Confessions to my boyos 3

The junior

You deserve a mention, not because I loved you as much the one before or the ones after but because you loved me. Just when I was getting rid of the phantom pangs of the last, trying finally to construct a fully functional me I ran into you.

It was heart-warming really that when I behaved (finally) like myself, you found me likable. You were one of the first ever (outside my loyal set of friends) who actually asked, "you don't have a boyfriend???" in that surprised tone that made me smile. You gave me enough compliments to help me gain my self confidence. This time my self confidence was mine and mine alone never to be shattered again by some boy. You gave it the approval that I craved. We got along well... extremely so.

I didn't really realize how much you liked me until that night by the bonfire when I told you I was in the 11th. You were suddenly horrified and disappointed and (dare I say) heartbroken and it showed on your face. You were two years younger than me and even though age doesn't matter when you're older, in the school, the age we were those two years could might as well be decades. Honestly, I never felt that age difference until we discussed school and such, you always made me feel younger than you. But the situation was how it was and you were never expressed any "feelings" after that, but it didn't change them.

The last day at camp, the last night... when we all sat together trying to come up with some brilliant plan. In the middle or all that brainstorming and teasing Arjun and yelling at the girls, I suddenly realised how I was seated. I was comfortably leaning against your arm, heads inches away from your shoulder, sitting next to you on the rock and I was comfortable. Any one who knows about my slight fear of male contact knows that I would normally not end up in such a situation until I knew the guy for over a couple months. I had only known you a week and I trusted you. Later that night when you told me to stop crying cause I looked funny, I couldn't help but noticing the caring look on your face. When I literally fed you dinner while you guys practiced lines and I directed, our friends teased us mercilessly. Your friends knew and the next day at the station they all called me bhabhi until I enquired why and you picked a fight.

Despite what happened later, how reality finally drove us apart, how the conversations became awkward and how I avoided you in the corridors, how you confessed much much later that you had a crush on me, and how that confession crumbled into dust, meaningless by then, how I eventually graduated and we moved on. Despite how it quietly hit dust. For one glorious week (it seems so small but it was so long then) for one glorious week, we had something special. Something that still makes us smile when we see each other, something that still makes me laugh at the memories, something that still makes me worry occasionally for you because you're so accident prone, something that still makes you message me now and then, something that made me stand longingly at my class windows for months after we returned. We had something good.

I'll miss you, in a good, "it was nice when it lasted", non-depressing way which is what I can't say for many of the others. With you, I have no regrets other than that two year age gap... that neither of us could bridge.