It was a new moon night, and even though it was supposed to be a very dark one, a faint light was peeking through Leah's window. Her mind flooded with questions that haunted her every night, Leah found herself unable to sleep. She sat up in bed, now aware of the starlight in the room. Only, she wasn't aware it's starlight. "Moonlight!" she thought, smiling to herself as she hopped out of bed and moved towards the window. Leah loved watching the moon. Though she knew there was nobody up there to answer her questions, she somehow seemed to stumble upon answers during her watching-the-moon sessions. She looked up at the dark blue blanket that endlessly stretched above her, with diamonds studded on it. But something was bothering her. She strained her neck to get a larger view of the entire sky but there was no sign of the brilliant golden orb that her heart ached to see. She turned back to observe the light in her room and realized that it indeed wasn't moonlight, it was much fainter than that. Awes-struck, she turned back towards the sky and mouthed the word "starlight" as she continued to gaze at the diamonds. She found it pretty funny that the moon, who actually just reflected the light of the sun, overshadowed the light of the stars, who emitted their own light. It was a funny little thing that a mere reflection of light could spellbind us more than light itself. The more she thought about it, the more she felt the truth dawning upon her - what appeared to be a bright truth was actually a mere reflection of what people around you think, whilst the actual thought, the actual truth, remained hidden behind the shadows; and in order to discover the real thing, you need to put aside the apparent truth completely. Shut out the moon, and you'll know the stars shine too. Leah could feel the weight of the truth pushing her down. She heaved a deep sigh and turned around, unable to digest her own thoughts. "Am I really doing the wrong thing? Have I been wrong all along? If yes, will I ever be able to set it right? What'll happen if I can't?" Leah shook her head as she felt a mild headache hitting her. She turned back to return to her bed when she noticed it - lying on her study table was a paper strip, its ends taped to each other in an awkward fashion. It's existence on her study table wasn't unknown to Leah, but the starlight seemed to illuminate it in a strange way, as if reminding her about its presence, and what lay in its past...
"Mobius strip? What's that, Li?" Emma asked, looking at Leah with her tiny eyes punctuated with question marks. She held a strip of paper whose ends were taped to one another in an unusual way. Leah smiled as she took the strip from Emma's hand and moved her finger along the edge of the strip. She started from a point and traced the edge of the strip without lifting her finger up and, quite to Emma's surprise, ended up at the same point from which she had started. Leah looked up at Emma and smiled as she noticed the look of bewilderment on her face.
"But..this can't be! This is clearly a three dimensional thing! This just can't be..!" Emma exclaimed.
"I knew you would react like that, sweetheart," Leah winked, "but this is true. This is a funny little thing I found on wikipedia the other day and I thought you were the best person who should be enlightened."
"Amazing! Simply amazing!" Emma said, eyeing the strip closely now and tracing her own finger along its edge to experience the magic herself.
The Mobius strip that Leah had prepared was a shabby one, she had torn of a piece of paper, given a half twist to one end and taped it to the other end. Emma quicky went inside and cut out a neat strip of paper and followed Leah's direction. She now held a well-defined Mobius strip in her hand.
"Here," she said, holding it out to Leah.
"Great job, Em!" Leah said, smiling as she took the perfect strip from Emma. Leah could never stop marveling at the genius of a person Emma was.
"Wear it like a band, Li!" Emma cried.
Leah slid the Mobius strip on her wrist, careful enough not to tear it during the process.
"That's for our friendship, isn't it? Something that has no end," Leah said, holding Emma's hand.
"It sure is!" Emma chimed.
The headache was starting to bother Leah now. She recalled her own words - "something that has no end". Over the past few months, her and Emma's friendship was anything but unending. With things crashing between her and Arthur like an avalanche, Leah couldn't bear the fact that Emma still found it okay to be Arthur's good, very good, friend. Every time she saw Emma being close to the boy who'd hurt Leah so much, she started fuming. No matter how much she tried to recollect all her good memories with Emma in order to drown out the feeling of hatred she felt for her, she failed. Miserably. "Her friendship, her memories, they were all fake! Just fake! She's been playing it fake all along! She is nothing but a bitch!" she would tell herself, every time her heart started contradicting her decision of pushing Emma away from herself. "But," she would find herself thinking, "she has her own life. She can choose her own friends. Arthur has hurt me, not her. If she finds a good friend in him, who am I to expect her to stop talking to him? Plus, I've forgiven Arthur for everything. There's no more hatred for him. I do miss him, yeah, as my best friend. I had always wanted him to be there in my life as a friend whom I cherished so much. I thought I had made myself pretty clear when I promised him that I've always wanted him to be there as a friend for me forever. But if he couldn't really take it, it's good we parted ways. Things wouldn't have been any better, anyway." And suddenly, Leah's mind would take a turn and she would find herself thinking, "But I broke myself away from Drew just for the sake of Emma. Because Emma wouldn't have loved it if I would've maintained my friendship with him. Now that she knew Drew liked me, it would be intolerable for my Em. How can Emma even think that I was the reason Drew put her through all this? The moment I realized that Drew was actually a bigger jerk than I thought was the moment when he told me he had loved me all along and that Emma was not even supposed to be in the picture. That was the day I had cried all night, dreading that this would end the friendship I shared with Emma. The next day, I had talked to Arthur about it and Arthur had straightaway told me to tell Emma the truth. "Are you sane, Arthur? You think I'd be able to tell her that without ruining what we have? Hell, no! I am not going to let anything hurt Emma. Yes, I will urge her to break up with that good for nothing jackass, but I won't tell her this. This will shatter her, Arthur. She won't be able to take it!" "But this is the truth, Leah. And Emma needs to face it. Maybe not now, but some day. You'll have to hurt her." Arthur had replied. "I'll tell her when she's over Drew. Not now. Please." she had said, turning away from him to hide her tears. Yet, Emma somewhere blamed her for everything that happened between Drew and her.She had always loved Emma. Her hard feelings had started erupting when Emma had started getting close to Arthur. Arthur wouldn't have enough messages left to talk to her because he'd been talking to Emma, and this would infuriate her. Almost everyone I talked to had told me Emma was wrong, but still I apologized because I knew the way I'd been harsh to her had hurt her. She had thought Emma would give up talking to him even at the slightest hint of knowing that she didn't like it, but Emma had ceased to do that. If she really considered me that good a friend, how couldn't she ever see through the smile I forced when she talked about her conversations with Arthur? She called herself dumb, but that doesn't make you insensitive, does it?" Leah was now holding her head in her hands as her head throbbed uncontrollably, filling her with unbearable pain. But her inner voices wouldn't stop.
"Emma has always wanted me to be happy. The happiness she felt when I told her about Neil was so evident in her smileys. If she longs for my happiness so much, how can I snatch away her happiness for my own selfish insecurities? Talking to Arthur, talking to Jordan makes her happy. Who am I to stop her?"
"But isn't it a bit strange that out of all the guys in the world, talking to those two makes her so happy? Why does she have to do all this? Throwing a party and inviting all of us together? She knows it'll only make me uncomfortable. She could've thrown a different party for the group and for her remaining friends. Is she doing all this only because she thinks I was the reason for things going so terribly wrong between her and Drew? Is she..." Leah gulped down a heavy bout of air before thinking the word that was constantly knocking on the doors of her mind, "...jealous?"
With this, she tried to stop the wave of thoughts that flowed in one after another.
"So what if it's Arthur, Jordan or any Tom, Dick and Harry with whom she talks? Why are they even making a difference to me when I'm so totally over what had happened between me and them? Why do I even have to care? There's Neil with me who keeps me so happy, so content. Emma has nobody like Neil to make her happy. So why do I have to crib so much if she tries to find happiness in little things like these? And why the hell do I keep forgetting the fact that I've forgiven Jordan and Arthur for everything? Then why am I being unjust to Emma by not forgiving her? And maybe, just maybe, I don't even have the right to actually 'forgive' her. Maybe whatever she did wasn't really that wrong as well. Maybe it wasn't wrong at all!"
Leah picked up the Mobius strip from her study table and absent-mindedly started tracing the edge with her finger. Her head felt very heavy now and it was aching more than ever, but she knew that this was going to be the last night for these thoughts. That she had to find answers to all her questions. That she'll have to decide. She thought about how many people had started hating Emma because of her. She wasn't feeling guilty about it, because she had never forced anyone to accept her decisions. Whenever she vented out her anger for Emma in front of her close friends, she just did it to lighten herself. She never meant to turn anyone away from Em. If they did that, it was their choice. Not an option Leah had given them. Her finger reached back to the point from where it had started. Leah stopped and stared at the strip. "Something that has no end," she recalled. The debate of her inner voices didn't have an end as well. She found herself standing at the same place from where she had started. "What am I supposed to do now?" she thought.
She went and stood in front of the mirror. The girl gazing back at her looked wary. Exhausted. Her large almond eyes seemed to have sunken in.
"What on earth have I done to myself?" she thought as she looked at the girl in the mirror.
"You've started hating people, Leah. And you waste too much energy on that." the girl in the mirror replied.
"Wasting energy hating people? Okay, I know you are my reflection. But you can't really talk shit at times like these!" Leah replied. The girl in the mirror smiled.
"You know what your problem is, Leah? You keep thinking about people who have hurt you, left you. You keep thinking about where things went wrong. Or what was your fault. Or whose fault it was exactly. If you conclude it was their fault, you start hating them. Then you think why they must've done this, or done that. You somehow don't seem to realize that it's none of your business. Why certain people do certain things is basically, funadamentally, completely, entirely and officially THEIR problem. Look at yourself. You've ruined your own heart and mind thinking all this crap. And does it affect them? No, it doesn't. Because they know how to let go off things and move ahead. Leah, you can't change what had happened in the past. But you sure can forget it. It is for fate to decide how they pay for whatever wrong they have done, if they've done any. If you destroy your peace of mind thinking about things that don't even matter today, you are simply ruining yourself."
Leah frowned. The last thing she wanted was the girl in the mirror telling her off.
"I am back to the same point where I started. It's like I'm going around a Mobius strip!"
"No, you're not. Think about it, Leah. A part of your heart, a big one indeed, knows what you need to do now."
"But..things can never be the same again. I did forgive Jordan, didn't I? And we do talk. But he isn't what he used to be. Arthur and I can never talk again. And Emma..."
"Do you hate Arthur even now, Leah? Then how can you be so unfair to Emma? Calling her names and hating her so much? Having this fake friendship with her? If you can't be friends with her, let her go! Don't bind her to yourself with a bond so fake."
"I can't..let her go."
"You've known that always, haven't you? That you can't simply walk past her ignoring her existence? That her memories still make you smile? That even if you keep telling yourself the entire day that everything was fake, your heart won't believe it? That all you want to do is hug her tight and say, "Forget the crap!"? That you wronged her by not being there when she needed you?"
"STOP!"
The girl in the mirror smiled again. She was having it her way. 'Her' way. Leah was thinking in the right direction now. And she could see it.
"I'm done with all the inner battles now. I'm going to follow my heart. I don't wanna hate anyone. Especially not the girl whom I have loved so much. Yes, things cannot be exactly as they were. But they can be better. They'll be better! I haven't picked up anything very special for her coming birthday. She's turning eighteen and this is going to be special for her. I want to gift her the Lillykins that she loved, someone who loved her Em. I'm done with all the hating business and all the poison inside me has washed out. Happy Birthday, Em. I love you." Leah smiled. Her head had stopped aching. She felt at peace. The girl in the mirror smiled as well. Leah kissed the strip and placed it back on the study table. That night, she slept. With a smile on her face.
"Mobius strip? What's that, Li?" Emma asked, looking at Leah with her tiny eyes punctuated with question marks. She held a strip of paper whose ends were taped to one another in an unusual way. Leah smiled as she took the strip from Emma's hand and moved her finger along the edge of the strip. She started from a point and traced the edge of the strip without lifting her finger up and, quite to Emma's surprise, ended up at the same point from which she had started. Leah looked up at Emma and smiled as she noticed the look of bewilderment on her face.
"But..this can't be! This is clearly a three dimensional thing! This just can't be..!" Emma exclaimed.
"I knew you would react like that, sweetheart," Leah winked, "but this is true. This is a funny little thing I found on wikipedia the other day and I thought you were the best person who should be enlightened."
"Amazing! Simply amazing!" Emma said, eyeing the strip closely now and tracing her own finger along its edge to experience the magic herself.
The Mobius strip that Leah had prepared was a shabby one, she had torn of a piece of paper, given a half twist to one end and taped it to the other end. Emma quicky went inside and cut out a neat strip of paper and followed Leah's direction. She now held a well-defined Mobius strip in her hand.
"Here," she said, holding it out to Leah.
"Great job, Em!" Leah said, smiling as she took the perfect strip from Emma. Leah could never stop marveling at the genius of a person Emma was.
"Wear it like a band, Li!" Emma cried.
Leah slid the Mobius strip on her wrist, careful enough not to tear it during the process.
"That's for our friendship, isn't it? Something that has no end," Leah said, holding Emma's hand.
"It sure is!" Emma chimed.
The headache was starting to bother Leah now. She recalled her own words - "something that has no end". Over the past few months, her and Emma's friendship was anything but unending. With things crashing between her and Arthur like an avalanche, Leah couldn't bear the fact that Emma still found it okay to be Arthur's good, very good, friend. Every time she saw Emma being close to the boy who'd hurt Leah so much, she started fuming. No matter how much she tried to recollect all her good memories with Emma in order to drown out the feeling of hatred she felt for her, she failed. Miserably. "Her friendship, her memories, they were all fake! Just fake! She's been playing it fake all along! She is nothing but a bitch!" she would tell herself, every time her heart started contradicting her decision of pushing Emma away from herself. "But," she would find herself thinking, "she has her own life. She can choose her own friends. Arthur has hurt me, not her. If she finds a good friend in him, who am I to expect her to stop talking to him? Plus, I've forgiven Arthur for everything. There's no more hatred for him. I do miss him, yeah, as my best friend. I had always wanted him to be there in my life as a friend whom I cherished so much. I thought I had made myself pretty clear when I promised him that I've always wanted him to be there as a friend for me forever. But if he couldn't really take it, it's good we parted ways. Things wouldn't have been any better, anyway." And suddenly, Leah's mind would take a turn and she would find herself thinking, "But I broke myself away from Drew just for the sake of Emma. Because Emma wouldn't have loved it if I would've maintained my friendship with him. Now that she knew Drew liked me, it would be intolerable for my Em. How can Emma even think that I was the reason Drew put her through all this? The moment I realized that Drew was actually a bigger jerk than I thought was the moment when he told me he had loved me all along and that Emma was not even supposed to be in the picture. That was the day I had cried all night, dreading that this would end the friendship I shared with Emma. The next day, I had talked to Arthur about it and Arthur had straightaway told me to tell Emma the truth. "Are you sane, Arthur? You think I'd be able to tell her that without ruining what we have? Hell, no! I am not going to let anything hurt Emma. Yes, I will urge her to break up with that good for nothing jackass, but I won't tell her this. This will shatter her, Arthur. She won't be able to take it!" "But this is the truth, Leah. And Emma needs to face it. Maybe not now, but some day. You'll have to hurt her." Arthur had replied. "I'll tell her when she's over Drew. Not now. Please." she had said, turning away from him to hide her tears. Yet, Emma somewhere blamed her for everything that happened between Drew and her.She had always loved Emma. Her hard feelings had started erupting when Emma had started getting close to Arthur. Arthur wouldn't have enough messages left to talk to her because he'd been talking to Emma, and this would infuriate her. Almost everyone I talked to had told me Emma was wrong, but still I apologized because I knew the way I'd been harsh to her had hurt her. She had thought Emma would give up talking to him even at the slightest hint of knowing that she didn't like it, but Emma had ceased to do that. If she really considered me that good a friend, how couldn't she ever see through the smile I forced when she talked about her conversations with Arthur? She called herself dumb, but that doesn't make you insensitive, does it?" Leah was now holding her head in her hands as her head throbbed uncontrollably, filling her with unbearable pain. But her inner voices wouldn't stop.
"Emma has always wanted me to be happy. The happiness she felt when I told her about Neil was so evident in her smileys. If she longs for my happiness so much, how can I snatch away her happiness for my own selfish insecurities? Talking to Arthur, talking to Jordan makes her happy. Who am I to stop her?"
"But isn't it a bit strange that out of all the guys in the world, talking to those two makes her so happy? Why does she have to do all this? Throwing a party and inviting all of us together? She knows it'll only make me uncomfortable. She could've thrown a different party for the group and for her remaining friends. Is she doing all this only because she thinks I was the reason for things going so terribly wrong between her and Drew? Is she..." Leah gulped down a heavy bout of air before thinking the word that was constantly knocking on the doors of her mind, "...jealous?"
With this, she tried to stop the wave of thoughts that flowed in one after another.
"So what if it's Arthur, Jordan or any Tom, Dick and Harry with whom she talks? Why are they even making a difference to me when I'm so totally over what had happened between me and them? Why do I even have to care? There's Neil with me who keeps me so happy, so content. Emma has nobody like Neil to make her happy. So why do I have to crib so much if she tries to find happiness in little things like these? And why the hell do I keep forgetting the fact that I've forgiven Jordan and Arthur for everything? Then why am I being unjust to Emma by not forgiving her? And maybe, just maybe, I don't even have the right to actually 'forgive' her. Maybe whatever she did wasn't really that wrong as well. Maybe it wasn't wrong at all!"
Leah picked up the Mobius strip from her study table and absent-mindedly started tracing the edge with her finger. Her head felt very heavy now and it was aching more than ever, but she knew that this was going to be the last night for these thoughts. That she had to find answers to all her questions. That she'll have to decide. She thought about how many people had started hating Emma because of her. She wasn't feeling guilty about it, because she had never forced anyone to accept her decisions. Whenever she vented out her anger for Emma in front of her close friends, she just did it to lighten herself. She never meant to turn anyone away from Em. If they did that, it was their choice. Not an option Leah had given them. Her finger reached back to the point from where it had started. Leah stopped and stared at the strip. "Something that has no end," she recalled. The debate of her inner voices didn't have an end as well. She found herself standing at the same place from where she had started. "What am I supposed to do now?" she thought.
She went and stood in front of the mirror. The girl gazing back at her looked wary. Exhausted. Her large almond eyes seemed to have sunken in.
"What on earth have I done to myself?" she thought as she looked at the girl in the mirror.
"You've started hating people, Leah. And you waste too much energy on that." the girl in the mirror replied.
"Wasting energy hating people? Okay, I know you are my reflection. But you can't really talk shit at times like these!" Leah replied. The girl in the mirror smiled.
"You know what your problem is, Leah? You keep thinking about people who have hurt you, left you. You keep thinking about where things went wrong. Or what was your fault. Or whose fault it was exactly. If you conclude it was their fault, you start hating them. Then you think why they must've done this, or done that. You somehow don't seem to realize that it's none of your business. Why certain people do certain things is basically, funadamentally, completely, entirely and officially THEIR problem. Look at yourself. You've ruined your own heart and mind thinking all this crap. And does it affect them? No, it doesn't. Because they know how to let go off things and move ahead. Leah, you can't change what had happened in the past. But you sure can forget it. It is for fate to decide how they pay for whatever wrong they have done, if they've done any. If you destroy your peace of mind thinking about things that don't even matter today, you are simply ruining yourself."
Leah frowned. The last thing she wanted was the girl in the mirror telling her off.
"I am back to the same point where I started. It's like I'm going around a Mobius strip!"
"No, you're not. Think about it, Leah. A part of your heart, a big one indeed, knows what you need to do now."
"But..things can never be the same again. I did forgive Jordan, didn't I? And we do talk. But he isn't what he used to be. Arthur and I can never talk again. And Emma..."
"Do you hate Arthur even now, Leah? Then how can you be so unfair to Emma? Calling her names and hating her so much? Having this fake friendship with her? If you can't be friends with her, let her go! Don't bind her to yourself with a bond so fake."
"I can't..let her go."
"You've known that always, haven't you? That you can't simply walk past her ignoring her existence? That her memories still make you smile? That even if you keep telling yourself the entire day that everything was fake, your heart won't believe it? That all you want to do is hug her tight and say, "Forget the crap!"? That you wronged her by not being there when she needed you?"
"STOP!"
The girl in the mirror smiled again. She was having it her way. 'Her' way. Leah was thinking in the right direction now. And she could see it.
"I'm done with all the inner battles now. I'm going to follow my heart. I don't wanna hate anyone. Especially not the girl whom I have loved so much. Yes, things cannot be exactly as they were. But they can be better. They'll be better! I haven't picked up anything very special for her coming birthday. She's turning eighteen and this is going to be special for her. I want to gift her the Lillykins that she loved, someone who loved her Em. I'm done with all the hating business and all the poison inside me has washed out. Happy Birthday, Em. I love you." Leah smiled. Her head had stopped aching. She felt at peace. The girl in the mirror smiled as well. Leah kissed the strip and placed it back on the study table. That night, she slept. With a smile on her face.
