A cosmic tale of wires, water, and poor life choices...
There’s something beautifully stupid about live performances. You prep, rehearse, convince yourself you’re in control… and then the universe leans in like a smug narrator and goes, adorable confidence… let’s roll the next episode.
Imagica. Floating stage. Wave pool on all sides. Equipment worth lakhs perched on wood that looked one splash away from giving up. Only one dry corner with plug points, guarded like a sacred relic every hero must protect.
Our band looked like a cast pulled from five different anime genres.
Adil gripped the mic like he was seconds away from a power-up.
Rashi hit notes sharp enough to slice through someone’s emotional backstory.
Aryan stood with his guitar, convinced the spotlight was his birthright, the way Goku assumes every final battle is scheduled for him.
And I was on drums, Shikamaru-level resigned, quietly keeping the storyline from collapsing.
Meanwhile, the background characters wandered around us like NPCs coded with only three idle animations. Among them was The New Girl, confident, cute, and instantly slotted into Aryan’s brain as his new filler-episode love interest.
While setting up, Aryan’s guitar cable kept sliding across my drum set like a creature looking for loot. I told him twice to fix it. But the man was too busy flirting, standing there with the confidence of someone who genuinely believed he’d unlocked Ultra Instinct just by existing. He kept adjusting his hair like a slow-motion entrance scene was about to start, and explaining chords with Kakashi-level calm meant for students, not someone who’d known him for four minutes.
Even physics, at this point, was watching him like… bro, you’re testing the limits of the universe.
Rehearsals? Smooth.
No sparks.
No drowning musicians.
Hope was alive.
Then the real performance began.
Crowd roaring. Lights flaring. Wave pool doing aggressive wave-pool things. Aryan, drunk on adrenaline and whatever romantic subplot he thought he was starring in, yanked his guitar with full main-character energy.
Except the cable was still wrapped around my drum set.
And my stool.
And, unintentionally, my entire existence.
This is where the cosmos stepped in and said, allow me.
The Bass Drum didn’t just wobble. It shivered, as if it had seen a timeline in which it lived peacefully as a coffee table in an alternate universe.
My stool didn’t just jerk back. It dropped out from under me like Tanjiro falling into the Infinity Castle, fast, silent, and absolutely not on the day’s agenda.
And I… the drummer who only wanted to keep the beat, not rupture spacetime… got pulled ahead with the force that makes universes blink. Somewhere across the multiverse, at least three versions of me probably froze mid snack and whispered, why did the timeline twitch?
One second I’m drumming.
The next, I’m underwater, wondering which galaxy I’ve arrived in and whether accidental time travel counts as a workplace hazard.
When I resurfaced, the crowd exploded. Not because of the music. Because they had just watched a cosmic slapstick event so dramatic even a black hole would’ve slowed down to laugh.
Aryan looked at me with that half-guilty, half “bro, the universe chose you” expression.
And honestly… maybe it did.
If the universe taught me anything that day, it’s this: even the most stable timelines glitch when you care more than the people you’re trying to save. Giving a f*ck is noble, but giving it to the wrong person? That’s how you slip through wormholes you never meant to enter. Choose your gravity. Choose where your energy goes. And for the love of physics, don’t anchor yourself to someone else’s chaos.
One minute I was keeping the beat. The next minute I was negotiating with the multiverse.