Her empty bed was not directly in my sight, but I could still see it through the corner of my eyes. I tried hard to ignore it, but it glared at my senses like an itch that demanded to be scratched. There were three of us sharing this room, but her absence still left a gaping void. We tried to go on like before, but it was starting to feel forced. Dinner-table conversations were pathetic attempts at regaining a lost camaraderie. Hopelessly, we struggled to find her.
What went wrong? I couldn’t help but wonder. Was it something I did? Was it something one of the others did? Nobody knew, nobody could tell. Every petty fight we had had, every tiny misunderstanding — they all came back to me in a swirling eddy of memories. I tried to zero in on the one moment that had started it all but came up with nothing. Living those memories again felt like taking a dive into the sea without an oxygen mask; they were so overwhelming that I often had to come back up to the surface to gulp in some air.
I sifted through each incident, trying to find what had been the breaking point, but again, I found nothing. Nothing to show what had given her the desire to just leave like that — without a goodbye, without any explanations, without even a note to explain herself. She had just waltzed in to the room one normal day, packed her things up, and left. She left in such a hurry that none of us realized what she was doing until it was too late. We tried to run after her, but she had disappeared.
In retrospect, I realize that it was selfish of her to behave the way she did. True, we might not have been the best roommates to her. We might even have been bad friends. Regardless, she owed us an explanation. Where had she gone? What had triggered this drastic move? What did we do to deserve this painful loss?
We should have seen it coming. Thinking back, the signs of her depleting mental stability were quite obvious. We should have noticed them, we should have picked up on them. She had turned into a recluse. Her appetite had reduced to just one meal a day and scraps for dinner. She didn’t laugh as much as she used to — and even when she did, her laughter echoed with a twinge of sadness. Conversations with her were increasingly grim. She didn’t catch much sleep at night, and this manifested itself as dark circles and lost bodily weight.
And yet, we did nothing. Of what use were roommates, nay, friends, who didn’t notice her steady descent into depression? Of what use were we if we couldn’t pick up on these blaringly obvious signs? We had let her down, and it was now too late to correct our failure.
Was it right to feel angry at her for leaving the way she had, when we were to blame?
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