She had written the message seventeen times.
The first version was angry.
The second was polite.
The third sounded as if nothing had happened.
She deleted all three.
It had been nine months since Priya and Anu had spoken properly.
Not because of one big fight.
Because of a hundred small things.
A cancelled lunch.
A birthday message sent two days late.
A conversation that ended with “We’ll talk later.”
Later never came.
At night, Priya sometimes opened their old chat.
There were photographs of terrible coffee, badly parked scooters and one holiday where they had laughed for three straight days.
She missed that woman.
She wasn’t sure she missed the friendship.
That was the problem.
One evening she typed:
“I don’t know when we stopped being us.”
She stared at it.
Deleted.
She typed:
“I miss you.”
Deleted.
Then:
“How are you?”
She almost sent that one.
Instead she put the phone down.
The next morning, she found an old photograph while cleaning.
She and Anu were sitting on the floor of a railway station eating samosas from a paper packet.
Priya didn’t remember who took the photograph.
She remembered the samosas.
She remembered Anu stealing the bigger one.
She remembered being annoyed for exactly three seconds.
Then they had laughed.
Priya opened the chat.
This time she didn’t write anything about the friendship.
She sent the photograph.
Nothing else.
For two hours, there was no reply.
Then the phone buzzed.
“You still owe me a samosa.”
Priya laughed.
She typed:
“You stole it.”
Three dots appeared.
“Exactly.”
Priya looked at the photograph again.
She didn’t know what would happen next.
For once, she didn’t need to.
Read this when a friendship has gone quiet and you don’t know whether to knock on the door.
If this story stayed with you…
The Call He Never Made · Five Minutes on the Balcony · She Always Sent Me Home With Something
About the Author
I’m the writer behind The Quiet Things, where I write about love, family, memory, healing, regret and the quiet moments people rarely put into words.
