Just Friends

Platonic is too idealistic a word, she said. No relationship can be entirely platonic. At some point of time every woman keeps the guy she's with in that special place in her heart, tries to figure out if he fits. If he doesn't, best thing ever. If he does, things get screwed. But probably, I never made it to that place in her heart, the tipping point. I must have stopped an inch behind it. And even if I did reach it, I must've been a bad fit, and she wouldn't tell me how badly I had failed. To add to my string of failures, another. She knew, I could never fit, I wasn't made to fit. She respected that, silently. I understood her, was vocal about it a lot.

Unable to contain my frustrations anymore, I quit college the year before I would've graduated. She got that degree, got married. I dropped-out to pursue art. Never married, not yet. We lost touch.

But all her man-woman theories took us, her and I, as an out-lier, an exception. She classified the men in her life into two water-tight chambers, the ones she was friends with, the rest she could ever be romantically inclined to. The former category was obviously for the ones like me, who failed the test or the ones who could never sit for it. We got to see her worst, see her for real. The ones she was romantically inclined to, the ones who always only saw her suave, coy, never stayed beyond a time. Even then, there wasn't any porosity allowed between the two chambers. She got scared if a friend flirted, and that scared me hell-lot. Not that I was possessive of her, or afraid that we would lose each other, but just that she had become a habit, a part of my day. And with the oscillations my psyche was victim to, it felt comforting to have one companion that would stay.

I never exactly got to figure out her perception of me though. I never asked, our conversations, strangely never took us on those lanes. Provided the stretch of time, it now appears impossible, but happen it did.

The day, I was leaving, she helped me pack. She had two more terms of college, all to herself. I wondered if all that was between us, could ever happen again, to either of us, separately in life. She looked me in the eye and said, It hurts to say that no man will know me the way you do. I stayed shut.

But yeah, it hurts. Still does