It’s easy to feel invincible when every room seems to have a place for you.
Scene 1 – Peace, Apparently
Coming back to India was surprisingly easy.
I thought after spending that long in Germany, there would be some dramatic adjustment period. Reverse culture shock. Missing German supermarkets. Complaining about traffic. Becoming one of those people who says, “You know, in Germany…” every seventeen minutes until everyone around me develops a perfectly reasonable desire to punch me.
Thankfully, none of that happened.
Okay, I complained about traffic.
But that wasn’t reverse culture shock. That was just Bangalore.
The birthday helped too.
Pondicherry had somehow gone from Shit, I’m spending my birthday alone to one of the better birthdays I’d had in years. No big plan. No people waiting to make the day special. Just me, a scooty, a few accidental detours and enough poor planning to accidentally have a good time.
And somewhere during all that, I had realised something that felt strangely important.
I was actually pretty good company.
Then the leaves ended.
And life looked at all that peace and said, Cute.
Deployment month started.
For anyone unfamiliar with deployment month, it’s a magical period in corporate life where everything becomes urgent at exactly the same time.
Things that had existed peacefully for six months suddenly needed to be fixed before lunch.
Testing was urgent.
Documentation was urgent.
Defects were urgent.
Approvals were urgent.
Things waiting for approvals were somehow even more urgent than the approvals themselves.
By the second week, I had stopped asking why.
There was no point.
One afternoon, a Teams message popped up.
“Sam, quick call?”
“No.”
“It’ll take five minutes.”
“That’s what you said yesterday.”
“That one was different.”
“That one took forty-seven minutes.”
“This is actually urgent.”
I stared at the message.
Of course it was.
Everything was actually urgent.
“Fine. Call.”
It took an hour.
At some point, the phrase quick call had stopped being a measurement of time and become a threat.
And strangely, I didn’t completely hate that phase.
The workload? Absolutely.
Nobody wakes up in the morning hoping to discover that humanity has created twelve new problems overnight and somehow assigned all twelve to them.
But I liked everything happening around it.
My phone was constantly buzzing. Someone needed help with something. Someone wanted me to check something. Someone wanted an opinion they were going to ignore anyway.
There was always another conversation happening somewhere.
And somewhere along the way, I had become one of those people everyone assumed would know what to do.
Which was dangerous.
Because sometimes I did.
And that gave me confidence far beyond what any human being should be allowed to possess.
One day, during another discussion about timelines that nobody believed in anymore, someone said:
“What are we going to do when you leave this project?”
“Finally.”
“What?”
“Someone is asking the important questions.”
“Sam.”
“I’m serious. What will you guys do without me?”
There was a pause.
“We’ll manage.”
“That sounded unnecessarily confident.”
“You asked.”
“I expected reassurance.”
“You’re getting nothing.”
Fair.
The days moved quickly like that.
Sometimes I would look at the clock expecting it to be three in the afternoon and realise it was already seven.
There wasn’t really enough space between things to think about anything beyond the next thing.
And honestly, I liked that too.
Work ended.
Laptop closed.
Whatever had gone wrong that day could become tomorrow-Sam’s problem.
Current-Sam had more important responsibilities.
Like football.
One night, I was playing on the PlayStation when Ronaldo made a run I had already decided was completely useless.
Then he scored.
Some ridiculous angle.
Of course.
“WHAT THE FUCK, RONALDO!”
I stood up.
No idea why.
Apparently standing makes virtual goals more meaningful.
I pointed at the screen like Ronaldo could see me personally congratulating him from Bangalore.
Then I remembered I lived alone.
Sat back down.
Still worth it.
Story games were probably worse.
Some village would be burning down around me while an NPC desperately begged:
“We need to hurry!”
“Yeah, yeah. Two minutes.”
There was a chest nearby.
What did they expect me to do?
Ignore loot?
The village had already been burning for ten minutes. It could burn for thirty more seconds.
Sometimes I would order food, start an anime and somehow end up watching six episodes.
Then I’d check the time.
2:43 AM.
“Excellent.”
Alarm at 8.
Also excellent.
Future-Sam could deal with the consequences.
Weekend plans happened too.
Someone would randomly call.
“Bro, what are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Come out.”
“Where?”
“Decide after you come.”
A flawless plan.
Sometimes we’d end up eating somewhere at midnight. Sometimes somebody would suggest a drive. Sometimes the entire plan would collapse and we’d sit somewhere talking absolute nonsense for three hours.
It didn’t really matter.
Life had movement again.
I had work.
People.
Money.
Things I wanted to do.
Things I could finally afford to do.
There were weekends where I went out too much and weekends where I refused to leave the house.
Both were good.
And one thing was definitely easier now.
Nobody was waiting for me.
No missed-call arguments.
No “You said you’d call.”
No “Why didn’t you tell me?”
No conversations beginning with we need to talk after I had already spent ten hours talking to people.
Nobody checking whether I sounded different.
Nobody asking why I had time for one thing and not another.
Nobody keeping track.
For a long time, I had wanted exactly that.
Freedom.
And now I had it.
Turns out, freedom was pretty nice.
Most evenings, anyway.
Some nights were quieter.
Not sad.
Just quieter.
I would reach home, change, throw myself onto the sofa and turn on the PlayStation.
Play a match.
Another match.
Maybe one more.
Then switch it off.
Not because I was sleepy.
Just… enough.
Netflix.
Scroll.
Something new.
No.
Something I had already started.
Maybe later.
Anime?
Hmm.
I’d open one.
Watch ten minutes.
Check my phone.
Nothing interesting there either.
Then, for absolutely no reason, I’d walk to the fridge.
Open it.
Look inside.
Close it.
Sit down.
Three minutes later, open it again as if a biryani might have spontaneously generated since the previous inspection.
Nothing.
Obviously.
I never thought much about those evenings.
Why would I?
Sometimes people get bored.
That’s not exactly a psychological emergency.
And after deployment weeks, there was an even simpler explanation.
I was tired.
That explanation had served me well for years.
So I’d go to bed.
And the strange thing was, sleep worked.
By morning, whatever tiny restlessness had been sitting somewhere in the room with me was gone.
Mostly because I usually woke up late.
“Shit.”
Alarm.
Bathroom.
Shirt.
Phone.
Wallet.
Keys.
Where are the keys?
Yesterday’s jeans.
Found them.
Out.
By the time I reached work, there was already some new crisis waiting.
A message.
A defect.
A meeting.
Someone saying:
“Sam, do you have a minute?”
And just like that, life was loud again.
Whatever had felt strange the night before disappeared so completely that I rarely remembered it had happened.
Then sometimes, a few days later, it would return.
A quiet room.
A game I didn’t feel like playing.
A show I didn’t feel like watching.
Nothing wrong.
Nothing missing.
At least, nothing I could name.
So I didn’t.
There were too many other things happening to waste time investigating a few boring evenings.
Life was good.
I was good.
And as far as I knew, that was all there was to it.
Scene 2 – After the Noise
Deployment eventually ended.
Not with celebrations. Not with someone dramatically announcing that we had survived. Things just slowly stopped catching fire.
The number of urgent messages reduced from approximately forty-seven per day to a much healthier thirty-two.
Progress.
People who had been appearing on Teams every fifteen minutes suddenly remembered that email existed. Meetings started ending at the time mentioned on the invite, which honestly felt suspicious.
And one miraculous afternoon, somebody said:
“This can wait until tomorrow.”
I almost asked if he was feeling okay.
For weeks, tomorrow had sounded like a mythical place nobody was allowed to visit.
But slowly, work became normal again.
Not easy.
Normal.
There were still deadlines. Still problems. Still people beginning conversations with “small request” before describing something that required half my afternoon.
But I could breathe between them now.
Sometimes I even finished work while it was technically still evening.
The first few times that happened, I didn’t know what to do with myself.
Laptop closed.
7:18 PM.
I stared at the clock.
That’s it?
No defect?
No call?
Nobody urgently needs something that apparently existed before I was born but somehow became my responsibility today?
Interesting.
I ordered dinner.
PlayStation.
Excellent evening.
For a while, having time again felt like discovering an extra room in my own house.
I could play without checking Teams every ten minutes. Watch something without pausing because somebody had written Hi Sam and then disappeared instead of telling me what they wanted.
Which should be illegal, by the way.
If you message someone Hi and nothing else, you should be legally required to remain online until they reply.
Anyway.
Life became easier.
And because I had spent so long being busy, I enjoyed doing absolutely useless things with great enthusiasm.
One Saturday, I woke up late, ordered enough food for what appeared to be a family of four and spent most of the afternoon playing football.
Ronaldo scored.
“YES!”
Another one.
“Come on!”
Then some defender made a mistake so stupid that I paused the game just to process it.
“What are you doing?”
The player continued staring into the virtual distance.
“No. Seriously. Explain.”
Nothing.
Unaccountable even in 4K.
I sold him after the match.
Consequences.
Another weekend, somebody dragged me out for dinner and what was supposed to be dinner somehow became dessert, then tea, then standing beside someone’s car at almost one in the morning discussing whether Batman could realistically defeat half the Justice League.
Important adult conversations.
Some days were like that.
Some days I stayed home.
Both worked.
That was probably why I never noticed exactly when the quieter evenings started becoming more frequent.
It wasn’t one particular day.
There was no moment where I came home, stared dramatically at an empty apartment and realised something profound about my life.
I wish emotions had that kind of production value.
Mostly, I would just get home.
Change.
Eat something.
Turn on the television.
Normal evening.
Sometimes PlayStation worked.
Sometimes I played three matches and suddenly realised I didn’t particularly care about the fourth.
Fine.
Maybe I wasn’t in the mood.
Netflix.
I’d scroll for a while until choosing something started feeling like more commitment than actually watching it.
Then I would select something completely random.
Ten minutes.
Phone.
Another ten minutes.
Phone again.
At some point I would notice that I had technically watched twenty minutes of an episode and absorbed approximately four.
So I’d switch it off.
Not sad.
Just bored.
And boredom has easy solutions.
Maybe go out tomorrow.
Maybe start a different show.
Maybe buy a new game.
Maybe I just needed something interesting to happen.
Usually something did.
The next day someone would call.
Office would become messy again.
A friend would make a plan.
Some random problem would consume three hours.
And I would forget that the previous evening had felt strange at all.
That was the pattern.
If it even counted as a pattern.
A quiet Tuesday.
Then four perfectly normal days.
A boring Sunday night.
Then a week where I barely had time to sit down.
Nothing consistent enough to worry about.
And definitely nothing serious enough to analyse.
I had spent enough years analysing problems for a living.
I wasn’t about to start debugging Tuesday evening.
Some nights I simply went to sleep early.
That usually fixed everything.
There was something incredibly convenient about sleep.
You could feel vaguely irritated with existence at 11:30 PM, close your eyes, and a few hours later your biggest concern was finding matching socks.
The mornings were especially effective because I was rarely awake early enough to have feelings.
Alarm.
Snooze.
Alarm again.
Snooze.
Open one eye.
Check time.
Immediately become religious.
“Oh shit.”
Suddenly there was no mysterious boredom.
There was only survival.
Shower.
Clothes.
Phone.
Wallet.
Keys.
Why did I keep losing the keys?
I lived alone.
There was literally only one suspect.
By the time I reached work, my brain had moved on completely.
Someone would already be waiting with:
“Sam, one question.”
“One?”
“Yes.”
“Promise?”
“Okay, maybe two.”
“There it is.”
And the day would start.
That was probably why I never thought much about any of it.
My life was full.
Work was going well. People were around. I could make plans when I wanted, disappear for a weekend if I felt like it, stay home if I didn’t.
Pondicherry had already taught me that I didn’t need somebody beside me for a day to feel complete.
And there was something else I had wanted for a long time.
Freedom.
No missed-call arguments.
No “You said you’d call.”
No “Why didn’t you tell me?”
No conversations beginning with we need to talk after I had already spent the entire day talking to people.
Nobody checking whether I sounded different.
Nobody asking why I had time for one thing and not another.
Nobody keeping track.
I had wanted that once.
Now I had it.
And I liked it.
So whenever one of those strange evenings appeared, I had no reason to treat it as anything more than an off day.
One evening, though, I came home unusually early.
No calls.
No plan.
Nothing I particularly wanted to watch.
I played for a while.
Won.
Usually winning helped.
Apparently not that day.
I switched games.
Played that for a bit.
Nope.
Opened Netflix.
Scrolled until the thumbnails started repeating.
Closed it.
Opened Instagram.
Watched a reel.
Then another.
Then somehow returned to the first one because apparently I had completed the internet.
I put the phone down.
Silence.
Not uncomfortable exactly.
Just very noticeable.
I looked around the room.
The television was on, but I wasn’t really watching it. A half-finished drink sat on the table. The controller was still in my hand even though the match had ended a few minutes ago.
For some reason, I didn’t start another one.
Usually I would.
Instead, I sat there for a while, doing absolutely nothing.
Not thinking about anything important either.
That was the strange part.
There wasn’t some grand sadness sitting inside me. No memory had suddenly attacked me. No terrible thought had appeared.
I just felt… done with the evening.
Which was ridiculous because the evening had barely started.
I checked the time.
8:26 PM.
Too early to sleep.
Too late to pretend I had enough enthusiasm to start something new.
So I walked around the apartment for no real reason, picked up things that didn’t need picking up, moved one thing from one table to another and eventually came back to exactly where I had started.
Maybe I needed a hobby.
Then I remembered I already had too many hobbies and regularly complained about not having enough time for them.
So that probably wasn’t it.
Maybe I’m just tired.
There.
Easy.
That explanation made sense.
Work had been ridiculous for months. My sleep schedule was terrible. Half the time I treated weekends like they were an opportunity to recover from weekdays by staying awake even later.
Of course I was tired.
I went to bed.
The next morning, I woke up late.
Very late.
Problem solved.
Life resumed.
And for the next few weeks, I barely thought about it.
Until one evening, I saw her.
It happened so normally that for a second my brain didn’t register anything unusual.
I was out after work, walking somewhere I had walked dozens of times before, thinking about something completely unrelated.
Then I looked across the road.
And stopped.
There are people you need a second look to recognise after years.
She wasn’t one of them.
My brain knew before I did.
It was her.
For a few seconds, I just stood there.
Three years.
Three entire years.
And somehow the first thought that entered my head was ridiculously simple.
Oh.
It’s her.
She looked different.
Not enough that I couldn’t recognise her.
Just enough that I could tell life had happened while I wasn’t watching.
Her hair was different. There was something different about the way she carried herself too, although I couldn’t have explained exactly what it was.
Maybe confidence.
Maybe peace.
Maybe neither.
She was alone.
That was the first thing I properly noticed after the initial shock passed.
No friends around her.
No phone call.
No one she seemed to be waiting for.
She was sitting by herself with something to drink, occasionally looking around, completely unbothered by the fact that nobody was sitting opposite her.
And she looked happy.
Not the loud kind.
She wasn’t laughing. Nothing particularly exciting seemed to be happening.
She just looked comfortable.
Like being alone with herself wasn’t an empty space she needed somebody else to fill.
I don’t know why that stayed with me.
The version of her I remembered was always reaching towards me somehow.
A message.
A call.
A plan.
A conversation.
Even during the worst parts of us, there had always been this strange sense that some part of her was still trying to close whatever distance existed between us.
The woman sitting there wasn’t reaching anymore.
She wasn’t waiting either.
And somehow that difference was obvious even from across the road.
For some reason, I felt a small sting somewhere in my chest.
Quick.
Sharp enough to notice.
Gone before I could properly understand it.
I stood there longer than I should have.
She hadn’t seen me.
At least I didn’t think she had.
Part of me considered walking over.
Just saying hi.
What was the big deal?
Three years had passed.
We were adults.
People meet.
People talk.
People move on.
Instead, I stayed where I was.
Maybe it was surprise.
Maybe I needed a few seconds to reconcile the person in front of me with the person who had been living quietly in my memory for three years.
Then somebody walked between us.
Just for a moment.
When they passed, she was getting up.
She picked up her things, checked something on her phone and started walking away.
I could have called out.
I didn’t.
I watched her disappear into the crowd.
And then stood there feeling slightly ridiculous.
Nothing had happened.
She hadn’t spoken to me.
Hadn’t even seen me.
I had simply seen someone I used to know.
That was all.
I continued walking.
Bought what I had gone there to buy.
Went home.
A completely normal evening.
Except sometime later, while sitting on the sofa, I realised I had opened our old chat.
I stared at it for a while.
Three years of silence looked strangely ordinary on a phone screen.
Her name.
An old conversation.
A text box underneath it.
I locked the phone.
Two minutes later, I unlocked it again.
Her name was still there.
Obviously.
I almost laughed.
Three years.
And apparently all it took was seeing her once for my brain to start behaving like it had misplaced something.
I didn’t type anything.
Not that night.
I put the phone away, turned on the PlayStation and started a match.
But before kickoff, I looked at her name again.
And one question stayed in my head longer than it probably should have.
Would she say yes if I asked her to meet me?