“Do you think I am a bad person?” he asks.

I do not reply. And I prefer not to reply.

Why? Because I barely knew him. Had met him for half a day, and spoken to him over chat on a not so regular way. I honestly was not the person from whom he should have been asking the question.

“Does it matter what I think?” I reply.

“It does,” he says. (Though his behavior to me of late gave no sign of him being bothered as to what I thought of  him.)

And then he goes and does his usual disappearing act, of keeping me on hold in a conversation, and then not responding to whatever I would have to say to him.

It’s funny how I had spent a lot of time trying to grasp what type of a person he was during the last few weeks. The person I met in real life was a lovely being, who seemed silent and minding his own business with intervals of random humming of music. He would speak of the rain which seems to top his list of interests, and say “beautiful” after watching me tie my hair.

Surely a woman could like a man who does that, someone who watches you as if you had fallen from heaven, and then inform you how beautiful you look after watching you with puppy eyes. So yeah, he seemed nice enough for a first encounter.

But I could not obviously answer his question from yesterday without being a liar. Did I think he was a bad person? Well I did not think he was a good person either. He was a little too indifferent, a little too self-centered and the world seemed to rotate for him in a different pace. The pace that was comfortable for him, and at a pace which would least affect him with not much concern over those who seemed to be around him.

Then again, who am I to judge? He was an element of my life from the past, which was slowly fading away, and in which I had got tired of investing energy and effort.

I tell him what I feel, text him in my usual way, after having waited for an hour to hear why he asked me that question in the first place.

Reply : “ You seem a nice enough human being, who seem indifferent and slightly self-centered. And every time I speak to you, I am filled with a vacuum within me for having tried to converse with you, and end up draining all my energy and effort.”

I would never be sure whether he reads what I type, or whether it would make any sense. I am sure he would think in his head, as he usually tells me “I think you have gone mad!”

Well then, you asked, I told.

Aiden calls. I had been trying to get through to him, and found his line busy. He calls to say that he was on a conference call (he knows my paranoia and trust issues since my former husband’s ventures).

“It’s some friendship day today and people have been texting me the whole day!”

I burst out laughing. He had that effect on me, simply by successfully whining.

Note: Thank you team for putting up with weeks long analysis of a human being, and for keeping me off cheesecake.