White.

Winter of 2016.

He looked at me the way every girl wanted to be looked at. He gave me the confidence to wear my fur boots in the most inappropriate of places- our office. Knowing that something wasn’t right, he came close to me and enquired if everything was. To his surprise, I confessed that it wasn’t.

And the rest, like they say, is history.

We never stopped conversing after that. If beautiful conversations could ever be personified, I’d give them the face of our conversations. Pure. Honest. White.

If I’d say that everything was white in our pseudo-friendship, a term most fitting for the relationship we shared, I’d be lying. There were blotchy black areas, sometimes set up in even blacker pits of dark past, and present. But eventually, the black areas gave way to the grey ones, until one day- it was nothing but white. Peace. Unison. Love.

I never doubted his intentions, but I did have my doubts when it came to his behaviour with me. It was never white when it came to that. While he was really verbal and never ever shied away from expressing his love towards me – and I’m a total lover of verbosity- it was his actions that sometimes spoke otherwise. More and more of that, and I started to feel victimised; doing things that somehow made sense in my puny brains at that time that I find hard to comprehend right now. What was I even thinking?

Amidst making myself believe that I was being mentally shredded to pieces here, his ‘positive’ actions came to hold lesser and lesser importance till it came to the point where I could see nothing but negative in an otherwise wonderful person. True, some of his actions were, indeed, uncalled for- but I generalised those to his entire being, violating one of my very own beliefs- we’re all humans and it’s okay to make mistakes. His apologies, no matter how sincere, seemed to hold little relevance to me, as every time he’d make sure that I was now on terms with the fact that he had realised he was a little out of the line, I’d bring the topic up again because I felt I had been wronged. And somehow to correct his ‘wrongs’, I ended up wronging him. I had forgotten that unlike the fundamental rule of the mathematics of multiplication of two negative numbers, two blacks do not make a white.