I don’t know whether I should ask you for forgiveness or believe that this was written in my destiny.

But I owe you a heartfelt apology. I truly regret that I was not there with you when you needed me the most.

I love my life and I should consider myself lucky (touch wood!) because I have always been pampered by my family and friends. I was the last kid in my family and I enjoyed a lot of freedom when I was in school and college.

I have an abundance of memories that will last me my lifetime.

But I started believing in destiny after I experienced this. We were halfway through our 12^th standard when this happened. A group of girls and boys from the same class decided to go out together so that we could enjoy our college days.  We wanted to go for a picnic but the roads there were very rocky. I did not think it was safe enough for us to drive on that road. So the boys decided that they would take the girls on their bikes. All the girls sat behind the boys that they liked. But I was left with no choice. So I had to sit behind a guy called Avinash. (I have changed his name here.)

Avinash was a close friend of mine. He was not very attractive to look at and did not have a confident attitude like the other boys. But he was very innocent and shy. He was not my type of a guy at all.

But from the very next day, he started avoiding me. He wouldn’t even look at me.

He would run away from me the minute he saw me.

I asked him why he did this so many times. I had not taken the bike ride in the wrong sense. So I started making fun of him. I knew he was too shy to even talk to a stranger. But I was a Tomboy who had won many state-level debate competitions.

Finally, my friends told me that he was falling in love with me. I found this very funny and laughed my heart out because I had no such feelings for him. But as days passed, I realized that he was serious about me and I said, "Yes" to him when he proposed to me.

He was on cloud 9. He was very scared to even talk to me but he said he loved me!! I was very patient with him because I knew his nature. Days passed and we started meeting outside the group.

Unfortunately one day, Avinash, two other friends of ours and I were standing in an open field and talking with one another when 4 robbers attacked us. They started beating both the boys. The other girl who was with us became unconscious. They took all our money and ran away. But when they saw Avinash’s dad’s photo in his wallet, they got scared and returned the wallet back to him after 2 days. His dad was a highly influential person in that city.

But Avinash stopped talking to me. He was scared. He even avoided looking at me. I was shattered.

Then his friends told me that he will talk to me after the exams were over. I started preparing for my exams but no one was sure about whether I would pass because all this was happening to me during the exam time.

I would see him every day. He would come to write his exams but he would not look at me. I thought that this was OK. I thought that he will talk to me after his exams got over. I assumed that he might lose his concentration if he started talking to me.

The exams got over. Now his friends gave me a new reason. They told me that he will talk to me after the exam results are out. I was OK with this. I tried calling him a couple of times but he wouldn’t talk. He would just answer my call and put the phone aside.

The exam results were out. I had passed but he had failed. I knew the next answer. His friends told me that he will talk to me after the re-exams. I waited. His exams got over and he did not pass again.

I had to run behind him and convince him that it was OK if he had not passed this time. He would surely get a chance to appear and pass the exam the next time. It took me almost two months to make him meet me.

Later he started looking after his dad’s business.

I tried to make him bold and strong enough to deal with the real society. He felt he was lucky to have met me. Trust me when I say this – it was a drastic change for him. Slowly he became a bold and ambitious person. I never thought that he would change like this.

I was on cloud 9. He was such a sweet person. He would earn his own money. He had stopped asking his dad for any money since he was the age of 18. He really respected his family and me. He helped poor people. Meanwhile, I had joined and completed my engineering. He was there with me every single day and stood by me in my happy and sad moments. I too did the same for him.

He tried to open his own construction company with his dad’s help and he was successful too.  Meanwhile, I got a job in an MNC and that is when we had to live away from each other. At the age of 24, he opened a school for kids with mental disabilities.

But he was insecure and very possessive about me. He did not want me to work or stay away from him.

So he asked me to come and find some other work in the same place or even stay at home. He said he would pay me the salary I was getting here.

I stopped talking to him when he said this.

Meanwhile, my brother came to know about Avinash. He scolded me and used bad words to address him. I stopped talking to my brother when he did this. I told my entire family that I was determined to marry him and asked them to stop irritating me. My brother and I always patched up within a day. He could not live without me. He would always somehow convince me and make me talk to him. But now he started fighting with me every day. My mom was not living with us at this time. She had gone to my sister’s place because she wanted to spend the vacation with her.

I was emotionally dependent on my mom and I was depressed when all this happened between my brother and me.

That is when I met this guy called Vikram. He introduced himself to me. He was 10 years older than me. I started laughing all the time when I was with him. I was out of my depression now.

He made me believe that I could be happy each and every minute of the day. He proposed to me. I told him that he was way too old for me.

He had a senior position in the company that I worked. I told him that people would think badly of me if I was him. And we belonged to two different states. I then told him that I was already committed. I showed him the pictures that Avinash and I had taken together.

But Vikram saw that I was struggling to keep my dream of becoming financially independent alive.

I don’t know how I fell for him. I just went and told my Avinash that everything was over between us. He did not give up. He tried to convince me. But this time I was stubborn. I knew I was doing the wrong thing. But I did not know what made me do this.

My family had no clue about why I was doing this to the boy who loved me so much. They wondered why I was going out with a person whom I had known for only 3 months despite knowing that he belonged to a different state.

But I just went with the flow.

Vikram spoke to my brother, my dad and my sister. His family accepted me right away. And before I even realized what was happening, I was busy enjoying all the attention that I was getting from a person who was struggling to make my family understand how much he loved me.

Vikram finally gave the marriage dates to my brother. He told my brother that it did not matter to him whether they came for the wedding or not. Vikram then said that he will ensure that I would be happy even without them around me.

I had the most beautiful marriage ever. I did not know that he was making me laugh and smile so much. I was smiling and laughing all through my wedding.

So much so that my brother came to me and asked me not to smile and laugh so much. It was only then that I realized what I had been doing all this while.

Avinash did come to know about my marriage. He wanted to stop it. But his dad locked him up. He called me after three months and said he will give me one year’s time to get back with him. He told my friends that I could not live with anyone else except him because I was a very short tempered person.

After two years, I gave birth to a baby boy. I realized what ‘love’ was only after my son was born.

When my baby was 10 months old, I got to know that Avinash was suffering from bone cancer. 

I cried my heart out. My husband was very supportive and understood how I felt. He helped me accept the truth. He booked my tickets to India so that I could meet Avinash.

I was just counting the days that I had to meet him when I came to know that he had died.

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