Of course there have been other girls.

My story wouldn't be complete if there wasn't would it? 

So why does this story just start and end around Her?

DAY - 0

March 4.  A very sunny afternoon with a gentle breeze. 

Some of us had left our classrooms to escape the humid weather and the even more torturous teachers.

Life was fine, just another plain uneventful and completely non-happening day. Nothing big or exciting to look forward to. Monotony of daily grinding at its best. Little did I know then that my life, as I knew it till then, was about to change.

The most important character in this story would be a 2006 model Honda Activa. Mine.

I never really liked the Activa. It  had always been a constant source of mockery for me plus the escalating cost of petrol just made it an unnecessary burden.

But as the Universe tends to work in mysterious ways, so on that fair afternoon, I had the vehicle on me. It had become a new-found source of entertainment for the girls in my class. Maybe I should have charged them for the rides. Never mind.

I don't know what made me look. I have always been a sucker for a pretty face. Gets something inside my head going at the sight of one. So my radar started beeping furiously. It took me a while to figure out who and where was setting it off. Finally, using my extremely keen sense of "pretty", I located the source. 

It was a girl getting onto that blessed Activa.  A fairly ordinary girl in ordinary clothes. Nothing too noticeable. But my radar was going haywire.

There was something about her.

I couldn't really put my finger on it, but there was something. 

I always took a shine towards girls who drive. Something quite attractive about it. I have my kinks, i know.

She sat on it with an effortless grace. Grace as i had never seen before. Grace that made swans on the lake seem superficial. 

She seemed poised. As if God had given her wings, not visible to mere mortals like me. She took it for a round and came back. And walked towards me.

My heart was racing, but I kept my cool. 

She gave me the keys. Her fingers grazed  mine.

And I spluttered, " You drive really well.."

She smiled. Just smiled. And then I realized why people said Man was god's greatest creation. Because if you had seen her smile then, you would have realized that god had indeed perfected his creation.

As much as I wanted her number, I couldn't pull myself together to ask her. 

Class began at that moment. Damn this college!

So she left. And took a part of me with her. The wind had been knocked out of me. And all I wanted to feel the breath of fresh air that was her, on my face. She was the shade I craved for in the sweltering heat.

First thing I did on getting back to class was find out about her. My thoughts weren't exactly about her.

They were more concerned with why in the first place had I never noticed her before?! Classmates for a year and a half and NOW i see her? What kind of a joke was the universe playing with me.

I just had to know.

There was something inanely attractive about her. Maybe her smile. Or the way she just stood there. Doing nothing. Just stood, with her dancer like poise.

Or was it her eyes? Twinkling, and disarming at the same time. Beautiful and yet cryptic.

I hated mysteries. But ladies and Gentlemen, here I was presented with a mind boggling one -a girl in my very own class.

That was the first time i REALLY noticed her. Not just see her, but acknowledge her presence in my company.

PHASE -I

Real Steel. As much as i think that the movie was a disgrace, it is perhaps the best hollywood movie to ever come out. Why you ask? It is because that was the topic of the first conversation I had with her.

How was she to talk to? You must be expecting me to say that her every word was like honey or perhaps words flew from her mouth like a stream of fresh water in the spring.

No, she was very cold. Her replies were monosyllabic. 

Her voice was sweetness beyond sweetness, I had to admit. But I got to hear almost none of it.

I used to hang on to every word she said, because her voice was the most divine sound that had ever been made. But her words were few and thoughts even fewer.

I had always prided myself on bringing out the best in anyone. And precisely because of that, her cold replies got to me. Try as hard as I did, I just couldn't let it go.

Thinking about her was like breathing for me now. Happened subconsciously. It was a part of my existence. Partly because I was attracted to her and partly because I wanted to unravel the mystery behind how a person with such a beautiful smile could be this cold. So over the next couple of days ( or was it eternity? I don't know), I continued trying to talk to her. Patiently waiting for her cold replies as if my life depended on it.

No, I didnt have a life. And whatever little life I did have had been devoted to her. By now, I was hooked to her. The colder she got, the more I wanted to know her, know why. So I persevered. Then in a couple of weeks came her birthday, and I raked my mind on what to get her. 

In all honesty, I had started to lose interest in this futile mission. I wasn't progressing at all and she was still a stranger to me. 

So I settled for a card and some very cheesy lines. And with that I thought it was the end of that chapter in my book. How terribly wrong I was.

PHASE - II

She got to know I found her cold. And she confronted me. At first I was a little taken aback, I didn't think she cared enough to clarify.

But apparently she did. She wasn't a conversationalist and was a novice in the field of text-communication.

She also told me she would try to put a little more effort into it.

I still remember, my heart did cartwheels that day. 

So I revisited "talkxting" again but this time with greater fervor.

I loved to pry out tid-bits of information about people and  liked to bug her to disclose her well guarded secrets. I was adamant to break the wall with which she surrounded herself. Not to be mistaken, she was a very friendly person, very warm, very sweet. But she always kept her worries, fears, insecurities and pain to herself. 

And I just couldn’t have that. 

She became a habit of mine, a routine so ingrained in my psyche that I didn't realize how close I had gotten to her.

We had become better friends too, both of us trying hard to not divulge much about themselves and at the same time trying to pry out more about the other person. Our conversations became a daily affair, and hanging out more frequent. And I could feel myself getting drawn closer and closer to her. 

Fear made me push her. I was afraid of what she was doing to me. I fought it and fight hard I did.

I made the stupidest of transparent excuses to distance her. Made up the craziest of stories.

A part of me knew she liked me too. A hopeful yet guarded part.

We would talk often on the phone, chat as if there was no tomorrow.  Despite my desperate and futile attempts to push her away, I wanted to get closer to her. Our conversations had started to get more intense and despite my better judgement, I didn't stop.

I got to know her and the more I got to know her, the more I wanted her.

God, she was wonderful. Amazing. Charming and sexy. Hot and Cool. She was everything I had ever wanted and didn't know about. She was perfect in ways I didn't know perfection to exist.

I fought the attraction for a while, trying to replace her, substitute the feeling, get more crushes, the usual routine. 

But every night, before I slept she was the only one on my mind.

My days felt incomplete without talking to her. My mornings never started without seeing her warm smile, bright as sunshine. My attendance rose up, courtesy her for crying out loud!

The semester ended and I was catapulted back home. Maybe this was the much needed break I needed from her to get my act together. The distance would help me get over the feeling, I told myself.

Again, I sensed a chapter was closing but yet again, I was gravely mistaken in my conclusions.

PHASE - III

Distance makes the heart grow fonder. Truer words have never been spoken. 

Vacations and I was home. 2900 kms away from her to be exact. 

We still talked. By now, we had graduated from texting to talking over the phone. 

I felt something was missing in my life. 

It took me two days to realize that I had left a part of me back in College. A part of me without which breathing seemed difficult. A part of me that radiated happiness and exuded cheer.

I had left her behind and was hurting. I talked to her, sometimes against my better judgement.

Fear had started to grip me. I had already been hurt before. I didn't have the strength to endure more.

But every time I heard her voice say hi, or a message saying hello, my resolve broke and all hell broke loose in my heart. Every conversation I had with her was like a celebration. A little festival in its own regards.

The land line at home had become the best invention of man.

Even though I was home, my heart hadn't gotten onto the flight with me. It had taken the bus along with her and gone on a vacation wherever she went. I was distracted. As it is, I was no master of concentration but her thoughts sapped the bare little concentration that I could muster.

Days passed in a haze, with me barely even noticing what I was doing. Existence became trivial without her in my presence.

My mind always drifted to her. Her laugh kept me awake at night and her smile tormented me in between sleeping.

She was an addiction. A mad passion for me. The thread of my life had irrevocably been intertwined with hers. 

I guess she felt the same way. My heart told me so. But my heart also told me to run hard and fast in the other direction. So my heart had betrayed me and it, I could not trust.

PHASE - IV

The bottom-line remained that I was scared, afraid of falling for her. I was afraid that if I told her about my feelings and if she didn't reciprocate, the world would end. And by now she had become an integral part of my life. I just couldn't lose her. Not when she had started to mean so much to me.

 So every day I would come up with lamer excuses to push her away. I would say things like I didn't want kids, I was commitment-phobic, and monogamy wasn't for me. 

And the truth...I was NOT commitment phobic. 

I was crazy about her and couldn't think of another girl ever again.

And I loved kids!

With each passing day my desire for her just got stronger.

I did try to bring up the topic occasionally with her but always ended up getting cold feet before the conversation got even a little bit serious.

I spent the entirety of that December at home. For one month I didn't see her. But that didn't stop us from talking to each other daily. And every single day when I woke up really late in the mornings, I would think of her.

What I would give to go back to college again, just to see her once more.

And my fervor to be with her just increased.

I wanted nothing more than to make her mine.

 And on a rather fateful day, I woke up and realized how badly i wanted her.

Guess what, I was in love with her. Despite every inch of my being protesting and fighting, I was inexorably drawn to her.

And that day at night, I told her on the phone. I spilled my guts. Told her everything I could.

And as much as I dreaded her reaction, fearing that apocalypse was upon us, she understood. She didn’t say she felt the same way but she felt something.

I think that was the first time that the Sun ever shined on me at night.

So I talked to her. Daily and more. Every second of the day I talked to her. When I wasn’t talking, I texted her. When I wasn’t doing that, I thought about her.

My day started and ended with her.

2900 Km apart and still she had taken over my mind, body and soul.

That is the story of how love in all its beauty happened to me. And in the form of someone so beautiful that I couldn't have ever imagined it to be for someone else.

All the little decisions, the simple mistakes, everything I had done so far in life made sense because it led me to her.

Every time I am with her, there is this insane happiness that is bursting inside me. She brings out the best as well as the worst in me.

The word mediocrity leaves my definition when I am around her because life is too short to waste on loving her in a mediocre way. If it is not crazy or obsessive or passionate, it is not love.

The fact remains that I belonged to her. Her simple presence made everything right in my life. It erased everything else, all sorrows.

The sun shines where she stands. And storms brew when she is upset.

And yes, we have had many a differences. When you get close to someone, there is bound to be some friction. It was not that we didn’t have our rough patches. We were fundamentally two very different people. Opposites to some extent. This often led us straight into some intense fights. Bruised egos and battered pride. But I guess I loved her more than I loved my pride. So an olive wreath extended and we would amicably choose to let the topic go and the conversations would continue like nothing had happened at all.

Every single moment I have spent with her, every single time I made her laugh, every little fight that we have gotten into, every little arrow of hurt I have pierced her with and every single time we patched everything up, one thing I know is that I never stopped loving her.

Whether it be the simple act of asking her for water, or the walk from class to the bus stop or me having her lunch on numerous occasions, I have thoroughly enjoyed her presence.

Simply put, she has always been the light at the end of the dark tunnel for me. She doesn’t just call out to me, she tugs at the very core of my soul.

I don’t know what life has in store for me. If someone up there was ever listening to my prayers. I don’t keep hopes of being with her though. What I do know is that she will be happy. Because that is what I wish for every single day. To keep her happy. To see her smile that one more time.

 And she is always going to have a special and fond place in my heart.

I still can’t describe how I feel around her. Sometimes violins play in my head, sometimes I feel the freshness of morning dew from her and at other times her presence is like the gentle warmth of Moonlight.

But what I love about her the most is her honesty. Brutal in fact.

I have never known her to sugar coat anything or trying to spare my feelings in any way.

Sometimes, I do think she feels a wee bit vindictive and tries to get a laugh out of teasing me but I don’t think there is anyone else out there who cares about me as much as she does.

She  has earned every right to be whoever she wishes to be with me.

She is my strongest critic and my biggest admirer.

And when someday you find a person who can do for you what she does for me...you hold on tight to her and never let them go.

Mistakes are made in a moment, but regrets can last you a lifetime.

She was and will always be the first girl I ever gave my heart to. My first love.

And that dear readers was the story of how love happened to yours truly.

Signing off,

Just another hopeless romantic.