She smiled politely to the only other girl in the restroom in an attempt to know if the girl could sense the heated conversation she was having over the phone. It wasn’t a conversation really; it was just him playing the blame game again. Over the phone, a person doesn’t always entirely realize the situation or for that matter, even the straightest & simplest of reactions. She concentrated back to the voice through her phone hoping she would be able to recall something that reconciled with the word “later”. The same time realizing that hoping this and not even making an attempt to listen to him was probably proving his point that she was infact an insensitive and heartless person.
Jutting herself further into the corner she’d been facing since the past few minutes she finally came to a conclusion that she does not need this right now and told him that she going to hang up on him whether or not he likes it. It was obviously the latter since he hung up himself. It had been a few weeks since like this, either of them hanging up on each other. When the arguments started, it had become a battle to hang on to the phone line since neither of them wanted to hang up and be the asshole. Then again after sometime it was the other way round because both of realized it was a waste of time and effort. They didn’t really care about the consequences as they had stopped meeting each other and the only way of communication was this. This, a cellphone, that religiously serves to its owners by providing them with the convenience of attending or not attending the calls as per their liking.
It was as though her mind, racing through all their meetings & conversations they’ve had in the past one year that she had been with him, on and off, concluded that he would call again within a within a span of five minutes. She quickly pulled her cellphone from the locker, switched it off and kept it back in.
She reached for the coffee mug on her desk, realizing that she hadn’t wholly wanted to switch off her phone and keep it in the locker all day as she had decided to after he hung up. A tiny part of her had always wanted to be more sensitive towards him in the past few weeks. Both of them had become conscious that they didn’t love each other as much as “Forever and ever, babe” lovers would. And she knew that it hit him as hard as it hit her. Even after his attempts to fix things she hadn’t been able to erase the thought that he wasn’t a guy she could “love” and there been n number of times when she hoped that the next conversation with him would somehow magically demonstrate that he was the man of her dreams.
How magical, she thought, it had been in the beginning, he always treated her like a princess. Of all the guys she had been with, he was the only one who had really tried to understand her and yet not bulldoze into the relationship. After the kiddish and the ambiguity period lapsed in a few months, their relationship had become more of an affiliation to adjust with each others shortcomings. The ticket later graduated to where they would ask each other to adjust. And then all the efforts had come tumbling down like the twin towers in a flimsy slow motion. She even came to a point where she made him believe that he was in fact with her because he blindly felt that being a guy and, of the orientation that he was, he was supposed to be with a girl and that he didn’t treat her like a person but a girl. She wanted otherwise. Even that, he hadn’t taken so well. After this long, she couldn’t even try to believe that it wouldn’t be the case any longer even if he tried to turn it around.
She could go on and on ranting to herself or maybe to him at times of how he didn’t make her feel the way she wanted to. Once in an effort to explain things to him she had given an example of how he would feel if somebody was rubbing on him but he wouldn’t be aroused. “Oh so I don’t turn you on now! That’s so nice to hear” he’d said and hung up. She sat with her head in her hands for atleast ten minutes wondering how he couldn’t grasp the essence. Work wasn’t too much and she had ample of time to think about it, which made things worse.
She dragged herself back to the locker to get her phone.
