People say, ‘True love strikes only once and that is enough to change a person’s  life.”

Love was just a concept for me. It was a mere expression until I met her. She then changed my perspective completely.

I did not find my high school education very interesting. It was full of teachers who had the exceptional talent of making even extremely interesting subjects like Chemistry colourless! I never had the urge to pay attention to even a single word that was taught in our classes till she joined. The new academic session had begun a month back but she was given permission to join the classes now because she had a letter which gave the reason for her absence.

I never believed in ‘love at first sight’. I believed that ‘love was blind’. That day, I was in a dilemma because I was a victim of the former.

She was not interested in befriending boys in the beginning. She would always be with her little group of girls. It all started in the Xerox shop. She was stapling her notes when she accidentally pushed the stapler through her left thumb. When I saw blood oozing out of her thumb, I got a few band-aids and helped her dress her wound. That was how we ignited the fire in our love story.

She was the best person I had ever come across. She was a flawless person herself and she changed me too into a better person. To be very frank, she understood me more than I understood myself and vice versa.

There have been incidents when I wanted something. She would come up with it before I could even show her the slightest sign of what I was looking for. Sometimes, she would be waiting for a bus and I would happen to pass through that very area at that particular time on my two-wheeler.

I knew that a higher force had preordained our connection.

During our classes, she would always help me understand concepts which were tough. She was definitely much better at studies than I was. I really improved in academics because of her.

There was a little lake beside our school. We would go there every day after school hours. We would sit on the rocks and enjoy every moment of our togetherness. We would hold hands, lean on each other, kiss and cherish our intimate moments.

We then got into a habit of writing in our diaries. We would sit under a banyan tree beside the lake and write one reason about why we loved each other every single day. We would write a different line every day.

We promised that we would read each other’s diaries on the day we got married. We would then bury our diaries under the tree and go home.

Everything was so heavenly but one day I got the worst shock of my life. I went to school only to find out that she was no more. She was involved in a major car accident while coming to school and had passed away due to critical head injuries.

I was numb with shock. It was as if there was no emotion within me. When her body was brought to school, I didn’t know how to deal with it. I had given up all hopes of moving on in my life.

I simply could not visualize my life without her in it.

I didn’t wish to live anymore. Some of my close friends pacified me for almost a month and helped me cope with the stress. But I never got the courage to break the promise that we had made to each other. I just could not go back and check our diaries after this incident.

It took me almost 3 years to gather the courage to look for our diaries. It was extremely difficult for me to go to that spot and search for them. But when I dug up the soil under the huge tree, I couldn’t find a single trace of our diaries.

All I could find were the metal edge protectors that held the edges of the diary covers together.

Perhaps the diaries had just disintegrated into the earth with the passage of time. I then started searching for the metal protectors. There had to be 8 of them. But after searching for almost an hour, I could find only 7 of them. I gave up.

I knew that she had left me forever. But I also knew she had taken one metal protector - as a token of our love- with her.

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