Bravo. Truly.
I’ve officially yanked the emotional rope till it snapped.
10/10 family damage. Would not recommend.

Because the door wasn’t just unlocked—
It was wide open.Drama-level open. Looking at the food she brought reminded me of our old fights- She always does this.

Feeds me when she can’t fight me.
Cooks for me when she’s tired of crying.

Food has always been her apology language.
Too bad my hunger speaks a different dialect.

Looking at this gesture of her, eventhough she was very angry, she still choose to care about me, I turned on to  my normal mode: 

Washroom - Fresh up - Eat - Eat again - Study(Summer Break Homework, there was a meme once even whole world was suffering from pandemic still teachers were asking students to successfully submit their assignments through the online mode.[Even if you die, assignments needs to be completed.Time might have changed but this never changes #studentstruggles] ) - No arguments - No complaints - Dinner too — she kept it again.

Silent_Plate_Table_Door. 

Same pattern. But this time... a little softer, looks like she made up with her daughter - very fast, if i and my grandma ever fought, it would atleast take minimum of a month to end our war.

Before sleeping, I noticed : The postbox.

That old, rusty postbox stuck to the corner wall of my room like a secret door to parallel worlds. 

We use it only when Cold Wars happen in this house. If Grandma and I are not talking, that box becomes our shared language. 

I opened it. Not expecting much. Maybe a “Good night.” , But— It wasn’t grandma's handwriting. It was different, may be her daughter's.[because it was very neat to be called my grandma's handwriting but after reading the words in the letter i was sure these words will never be of my grandma, and she(grandma) usually calls me pandu(nickname of anveshna), except when she yells. ]

A letter?. 

Just one line. “Anveshna, do you know what is love?” . 

My brain? It blinked. 

My mouth? “Huh?” 

Excuse me? What kind of mother sends philosophical riddles by mail to her emotionally damaged daughter? 

Do you know what is love? Seriously? 

And just like that... My mind went back. Like a paper floating in a dusty storeroom, flipping through old chapters I didn’t even bookmark. 

Surya. 

Of course. It always starts with him, doesn’t it? 

Flashback: When we were in 5th class. We ended up as bench mates. 

The model girl and the chaos generator. Why? 

Because teachers loved social experiments. They thought, “Surya will stop talking if he sits with girls.” Little did they know, Surya talks to furniture also if he’s bored. 

So there, in our bench we were — Wall side: Surya, Middle: Me, Left: Asha.  He’d put his bag between me and him. Even during combined study sessions, when we’re asked to sit side by side… He’d slide to the edge of the bench like I had a disease. That’s fine. I didn’t want his dumb brainwaves touching me anyway. Still, we became “okay friends”. Not “share-your-lunchbox” friends, but… “I’ll-not-kick-you-if-you-step-on-my-shoes” friends. 

And no, till then I never liked him. Ever. I used to complain about him to the teachers even if he sneezed too loudly, Because of that One incident which happened a year before, when we weren't this close.

Flashback in flashback :) - Class 4. 

After lunch. 

Substitution period. 

No teacher. 

Suddenly, this guy starts throwing blank chits on my bench. I opened them, saw nothing, dumped them in the dustbin. “Grow up,” I thought. But then, he whispers from his bench, “There’s one more chit under your bench.” I picked it. Opened it. "I love you Anveshna and Nyapika." ... …Excuse me? I rubbed my eyes and checked it again,

"I love you Anveshna and Nyapika." 

Two names. 

One line. 

One chit. 

One confession? 

I turned to Nyapika(who was my benchmate in 4th class and she sat on my left side). She was crying. 

CRYING. 

“My parents will kill me,” she said. “I can’t believe a boy proposed to me!” 

 Wait. Wait. WAIT. 

First of all, who tells such things to their parents? 

No, Actually who proposes to TWO girls in ONE chit? 

And, since when did polygamy become the new crush culture? 

Before I could even process this madness, Teacher entered. Started shouting. Of course, I got caught. I stood up, explained everything like a victim in a police case. Teacher ignored the logic and started hitting everyone around Surya. Front bench, back bench, whole radius of sin. Except one boy. The topper. Because toppers don’t write love letters, apparently. They just study and sparkle. 

And Surya? - He denied everything. Stone-faced liar. Didn’t even blink. 

Nobody spoke about that incident again. Even I acted like it didn’t matter. 

End of flashbacks: But her stupid one-line letter opened the vault again. What is love? Is that love? Throwing a chit with two names and zero guts to accept? Or was he covering for someone else? Maybe that boy who wasn’t beaten? And You know... even now, when I lie on my bed staring at the fan like it's going to spell out the answers, I still have questions. About that incident. That silly chit. That so-called confession.

First of all—if Surya was the one who threw the chits and told me to pick them… why didn’t he just say it in front of the teacher? Why act innocent like he had no clue what was happening? Did he get scared? Or was he protecting someone else?Because that chit didn’t even have a name. Just two names inside. One was mine. The other was Nyapika's. And both of us got proposed to. Apparently.

Why did Nyapika react like that? Like someone set her name on fire in the middle of the assembly.
It was just a confession, no? Not a blood oath.
But she turned it into a tragedy scene with full background score.

As I said before, After that day, no one ever brought it up again. Not even in whispers.
The whole class behaved like it never happened.
Like that chit just... disappeared. Like it was a glitch in the memory system.

Sometimes, when I think about it now… it feels like a mystery.
A strange, unsolved one.

Maybe Surya didn’t even write it.
I thought he did—because, well... he had two Sudis(double hair whorl) in his head.

And elders always said, the more Sudis a man has, the more wives he ends up with.
Two names on the chit. Two Sudhis. Coincidence? I doubt it.

But maybe—maybe he was just helping someone else.
Maybe someone else wanted to say something and Surya just… passed the note.
Protected their identity.

Whoever it was... I know one thing for sure.

The kind of love they tried to confess that day… it wasn’t the kind I believed in.
For me, love is different. Quiet. Destined.

They say love has evolved. Gotten faster. Sharper. Digitized. Like everything else—edited, captioned, gone by 24 hours.

But I must’ve missed the update.

Maybe I’m still running on my grandmother’s software—love version 1967. One-man, one-life, one-long-slow-burning-fire kind of love.
Rama-level loyalty. Epic vows. No edits, no filters.

And maybe that’s why I thought—just for a second—that when he said,
“Hey, let’s meet .”
it meant something.
Something slow. Quiet. Destined.

Turns out, it meant he wanted advice. About another girl.

And the worst part?
He never confessed. Never flirted. Never even wrote his name in that ridiculous folded chit.
So technically, he did nothing wrong.

So why the hell do I still feel like I got left behind?

He’s not even my type—if I had one.
I always believed love comes later. Like, after Graduation. When you’re more than just hormones in a school uniform.
When your brain has fully loaded and your heart doesn’t glitch every time someone with good hair walks by.

But now?
Now my own algorithm betrays me.
Search "love"?
His name pops up. Every time. Without fail.
Like a bug I can’t patch.

What a tragic design flaw.