In 2017, I was lonely.
Being lonely isn't anything new for me. I had my social butterfly phase bludgeoned out of me as a child by a number of things (not being neurotypical, horrible cousins, thoughtlessly cruel brother and the fact that Bengalis are not the safest people to interact with when you're naive and eager to please).
Though by my early teens I had managed to break out of my exile from society by making a few dear friends, by my late teens these considerably older friends had aged out of our frequent conversations and all-night chatathons. My attempts at making friends with others ended disastrously — either I was too cautious and closed-off or they didn't take well to my ADHD-induced novellas in their inboxes when I wasn't closed-off or my neuroses ran straight into another, stronger set of neuroses: in 2016, I had to back out of a friendship because the person threatened to kill themselves when I asked for a little bit of space.
Reeling from the terror of frantically making international phone calls to ensure that someone was still alive, I withdrew socially and emotionally. My father's health had begun to decline and the first clear signs of my brother's mental degradation had started appearing. I hermetically sealed myself back into my own headspace, filling it with books, video games, artistic pursuits...and movies.
Going into 2017, I began a pro-Indian cinema crusade in the face of small-minded western scorn. A lot of people reading this are probably well-acquainted with this side of me because in the intervening seven years, I have carried out many keyboard-assassinations and given innumerable sermons on Twitter in the name of my celluloid god. But I digress.
On my Tumblr, I began to devote posts to old Hindi movies. I had started a pilgrimage of discovery and the cinema of the 50s and 60s was my promised land. Pyaasa quickly became my favorite film.
Through Pyaasa, Rose* found me.
In early 2024, I had an emotional crisis.
I no longer clearly remember what triggered it. Maybe it was something that wouldn't make a lot of sense right now, connected in some convoluted way to my hellish home life.
I wasn't lonely, not really. I had become involved in a community due to my cinematic bloviation. I had entered into a romantic relationship. I now had a larger circle of friends and acquaintances than ever before in my life.
But the crisis still came and I fell into a pit of manic depression. Back then, it felt like death. In hindsight, it was a cleansing fire: it cremated moribund acquaintanceships and cleared the forest of old expectations so I could accept that some relationships had changed for good.
But it also, for no real reason, burned my friendship with Rose to cinders.
Rose was, and I assume still is, a big fan of Pyaasa. Our mutual love for Guru Dutt’s masterpiece drew us together.
She likely messaged me first, because I am a chronic non-initiator. We began to talk often, with her sending me scores of lovely photos of the lovely Waheeda Rehman. I felt she was kind and warm. She fit the pattern of most of my friends being much older than me, so I suppose there might've been a touch of something maternal to our friendship.
Then, a year after we began talking, my father passed away.
My old dear friends reacted to the news with distracted, bleary surprise, which added to my anguish. But Rose, who had lost her own father, came to my rescue. She talked with me, consoled and reassured me. She sent me more pictures of Waheeda Rehman and kept me distracted through movie nights, watch parties of golden age Hindi cinema. She formed an important component of the glue that kept my sanity together as I dealt with my grief.
Six years later, she unceremoniously ghosted me.
I am an alien in the midst of human civilization. I am mystified. You fuckers confound me and I'm just as much of an infuriating fucker but I don't do any kind of shady business — if I'm not getting along with you, it'll be clear from the start. If you get on my nerves, I won't be mean about it but I certainly will be blunt.
And if I'm not feeling a friendship, I'll tell you outright. Because as a human being with feelings, you deserve that. Because closure is the best thing I can give you in that situation. Because being left in limbo after a friendship went out to get milk and never returned is not even remotely entertaining. It sucks ass, actually.
I know my emotional breakdown didn't cause Rose to vanish into the ether because by the time I reached out to her, I had recovered quite a bit (her selfish and cowardly act — see, blunt — in fact, set me back by days). We not only chatted normally but she wrote me a long letter about recent grave events in her life. We made plans to watch a movie together, which I hoped would rekindle our tradition of movie nights.
An absolutely senseless string of actions followed that seemed to be from another person entirely. She excused herself from the movie night by claiming illness and then...phased out of our friendship.
After a brief response on Whatsapp to a message asking if she was feeling better, there was radio silence, though she remained active on Twitter.
She carried on conversations in people's replies while I messaged her on two platforms, first asking her if she wanted to schedule a movie again, then asking her if everything was okay, then asking her why she was being this way and lastly asking her to just confirm that she wasn't interested in the friendship anymore.
No, I don't hold her in contempt for not wanting to be friends. We all have the right to choose our friends. I do hold her in contempt for not having the grace and decency to say it to my face and turn her back to me firmly, instead of coldly ignoring me as I suffered and she hid in others' Twitter threads.
I could not do what she did and not have guilt tickling some part of my brain forever. Eight years after I broke off my friendship with the person who traumatized me with a manipulative suicide threat, I feel guilty for not resolving it cleanly and giving them a measure of closure.
At this point, it's not even pain and betrayal I feel anymore. I'm maddened instead by my inability to comprehend Rose's thought process. Who was she, exactly? Was she ever the kind and warm friend I had perceived her to be?
Maybe I'm not an alien. Maybe I am human and you are human and Rose is human, too, but she is the kind of human who can carelessly throw a white sheet on seven years of friendship and move on without blinking, without offering a sentence of explanation.
That, I’d like to think, is outside the realm of what most of us can comprehend.
2024 is coming to a close and as the weather cools, my loneliness returns to engulf me like a chilly draft. This time I’ve decided to break it, mold it instead into pleasant solitude.
I blocked Rose on Twitter in the immediate aftermath of her spectral turn, just so I wouldn't have to see her posts show up on my feed or her replies to our mutuals. She remains unblocked on Whatsapp and Discord but I've yet to receive a message from the beyond.
I have no desire to rekindle our friendship but traces of what was cling to my mind, residual affection and echoes of pleasant memories that can be triggered by a movie scene, a black and white still or a song.
This piece is where I lay all of that to rest, a 1300 word prayer for closure that answers itself.
As for Rose, if you ever read this, I wish you all the best in life.
*Not her real name.
Thank you to Sith and Kris for their invaluable feedback and suggestions ❤️