I called him that evening, heart singing, mind made up. This was the day, I could feel the positive energy wanting to shoot out my fingertips as I dialled the number and held the phone up to my ear. ‘Hey’ I said, almost shouting to hide the flurry of emotion in my stomach, and to outmatch the tremble in my voice. The only way to push out the nervousness is to overcompensate, no? To create the picture of a normal you on a normal evening of a normal day while the phone hides your terrified heart and face. It wasn’t a text – after much contemplation on how to broach the subject in this newfound age – so my voice was one less filter that I could skilfully use to hide my pounding chest, unless ofcourse he could hear the tiny thuds rushing through the telephone wires.

‘Hey!’ he said, exuberant, except the real kind, not the kind that was hiding a tumultuous undercurrent of feelings, I suppose. A stream of conversation ensued, with my head doing both – anxiously waiting for a pause in the conversation, to pour into that gap a bottle of emotions, and also exulting with joy when it didn’t come, relieved to keep the lid on a little longer.

Well, the pause never came, and I never told him, and he had to go, eventually. I wonder “what if” I had made it that day, I had been able to tell him and most probably hear back in the negative. I suppose it could’ve been a broken heart, or a broken friendship. And honestly, despite the sentiment of seizing the day, I’m okay it was neither.