A Journey to Trust and Heal

73- Disastrous Birthday

I was failing at my practice yet again. Instead of having my focus at getting better, my whole attention was on seeing that Maitri didn't get hurt because of my friendship with Rudra and this clearly affected my healing process.

"Stop, just stop", Rudra stopped our practice when I failed again.

"Rudra...I", I started but was interrupted by him.

"Enough Sia. Stop with the excuses and tell me what's wrong. I would have understood if you weren't improving but you are going backwards now.

Forget new trials, you are not able to handle the space you were able to even before starting the process.

Tell me what's the problem. Did I do something to make you feel unsafe around me? Atleast let me know if you are scared because of me", Rudra spoke in a rejected voice.

"Sorry", whispering an apology, I left the living room.

Shutting the door of my room, I plopped down on my bed, cursing and screaming at myself.

My stupidity not only affected my healing process but also hurted all my friends who wasted their time for me.

Rudra was right, I was spiraling backwards and that wasn't okay. There's has to be some way where neither my practice suffered, nor Maitri's feelings got hurt.

There was a knock on my door. Probably, Rudra or Jiya would have come to lecture me. Before I could respond, the door opened and in came Maitri.

"Am I so bad?", she asked before coming to sit beside me.

"Umm...what?", I asked, confused by her question.

"I know Jiya is the smart one of our group but that doesn't mean that others don't have brains.

It's not hard to put two and two together. Your performance has been degrading since last week, the day Rudra and I got into relationship.

So that's why I am asking you this question- Am I so bad that you felt like sabotaging your friendship with Rudra?

Please tell me if I am the reason behind this. I would never be happy with him if that happiness comes at the cost of your friendship.

Am I so bad, for you to feel that I won't trust you two to not go behind my back?", she asked with a sad smile, making me feel pathetic for my actions.

It would have been better if she would have just screamed at me or even hit me but this made me feel like I was the worst person on this planet.

"It's not like that Maitri. I didn't want you to get upset seeing my bond with Rudra. We must have been too close for you to mistake us as girlfriend- boyfriend. So I was trying to cut it down a little", I made a feeble attempt to explain my side.

She snorted at my words, "Cut it down a little? You just stopped interacting with him altogether and that too without giving him any explanation. Do you even realize how sad and rejected he felt because of your actions?"

Now she was getting angry. She stood up from the bed and started pacing around the room while simultaneously glaring at me.

"Don't even talk about me being upset. Yes, I got confused so what? You will destroy your friendship, just like that? There's a limit to stupidity, Sia and you have crossed all the boundaries.

I was upset because I didn't knew what to do with my feelings as at that point I thought you two were in a relationship. The reason behind my sadness was the fear of hurting you because of my newly found feelings and not because of your bond with him, stupid", she shouted, getting frustrated while I sat there clutching my head.

"I am so so sorry", I apologized feeling truly guilty.

"You need to apologize to Rudra. One last thing, I will let you know if your actions hurts me or I don't like them. So don't keep looking over your shoulders to see if I am okay or not", saying this she dragged me downstairs.

After lots of explanation and lots of apologies, we all were good.

"Today's practice also went bad. No problem, we will try again tomorrow and this time hopefully succeed, seeing everything is okay again", Jiya announced before starting to pack her things to leave.

"But...but tomorrow is my birthday", I whined.

"We don't practice for 24 hours. We can easily practice without disturbing your birthday celebration. You are not going to get holiday, take this as a punishment for worrying us this whole week", Maitri spoke sternly, not giving me a chance to argue.

                         ~~~•~~~

Next day morning:

All my friends gathered early in the morning so that we could get over with the practice and I could have the whole day for my birthday.

After receiving the birthday wishes, we started the process.

As always Trio was cheering for me, giving me motivation whenever I got scared while Rudra stood still, not moving at all so as to give me full control over the situation.

I was slowly moving towards him, when Trio abruptly stopped cheerly. Looking towards them in confusion, I noticed them staring behind me.

Turning around, I saw my whole family- Mom, Raghav, Tanya, Raghav's parents, Rishi, Nikhil and Jay standing at the door with lots of balloons amd gifts in their hands.

"We were....we were just practicing for the play", Shanaya tried to lie but Raghav stopped her.

"Shanaya please, don't make this worse by lying. We were standing here for more than 5 minutes and have seen and heard everything", Raghav said showing his palm.

Apparently lying to strangers in the park was different than lying to your family members, who had known me since the day I was born.

"What is all this, Sia? Why did you hide your problem from us?", Mom asked, hurt and shock clear in her voice.

"You promised me that you won't hide more things from me after that nightmare problems", Tanya said feeling cheated.

One by one all of them started questioning me and yelling at me. I don't know what Jay understood from all this but he too yelled at me.

Trisha and Samar too joined the questioning. They hadn't come here as Trisha was in her 8th month of pregnancy but they were on a video call as they too wanted to be a part of surprise which later turned into shock.

Hurt, shock, anger, worry- all these emotions were clear on everybody's faces.

This wouldn't have happened if we didn't try out the process today. But for my friends, birthday wasn't an acceptable excuse for ditching practice.

I couldn't even be angry on them, they didn't knew that my family would come here to surprise me.

My fears were open to them now, the worst part- I wasn't the one to inform them about it.

In short, my birthday was a disaster.