Blog 3: When Things Started Feeling Different

 “Kuch rishtey shuru hone se pehle hi khatam ho jaate hain, aur kuch log… door jaane se pehle hi apne ho jaate hain.”

There was this one green shirt I used to wear a lot back then. Nothing special about it, honestly—just comfortable. But on its pocket, there was an embroidered “A.” Not intentional, not meaningful, just a random company design. Still… sometimes I wonder, was it really that random? College back then didn’t even feel like college. We only went for practical classes, no lectures, no long days—just a few hours and then everyone disappeared back into their own worlds. After class, there was a routine. Me and Anushree would walk together till the bus stand. Her route was in the opposite direction from mine. Funny, right? We walked together just to go separate ways. Maybe the world was already hinting something—we just didn’t understand it yet.

Around that time, I had started bonding with others too—Krusha, Priya, Nil, Ana, Arka, Ari. Not deeply with everyone, but enough to feel like I belonged somewhere. With Krusha though, it was different. We had those long conversations—the kind that don’t need a topic, just talking and somehow understanding. And then there was Ankit. Let’s just say he had a very unique talent. He could tell “I love you” to almost everyone and still mean nothing. That was the level of chaos he operated on. By then, most of us had understood him—or at least we thought we did. There were fights, arguments, misunderstandings, especially with Krusha and others. At one point, me and Krusha even had a watchlist—a very simple one: before these three years end, we’re slapping him at least once. Yeah… that plan never really happened.

Then came the exams. Online, of course. Everything still felt distant, but somehow emotions didn’t stay online—they got real. And after the exams ended, I did something I had been thinking about for a while. Something I wasn’t fully ready for, but I did it anyway. I proposed to Anushree. Some people encouraged me, some helped—Priya was there, others said “just do it,” except Krusha and Nil. They didn’t say much. Maybe they already knew something I didn’t. I wasn’t the best-looking guy, not the most confident either, but I thought maybe that doesn’t matter, maybe what we had meant something more.

So I planned it. Simple. A red rose. An Amul dark chocolate. Nothing grand, just honest. I asked her to come along under the excuse of taking photos with everyone—Krusha, Ana, Ari, even Nil was there. Everything felt normal, until it wasn’t. I gave her the rose, tried to say what I felt… and she didn’t take it. She didn’t laugh, she didn’t mock me, but she stepped back, rushed, almost like she wanted to escape the moment. And that hurt in a way I didn’t expect.

She had a close friend, Shamma. She used to share everything with her. There were conversations I wasn’t part of, things said behind spaces I couldn’t enter. And maybe that’s how it works—not every story is meant to be told from both sides. But in that moment, standing there with a rose she didn’t take, I felt something very simple. Like I had made a mistake. Not just in confessing—but in understanding what we were.

Spring, they say, is about beginnings. For me, it felt like something quietly ended before it even began. And the strange part? After that, nothing looked different—but everything felt different.

This… was where things started changing.