realisation that I wouldn't possibly see my best friend again but Nihal from right up behind me said he wasn't going to college either. I never asked him why, happy to have some more time with him. But off late, I had been wondering why he had stayed too. He had gotten into his dream school, the same one he had been talking about months, but he was still here.
