We Kissed Once and Talked About It for Years
One moment became the longest conversation of our friendship.
The kiss lasted maybe four seconds. The conversation about it is currently in its ninth year.
It happened on the roof of Kabir's uncle's building in October 2017, at the farewell party none of us wanted to admit was a farewell. Someone's speaker was playing an acoustic cover of a song that was already a cover. The city below us was switching itself on, window by window, and Sana and I were sitting on the water tank sharing the last warm beer because we had lost the toss for the cold ones.
I do not know who started it. I have claimed it was her for nine years and she has claimed it was me for nine years, and at this point the dispute is load-bearing. What I know is that she laughed at something unfunny I said, and then she was not laughing... and then it was happening, brief and clumsy and tasting faintly of that terrible beer, and then a door banged somewhere below and we sprang apart like two magnets flipped the wrong way.
She said, huh.
I said, yeah.
That was the entire debrief. The next morning she left for her new job in Pune and I stayed in Delhi and we did what any two cowards with a good thing would do. We protected the friendship. We filed the kiss under miscellaneous and got on with our twenties.
Except we did not file it.
We footnoted it. Endlessly.
It started that December, a message at 1 a.m.: so are we ever going to talk about the roof?
We talked about the roof for three hours and resolved nothing, which set the format for what became, I am not exaggerating, an annual tradition. Every October, give or take, one of us would open the case again.
We litigated that kiss like two junior lawyers with one file. We examined timing, intent, beer-related mitigating factors.
We agreed it meant nothing. We agreed it obviously meant something. We agreed the only real mistake would be ruining the friendship, and we said the word friendship the way you say a password, carefully, so the door stays shut.
Meanwhile the timing kept doing stand-up comedy at our expense. The year I was finally single, she had just met Aditya. The year that ended, I had just started something with a colleague. Once we were both single for an entire overlapping March and neither of us noticed until August. If you have ever had a friend like this, you know: it is not a love story. It is a scheduling problem with feelings.
Around year five, a writing habit I had picked up got involved. I had started doing a daily prompt to keep myself sane during a bad job, and one evening the prompt said: write about a door you never opened. I wrote about the roof in eleven minutes flat, barely breathing, and then sat back and stared at what my own hand had produced. I posted it on a wall where poets share drafts, changed just enough details to be deniable. A stranger commented: whoever this is about... tell them.
Sana found the poem in four days.
Of course she did. She sent me a screenshot with one line: nice water tank.
So in year six, we finally did it. We told them. Both of them, each other, out loud, on the phone, no beer involved. We said maybe we have been idiots. We said let's actually try. We booked a real date for the next time she was in Delhi, a proper restaurant, the kind with cloth napkins and a man who refills your water like it is a sacred duty.
Here is the part nobody warned me about.
It was awful.
Not dramatic awful. Worse: polite awful. We dressed up for each other and became strangers. Nine years of instant shorthand evaporated somewhere between the menu and the starters.
I heard myself asking her what she liked to do on weekends. I have known this woman since she threw up on my shoes at Kabir's birthday. I know what she does on weekends. We attempted a kiss at the end, both leaning with the commitment of people signing a gym contract, and it was... and I say this with love... like shaking hands with lips.
She pulled back and looked at me and said the truest sentence of the whole nine years:
oh no. We like the almost.
Some loves are not meant to be lived in. They are meant to be kept, like a window you never open but never brick shut.
We sat in her rented car outside the restaurant for two hours after that, talking the way we actually talk, shoes off, seat reclined, and performed the autopsy together. What we loved was not each other, or not only. It was the almost itself: the one unspent coin, the parallel life kept in mint condition precisely because it was never used. Every October we had not been reopening a wound. We had been polishing a memory, the one door in each of our houses that led somewhere unbuilt. Open it, and it is just another room. Keep it shut, and it is infinite.
You can call that cowardice. For years I did. I have spent whole train rides mourning the version of us that a braver man might have collected in 2017, and I will not pretend there is no regret in this story, because regret is the rent you pay on any road not taken. But I have come to believe something gentler too. Some people arrive in your life as a question, and the friendship is the answer, and the romance was only ever the question mark: necessary, decorative, holding the whole sentence up.
She married Aditya in 2023. I read a poem at the wedding, an actual commissioned piece about love that shows up wearing sensible shoes instead of a costume. Aditya knows everything, including the water tank, and finds the entire saga much funnier than we do. My girlfriend calls Sana my co-author, which is the most accurate description anyone has managed.
The annual October message still comes. It has evolved. It used to be, should we talk about it? For a while it was, can you believe us? Last year it was just a photo of a warm beer on a shop counter, no caption... None needed.
Then, this June, her housewarming. New city, new building, and after dinner the two of us ended up, without planning it, on the roof. Of course we did. Dusk was doing its slow trick, the sky going from orange to that bruised blue, the city below switching itself on window by window, exactly like nine years ago, as if the electrician of the universe has only one move.
We sat on the ledge with our drinks. Downstairs, the people we love were laughing at something we could not hear.
Neither of us mentioned it.
First October-adjacent rooftop in nine years where nobody opened the file.
She just knocked her shoulder against mine, once, and I knocked hers back, and we watched the lights come on.
That was the whole conversation. It turned out to be the ending we had been drafting for nine years: not the kiss, not the wedding, not the brave speech in the rain.
Just two people who kept the window shut, sitting beside it together, admiring the view.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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