“Hello Mr.Kropodkin”- Randi Said, her voice as cold as the barrel of the levelled submachine gun. “Shall I cut you in two now, or should we wait until later.”
I was having a peaceful night with a book in one hand and a bowl of something potato-based mysterious carbohydrates on which I was conducting important private research between the reads. The food was somewhere between dinner and a cry for help. The dish had no official name, no nutritional dignity, and no future in culinary history.
Then the bell rang again…That was when the bell rang.
Not once.
Not twice.
But repeatedly, like someone was either being chased by assassins or possessed by a bladder that had completely lost faith in timing.
I book marked the page, closed the book and paced towards the door.
“Who is it?” I called out.
“Open up!” came the voice from outside. “It’s me!”
I opened the door and there he was: my friend Mike. Hair disheveled. Eyes wild. Breathing like a man who had just sprinted away from common sense. He entered the room with the tragic energy of a campus hero who had failed out, betrayed by attendance.
He had come for information.
Mike stumbled in, sat down, took one look at my mysterious bowl of food I was having and asked, “What’s that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s between a snack and an accident.”. “That’s my pre-midnight snack, grab a spoon, a chair and help yourself”
He nodded solemnly, took a spoon, and began eating as if carbohydrates might give him courage.
For a while, there was silence. Only the metallic clink of spoon against plate. The soft chew of confusion. The kind of pause that tells you a man is either about to confess a murder or a crush.
Finally, he spoke.
“I like a girl.”
Of course he did.
No man comes to another man’s house at midnight unless a woman is involved or his computer has crashed. Now, let me explain something about men in love. A normal man has a working brain. A man in love has a slideshow. Logic leaves the body. Pattern recognition becomes dangerous. If a girl adjusts her hair once, he sees destiny. If she says “hi,” he begins mentally choosing curtains for their future living room.
I leaned back and looked at him the way doctors look at X-rays and astrologers look at weak planets.
“Go on,” I said. “Tell me where Cupid hit you. Was it the chest or directly in the common sense?”
He sighed. “It’s serious.”
That sentence alone should be declared a public warning.
Nothing good has ever begun with “It’s serious” after 10 p.m.
He continued in the trembling voice of a man whose soul had recently gone wireless.
“She’s… different.”
Ah yes. The classic symptom.
Not pretty. Not smart. Not kind. Just “different.”
That ancient word used by men throughout history to describe a woman about whom they know absolutely nothing.
“Its something like this…I like this girl so much… ” said my friend and looked at my face for a response.
Since I am having a permanent constipated grimace on my face and the rest covered by beard, and spectacles, I don’t think he read anything more from my face.”
I adjusted my posture, because this was no longer a conversation. This was a briefing.
“Who is she?” I asked.
He looked at me dramatically, lowered his voice, and said, “The girl next door to your apartment.”
I blinked.
Not next door to his heart.
Not next door to destiny.. or..
Next door to his apartment.
He moved forward and sat on the edge of the chair, continued speaking as though unveiling a classified international operation.
“I don’t know much about her,” he said. “I need information.”
There it was.
He was conducting an emotional census.
I stared at him for a moment, trying to understand the scale of the problem.
“You need information?” I asked. “What is this? Love or a background verification?”
He leaned forward.
“Do you know her name?”
Now, I should explain something. Mike had not come to the right man for moral guidance. He had come to me. And I have two default settings in life: sarcasm and unnecessary analysis.
So naturally, I took this very seriously in the least useful way possible.
“My friend,” I said, in the tone of a retired philosopher who had once suffered beautifully, “women are mysterious.”
He nodded.
I continued, because once I start nonsense, I commit to it.
“Buddy… I understand you, see, woman, they are complex like a rubberband, mysterious like Bermuda Triangle or the lost city of Atlantis or the smile of her highness Cleopatra…Very mysterious indeed, my friend. “
I changed the pitch of my voice like that of I was giving a lecture on Quantum Physics and continued.
“Their behavior pattern, My friend… can be mapped precisely to the flight of a butterfly on the sandy beaches of Hawaii, at times comrade… you need to handle them like you handle nitroglycerine eggs, very delicate they are.”
“As for now, let me conclude that for you, she is like an uncharted territory, a small blip on your radar, an undocumented wild flower in the Amazonian Rain forest.”
Mike blinked. “So… you know her?”
“No,” I said. “But I have seen her cuz she lives near my apartment”
This changed everything.
His eyes widened.
“Is she single?” Inquired my friend
“Yeah! unless I am diagnosed with a double vision defect. How do I know? I see her doing yoga on the terrace everyday early morning.” I answered my friends query.
“Are you seeing her ?” Asked my friend in a feeble voice.
“Yes!! My window opens to the side of her terrace and I am “Seeing” her every day.
“Oh! that way!! I thought”, my friend said with a sigh of relief.
To a man in love, those two words sound like access to state intelligence.
He grabbed the edge of his chair. “How much do you know?”
Now I had his full attention. The room had become an interrogation chamber. I was no longer a friend. I had become an unwilling field agent. A low-budget James Bond for idiots. A neighborhood Sherlock with less cocaine and more sarcasm.
So I gave him what any responsible friend would give in such a situation:
Absolutely useless information.
“Well,” I said, “I know she exists. That’s a strong start. She appears human. She returns home at regular intervals, which suggests employment or at least routine. She has mastered the art of walking past balconies without noticing grown men mentally writing wedding speeches.”
Mike did not laugh.
He was too far gone.
“She works in IT, I think,” I added.
“I know that.”
“She’s short.”
“I know that too.”
“She has hair.”
He looked at me in pain.
Now, there are moments in friendship when the truth must be faced. This was one of them. Mike had built a cathedral of emotion using three bricks: proximity, hairstyle, and wishful thinking.
This was not love at first sight.
This was buffering.
Still, he pressed on.
“Can you find out more?”
There it was again. The plea.
That dangerous request men make to friends when they don’t want help — they want espionage.
“Find out more?” I said. “What am I supposed to do? Launch Operation Neighborly Nonsense?”
He looked hopeful.
I should have been alarmed by how hopeful he looked.
He wanted the full package: name, number, interests, schedule, probably blood group if available.
He was not asking for romance. He was asking for customer support.
“Listen carefully,” I said. “This is delicate. You cannot just go charging in like a confused Labrador with feelings. There is a process.”
He nodded like I was about to reveal the secrets of the universe.
“The process,” I said, “is called behaving normally.”
He looked disappointed immediately.
Apparently, normal behavior had not made the shortlist.
“Fine,” he said. “At least tell me how to get her phone number.”
I looked at him for a long moment.
It is in moments like this that friendship becomes community service.
“You could,” I said, “make a fake survey form, knock on her door, and say you’re collecting data on single women in the neighborhood.”
He stared at me.
I continued, because when sarcasm begins, mercy exits.
“Ask for name, age, phone number, hobbies, favorite snacks, preferred wedding season, and whether she believes in destiny or central air conditioning.”
He groaned. “Be serious.”
“I am serious,” I said. “That plan is only 92% terrible.”
He sat there, defeated, spoon in hand, staring at the bowl as though potatoes might offer emotional guidance.
Then immediately recovered and asked, “At least find out if she’s single.”
This is what infatuation does. It turns intelligent men into emotionally sponsored wildlife.
I decided to help him in the only way available to me: by mocking him so hard that wisdom might occur accidentally.
“Here’s your plan,” I said. “Step one: calm down. Step two: stop behaving like she’s the final treasure in a mythological side quest. Step three: talk to her like a normal human being.”
Mike looked at me with disappointment so pure it could have been bottled.
Normal was not what he came for.
He came for tactics.
He wanted a shortcut. A trick. A glorious loophole in the universe that would let him skip the terrifying part where he actually has to introduce himself without sounding like a malfunctioning refrigerator.
“But what do I say?” he asked.
I looked at him, then looked at the ceiling, then looked at destiny itself and found it unserious.
“What do you say?” I replied. “Oh, I don’t know, maybe words? A greeting? Something from the ancient lost language of basic conversation?”
He ignored the sarcasm and waited sincerely, like a confused pigeon in a philosophy seminar.
So I gave him examples.
“You say: ‘Hi.’ That one is classic.”
He nodded.
“Or: ‘Hello.’ Very advanced.”
He nodded again.
“Or if you’re feeling reckless: ‘Good morning.’ But don’t attempt that until you’ve built up your confidence and checked local weather conditions.”
He rubbed his face. “You’re not helping.”
“On the contrary,” I said, “I am the only thing standing between you and a restraining order.”
Then came the great philosophical question of the night.
“Do you think she could be my partner?”
There was silence.
Outside, the moon continued its work without interruption.
A dog barked in the distance, perhaps in warning.
I looked at Mike with the compassion one reserves for the temporarily possessed.
It is said that we should not interrupt patients with psychological conditions, they can turn violent.
But he was gone. Spiritually gone. The poor man had crossed into that shimmering desert where every coincidence becomes a sign. If she opened a window, he would call it fate. If she watered a plant, he would interpret it as proof of emotional depth.
It was useless.
He was cooked.
Charred.
Romantically sautéed.
Still, after much tea, mockery, potato debris, and emergency verbal CPR, I managed to drag him back toward the border of sanity.
He finally admitted the awful truth.
“So there’s no shortcut?”
At last. At last! The birth of reason.
Men in love do not use evidence. They use weather patterns in the heart.
I nodded with the compassion usually reserved for the mildly concussed.
“Yes,” I said. “And I have a feeling one day you’ll name your children after software updates.”
A while later, Mike left. He vanished into the night carrying hope, hormones, and exactly zero useful data.
I closed the door, sat back down, and stared into the distance.
Somewhere out there was a girl peacefully living her life.
And somewhere else out there was my friend, already planning a future based on absolutely nothing except adjacency and adrenaline.
Love, I reflected, is a beautiful thing.
But from a safe distance, it has all the elegance and restraint of a landslide with feelings.
Because the moment a man falls for the girl next door, he stops being a person and becomes a part-time detective, full-time idiot, and unpaid poet of his own delusions.
And the friend he runs to?
That unfortunate creature becomes the local intelligence agency.
Which is how I, a man trying to enjoy potatoes in peace, ended up as Director of Romantic Investigations for a mission that had no budget, no logic, and every chance of ending in spectacular embarrassment.
Friendship, after all, is just love with worse assignments.
“Friendship, after all, is just love with worse assignments.“- Sorcerer