4x featured
Just when Nicola had given up on love, a stranger called Rudra walked into her life, inviting her to join his challenge. Claiming that he could restore her faith in love with just 27 bowls of ice cream, he takes her on a metaphorical jou...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Bowl 0: To Unlove
She could never understand why falling for him was so easy but being in love was so complicated. Nicola had spent ages trying to decipher the concept of love but all she could come up with was multiple contrasting theories.
Sometimes her love for him was like a boomerang. The farther she tried to throw away her memories of him, pushing away the love she once felt for him, the faster his absence would start overpowering her. Hitting her with an incomprehensible force, leaving her dazed until the very foundation her beliefs stood strong on would shake.
Soon enough, it would become impossible to figure out how the sun would rise one moment and set the next, but she would still find herself seated in the same place, cherishing the bundle of the sweetest irreplaceable memories he had given her.
Sometimes she thought love was like sand. Having learnt from some bitter experiences that the tighter you hold the sand, the faster it would slip out of your hands, she would try to hold his memories so tight that it would physically hurt to keep thinking about the man who convinced her that love was beautiful but one day, decided to breach the same imagery by cheating on her.
She had truly tried it all – pushing away every single thought about him, trying to accept him and his betrayal, choosing to hate him instead. But nothing seemed to work. Unable to figure out how the heck in the world the 'moving on' or 'getting over a breakup' phase worked, she chose to experiment with every existing possibility.
She would either end up loving him or hating him. Missing him or loathing him. Wishing for him or cursing him. No matter what choice she made, he was the only constant. While in reality, he was the only missing variable in the equation of her life.
In spite of the mess her life had become, she was certainly thankful for the fact that she had at least one thing to hold onto. Seated in a coffee shop with an old friend – who had travelled miles just to meet her – Nicola was not sure if it was the hot chocolate or this friend's presence that made her heart feel all warm and fuzzy. And for a heartbeat, she felt like she could be herself without the fear of being judged or misunderstood. If only she could remember who she was before being so heartbroken.
"It's going to be okay, Nic." Lyra whispered, not quite understanding what to make of the situation beforehand. She had, too, been in love but imagining a fate as cruel as Nicola's was enough to trigger her overthinking. Lyra had known love but only the beautiful side of it – the butterflies in her stomach, the way her heart would beat rhythmically like the sound of music, the feeling of finding his face in the crowd even when he was not around... But she had to admit there was a dark side to love that she was yet to experience with age.
The rejection and heartbreak, betrayal, or worse, the falling-out-of-love phase... The thought of her first love not loving her back sent a shiver down her spine. As badly as she wished to, she knew she could not be the one to help Nicola out of the storm that was threatening to engulf the rest of Nicola's life in one go.
