Living in a Mirage

Chapter Four

"Do not keep on with a mockery of friendship after the substance is gone - but part, while you can part friends. Bury the carcass of friendship: it is not worth embalming."

~ William Hazlitt

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"What the hell does he mean by I am not worthy?" Alya asked Mukti as she kept pacing back and forth in anger while the other girl was sitting on the bench nearby.

"Let it be, Alya," Mukti told her in an attempt to skip the conversation she knew they were about to have.

"No, he needs to understand that I am not the wrong one, he is... I want him to..-" Alya would have continued if she wasn't interpreted by her phone which was running in a tone that by now Mukti knew was reserved for Dhruv only.

As she saw Alya picking up the phone, greet Dhruv a sweet manner, Mukti let out a sigh of relief. It was never a good place to be - stuck in between two friends - and as much as she wanted, she could not escape these fights but tried to avoid it as much as she could.

These fights between Cabir and Alya have started getting irrational and irritating and happened every time they met. While Cabir rarely ever met Dhruv, he had to meet Alya more often than he would want to, he was forced to because of her and Nandini.

Their friendship had died long back, she knew. Mukti was the only reason why the three of them were still somewhat in touch. She just couldn't let go of them, even though she was no longer overly depended on them, thankfully, that phase of her life had ended where they were necessary for her to keep her sanity intact.

That night had changed so many things, somehow along the way, Mukti has lost the count. Manik went missing, and with him so had the bearly alive friendship between Fab 5. Dhruv left had them, after some time, to start a band on his own. Alya had moved on to become the fashionista she was meant to be. And she, to escape the silence which once had been filled with their music, had willingly started to do something good for the people in an attempt to live life the way Abhimanyu would have wanted her to...

When she had lost Abhimanyu, Fab 5 and Manik, one after another, the realization of being alone had intensified and with that so had the need to escape it...

And that had been what made her run to the place where she had once found peace; the hospital. The one which Abhimanyu had been once admitted to. When she had first stepped into the hospital and had looked around her, she had understood what she couldn't back then when Abhimanyu had countless times told her to appreciate the life she had, to make it count, to not waste it. Only when she had been shaken up by the death of Manik, deprived of the family she once thought she had, she had understood what he had meant back then.

It had been the need to escape that made her start to volunteer, and spending time away from home and college had made her forgot her pain during those hours she had spent with people who were suffering pain greater than hers. She had done it for a purely selfish reason at first, but slowly and gradually, she had started to like it. As if finally she has become a part of something greater, something she has been seeking and had searched for since forever...

When she looked back, to the time which now seemed like another life to her altogether, Fab 5 had been able to give her that feeling for a little while by making her a part of their chosen family; a bond that Manik had claimed was unbreakable. But when she had lost them, she hadn't stop craving that feeling. She had searched for it and had fortunately found it by becoming someone who healed themselves by helping others.

But that didn't mean she had let go of her friends, she had returned back to them once she was healed. But she had found that nothing was left of their friendship, of Fab 5. It had been her fault, she knew. She hadn't there when she was needed, neither for Cabir nor for Nandini. But with time, she had forgiven her self for it. She knew why she had escaped; the loss of Manik, and being around Nandini had done nothing but intensified the loss of Abhimanyu. So much that it had become something she had to escape from...