She checked her inbox the tenth embarrassing time with a faint hope of receiving an email from him. The tiresome dissatisfaction hovered over her as she struggled with the fundamental logic behind her two-week-old obsession. It couldn't possibly be anything more than her tedious, chore-driven, mind-numbing, lifeless, everyday routine driving this mad rush up her veins. She had never been the type to express her discontent but lately she had been longing for something, anything better than her current disposition. The cacophony in her head played trumpet with the devil residing in her heart. That, however insane it may sound, became the irrational motive behind her trivial yet repetitive action of cell phone and email check. It was an unhealthy and compulsive preoccupation with her, not a stranger anymore, friend. I guess she could call him that or was he more than that. He was the inspiration to her creative outlet and the foundation of a new society she was now a part of, society of clingy and needy people. It was not completely out of character perhaps and yet she wasn't always able to justify it to anyone. It was clearly a close friendship. What else could it be? The whole argument was based on conjecture and that bothered her to no end because she was a scientist by trade though lately she had begun to question that as well. 

It was one of those days, deadening and irksome. She was unsuccessful in creating the report that she had promised herself she would, by close of business that day. Her resplendent native simplicity was her biggest supporter as she gasped her way, completing the three very long miles on the treadmill. Her hugs didn't seem to be adding any specific value to her day either. She ruled the day out as an exception to the normal Monday but it wasn't. In fact, it was better than most Mondays. Just that her head constantly churned, making everything around her turbid. She tried to think about him, unemotionally, because on Mondays she did that. It seemed natural to her as she accepted the misgivings of her day, the almost humbling meeting that she had chaired and the loneliness she felt during lunch time that she used to enjoy before she had met him. It's not like she didn't have other friends but recently her life revolved around him. The only thing to her advantage was the fact that she was a hard-nosed pragmatic who rarely believed in longevity of most relationships. The property of long-lived relationships was not something she owned because they were far and few in between. 

Her life was entangled with several other lives that had met in the past several years. I couldn't tell if her past dictated who she was today or it just determined her essential qualities. Neither differences in language nor culture ever delineated her passion for a theatrical attitude shift. She had fallen in love, matter of speaking, more than she cared to admit publicly. These men had conveniently ranged from appropriate marital status to a complicated one. These had been at different phases of her life and hence the intensities didn't have any correlation with each other. What all of them did have in common was her deterministic passion. But she liked to think that she had successfully altered her ways and was someone she could see eye to eye with. She had scripted her life to include new experiences and was devoid of the banal emotion associated with her past. Today she was clear to her mind with an easily perceptible manner, entertained by a new friendship all along promising herself to not add her new 'friend' to her list of her previous abortive relationships.