The First Note
6th October 2018 Saturday
4:30 AM
Oh god help me this once, I’m on my knees begging and praying.
I woke up thinking about her today just can’t seem to shake off this feeling. I know during day I’m gonna go to office, try to read and push through this with all I have but nights are almost killing.
Had good days when I used to go to coffee with them- Priya, her and others, that used to be the best part of my day but then I had to get greedy, get another job, go tell her all my feelings and loose it all for once and forever. It feels like with her, she took away everyone and everything. I understand if she has a boyfriend, I’m ok with just being friends, I just need someone to commiserate with, someone to talk to, I guess that’s all I ever wanted. Anyway she’s like a fairy walking among humans and I’m like this dumb hollow guy who has achieved nothing in his life and has no talent or tricks to impress her.
Eating still feels like pushing stuff down the throat and out of nowhere there’s this gulp in throat, that heavy feeling. Almost a month has passed and I am still in this shit. My tricks to muddle through are almost done and I keep thinking “Just one more day, one more day…”
11:53 AM
Woke up, went to temple, thought of skipping gym and go to office to revise for interview preparation rather I just watched one punch man and as soon as it ends, post credit music comes up and this shit hits back. How can I focus on studying if I can’t even think straight, just like in the bell jar (I’m just about to complete it)
When I first joined this job around 2 years back, I was in another team called Adaptive which was at ground floor. I hated that team and used to eat lunch alone most of the times, even occasionally when I did join some guys for lunch I never felt connected. Work wasn’t good either, I was on front end role and was trying to learn reactJS and I hated that too. Before this job I used to stay with college friends at brookfield, after joining I shifted with mom and sister to this new place, which was another story in itself.
Adaptive went on for a year, then project was migrated from India to US team, I was little happy that, that shitty project was gone. That’s when I joined this new team(where she also joined later) actually I interviewed for one other internal team too but I thought this team is working on chatbot stuff which will be something new, so I joined here. Here I met Rajat, I thought he was just some engineer, couple of days later found out thats he’s the senior manager of team, I was like “wtf!! this guy looks like he’s in his mid 20's”
People in my team were Priya and Saharsh and couple of other people on machine learning and stuff. Priya, Saharsh and me were just working on writing conversation flow for bots. Then this other girl joined our team, who initially worked on some other tasks but then eventually started writing bots too. Later new product owner Jyothi joined, she has 2 kids but was chill, she used to say whatever just comes to her mind without any filter, just right off the bat! bam!. For lunch, almost all guys used to go together and these guys always picked me up, which felt a lot better than eating alone in some corner, sometimes I used to go for coffee with Priya and Jyothi so I didn’t feel left out.
I was happy, I knew the stuff I was working on, I was good with backend stuff and people around were friends not just colleagues. At home things with mom and sister settled down, eventually it was copacetic. Although some days I missed my previous college crush but I was busy with work, gym and had friends around.
Then one day I came across this pretty girl at cafeteria, it was a cloudy evening and she was my 3rd crush in life. That’s a different spin off though for another day. That phase lasted for 2–3 weeks and was over with(when I had a bald head and used to wear cap) Couple of weeks later, this new girl joined our team, this is her. I got to know some new girl joined when a colleague was talking to her over lunch but I didn’t bother looking and didn’t care. Initially she was in some other project and couple of days later she shifted to same chatbots project, for some reason I don’t know, even now.
Whatever, so she came along, there were some seating changes and she started sitting next to me, believe me she was really really pretty.
I thought of searching her online and found that she’s a pretty great writer and has her own followers. Damn, this girl was amazing! next day I got a small greeting and wrote a compliment to her — only about her writing, I didn’t want to intimidate her by complementing on her looks or so. I knew she was new in the team and was relocating and I know changes are tuff, so didn’t want to do anything to make her feel uncomfortable. I waited till everyone in team left, she was there and I was about to leave, I took a minute, thought about this, then gave her that note. Told her to read it later and I will ping her “when”, I thought I will ask her to open this on the day I leave. But she said “I want to read this now” I didn’t argue much said “ok”and left from there.
Next day, she didn’t say any thing like if she didn’t like it or anything about what I did. But she was still sitting next to me, I didn’t do anything after that. I was mostly in my work and gave her space. Sometimes she asked some code related thing and that was it. I just wanted to let her know that she’s a great writer and she’s got a fan. I probably shouldn’t have done that, I don’t remember exactly but I wrote something like this
Hey! I was checking your instagram (honestly it was stalking) and found your wordpress handle. I read {title} story by you and it’s pretty amazing, great stuff! I am a fan! Sorry if I am little awkward at times. and something which I don’t remember now…
Couple of days later Jyoti took us for coffee to cafeteria — me, Priya, other girl and her. We went upstairs had coffee and some irrelevant small talk. This became once a week kinda thing, we all used to go for coffee around 3PM. I grew fond of it, for some apparent reason I was happy and connected, maybe subconsciously it was because of her but I didn’t realise it back then.
In parallel I was interviewing for a new job, just for the fun of it, I mean I had plans for MS from last year, I had given GRE, TOEFL, my SOP was done and all set. Honestly, I was getting bored and started interviewing just for fun. I never really had any intention to switch job just for a couple of months, things were just going well. Then got this offer at Mumbai which was almost double of what I was getting here, so I thought about it and now you know the things afterwards.
6:30PM
Came back around 6pm from office, watched some movie for couple of mins, this feeling is stuck somewhere deep inside. It’s raining and I have no money, I have like 100bucks in account, 150 in cash and 40k outstanding in credit card, I guess that’s when she does it in bell jar. This weather isn’t helping either, I just want to get out of this feeling, just this once.
Borrowed 5k from a friend, ordered food online and had dinner, still didn’t feeling any good. I was having this slight headache entire day today, which makes it more unbearable. So called an office friend but he was busy with some stuff so called Rajat and went to his place.
Rajat was playing Fifa and I was sitting nearby, I started filling college applications. He asked what all colleges I am applying to and give a draft for letter of recommendation(before joining back I told him about MS thing). Later, he asked how things are, I told him as it is- “things are not good, I get depressed whenever I see her, it’s not working and I was thinking of absconding this job last week”. He said same thing like, “you are overthinking and making this big, it’s not like you had a long term relationship. You need to focus on bigger things in life”.
Another office friend joined, we all sat in balcony, it was pretty calm and cold, he has this wind chime in his balcony that just makes it perfect. Then we all had few beer, couple of smokes and discussed some random things like from startup ideas to the pencils we used in our 3rd-4th classes. After couple of beer, I felt good, it’s like there’s a weight off my head, felt normal again in long time. We sat there for couple of hours and then started coding, around 3AM I came back home.
And it seems like it has been ages since I felt this normal, really at home. It’s like all this time I have been walking under the sea. The weird part is I know am good today and probably tomorrow but I am shit scared if I go back Monday and come across her, it’s gonna mess me up and reset everything to where it was.
