Just thoughts

Today, my boyfriend and I were on a date at the mall, and we decided to pick out some clothes for each other to try on. While I was browsing through some shirts for me, some salesmen came to offer help, and they were suggesting stuff to him. And he just said "My girlfriend is picking things out for me."

I don't know, but that made me feel so happy and giddy. I literally had to walk away from there, trying to hide my blazing cheeks and the ear-to-ear grin on my face.

And he didn't even realise. He was actually genuinely surprised at my reaction and even asked me what happened to warrant a reaction like that.

In case that doesn't ring a bell, let me elaborate. She recounts a time when she told her therapist that she had been cheated on, and her therapist told her that she might be a self-fulfilling prophecy. She said it means, and I quote, "Sometimes, we expect someone to treat us poorly, so we treat them like they are going to treat us poorly, until they do."

And look, I get it. I get that it's not a good thing. You are pretty much bringing about the bad things that you dread. But what is the alternative? To treat someone like they care about me even when I am not sure they do? I don't think that will make me a self-fulfilling prophecy, then. I'd argue me treating them like they care about me will only make them take me for granted and go on to mistreat me even then.

Bullshit.

Don't you come at me with that shit. We are students of STEM, and we have been taught that a single error is enough to classify a model as wrong.

So forgive me, but I am gonna apply that knowledge to real life as well.

A couple months ago, I got a job offer from one of the biggest companies in the country, and dare I say, the world. That too in times of recession, when I can see a lot of my friends literally struggling to get a job. The pay wasn't a lot, but it was good enough for an entry level position. Granted, the role wasn't exactly what I would have loved, but I was thinking of this as a temporary situation anyway. And starting off in a company like that, even having that on my resume was definitely going to be helpful for me in the future. Needless to say, I was pumped.

I was supposed to start with a six month internship after the New Year. But before I received my offer letter, something unexpected happened. No, it's not what you think, they did not let me down.

I received information from a third party, that I would need to shift across the country, to a city that has much higher living cost than where I currently live. Which poses a lot of issues.

It's strange (and maybe kinda weird too) how back when we were younger, every single broken friendship used to feel like the end of the world. We would cry at every single quarrel with a friend , no matter how trivial. We would yell at each other with the meanest words we had, and then we would go up to them the very next day and try to make up with the biggest, most genuine sounding words we knew. I have had big dramatic break-ups with a lot of friends, filled with tears and sad words. Some of them, we overcame and some stayed. But that's besides the point. The point is, we were so emotional and so real all the time.

And look at us now. At this point, I have lost count of how many people I have lost. So many have walked out without a sound. Some of them stopped texting me with no explanation. Some of them I stopped texting because something they said or did gave me the ick. And some of these people were the ones I used to be the closest to growing up. Yes, it hurt. But now, it's silent. We don't fight anymore. We don't fight to tell them how they hurt us. We don't beg them to forgive us and stay. We just... accept it and move on.

I don't know if this is a good thing. I know that this is more of a personal thing than a general thing as well. I don't know, maybe if we had been louder, maybe we could have still been in contact. Or maybe it was better to have cut them off over the smaller red flags than to keep people around just for the sake of emotional attachment.

For some people, they just need to get through the night till they wake up and see their loved one in class or at work in the morning.

For some others, they just need to get through their school/work day so that they go home to their person.

The world was in a chaos and everything was scary and uncertain, and in the midst of all that, you and I were right there beside each other, separated by a screen but still closer than ever before. You were my biggest source of stability and hope in those times.

And how can I forget the gradually learning to open up to each other, the nervousness of navigating our nameless relationships, the utter denial of the very obvious feelings. Everything was new and daunting, and yet so exciting at the same time.

We had all the time in the world and we spent most of it together, for our worlds hadn't separated yet. Sharing everything with each other felt so comforting.

Ten out of a hundred is only ten percent.

But ten out of ten is a full hundred percent.

Like, the other day, when all that shit went down, and that poor girl, she was in the verge of a panic attack, the way she was clutching her hands and she could barely speak properly. And yet, when I was texting the others about where we went, she noticed and moved so that she was the one walking on the traffic side of the road and not me. Because I was on my phone.