I love entering other’s lives, nudging their doors open in a quiet, noiseless way, being their uninvited, invisible guest. It really puts me on edge. Glancing at people through the peep holes of their social networks (especially Facebook)  seeing their lives, their moments of happiness, their times of tragedies, making assessment of those and comparing them to the data of my own life tantalises me. It entices and invites me. It is my favorite and only pastime in a room radiating absolute boredom and dullness diffusing from every corner.

It was a chilly winter evening when it happened.  I was preparing tea in the kitchen when I heard that irresistible sound of a Facebook notification. It was from a group called “WORD FIGHTER”— those kinds of groups where rookies with a very limited sense of rhymes and poetry judge themselves as poets and act as though they are Keats or Wordsworth. On a normal evening, I wouldn’t have dared to enter that group, but it was the dullest evening of my life so I checked it out anyway.  There was a crappy poem from my friend Angela moaning  about how her boyfriend dumped her and how love hurts so no one should ever fall in love and other depressing rubbish; I was just about to exit from that group when I saw something. Some girl named Alonika Sharma had commented on Angela’s poem. She wrote, “He was not your true love anyway. You should get over him and try searching for true love again. Say goodbye to minor bumps and be ready for the journey of life”. Such cheesy lines of consolations, I joked in my mind.  It was not those lines that got me drew me towards her. It was her name. Alonika, what a weird name, I thought and within a few seconds I found myself looking at her Facebook profile.

Alonika Sharma, boy she must be alone then I chuckled. From her photos, she appeared to be in her late teens, with a fair complexion, and maybe had a height of about five foot two. Wow, I thought, exactly what I need in a girl. Marilyn Monroe was on her current cover photo with her quote, “ It’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than to be absolutely boring. Wow, we share the same philosophies too, I thought. A girl who suits me in every possible way. I thought my mind up would swell up any moment and if I did not stop thinking about her it might explode.

These days, people are conscious about their social network profiles. It is very rare that you can view someone’s Facebook profile without being his/her friend and the probability decreases if she is a girl and it becomes negligible if she is from a city. Fortunately, Alonika belonged to that negligible group of people. I couldn’t wait to explore her timeline. I read all of her status updates. The most recent was the one she had posted two days ago; it  could have been a pop song, a poem she wrote herself, some lines from a Nicholas Sparks novel, I honestly do not know. The exact lines were:

“Hold me close and hold me fast

 as two bodies with romantic souls on sand cast

 a meadow to our one shadow

and never let me go”

She sure has some romantic fantasies, I thought.  I was done for the evening and was about to log out then I saw a comment from Punky Prakash II; he had written, “ I neVeR wIlL :p “. The smiley ‘:p’ has always bugged me. It irritates me. It is as if someone is teasing a child by hanging their tongue out. But I had to prepare myself, for the evening of irritation had just started. That piece of junk surely does not know what punk even means, I assumed. And what is II? Is he some kind of Batman movie? I thought. He was one of those typical cocky teenagers whom you find now and then on Facebook, those wannabes who have a huge problem writing with correct spelling and using the correct words. I mean what language is “cho—chweet”; must be Chinglish—half Chinese half English, I joked in my mind. Then came one of the biggest shocks of my life. From my research I found that they were having a romantic affair.   Well you must have assumed that Punky Prakash II was bad, but how bad? Let me tell you. Take the worst person you know, multiply that by hundred, and you end up with him. I can swear I am five hundred times better than him. His face was like some stale, rotten dessert with pimples for garnishing. He had written all of his status in mixed upper and lower cases like “i aM lAmE” those are not the exact words, but lame he certainly was. The question that was eating me that evening was: What on earth is a smart beautiful chick doing with a clueless phony geek like him?

It must have been a week that I had continued stalking her. I watched and analysed each of her status updates, photos and notes. I thought of sending her a friend request but who was I kidding? She must have thought of me as some random vulgar stranger on the Internet who sends requests to every girl he sees on Facebook. So I dropped that idea and continued stalking her.

Let me tell you something about the Internet; the Internet can be an addiction but it’s not the Internet you are addicted to; it’s something like “ You are not addicted to texting, you are addicted to the person you are texting.”  I had read that line on some Facebook page I absolutely agree with. I was addicted to Alonika—I was look at the same photos over and over. I followed her timeline as far as when she had first started using Facebook. I was addicted to her photos, the ones with the fewer trees and more houses in the background, the one with the caption: “enjoying the thrill of forests”. I was addicted to her school group photos, where she wore spectacles, making her look like a sexy nerd. I was even addicted to her bathroom photos with their insanely non-matching quotes about lives. I was addicted to everything she offered for random stalkers to her Facebook wall.

Then came the tragedy.  It was the festive period of  Dashain. I had to visit my grandparents in Gorkha. The village was the typical remote one, with no electric lines and where people used solar lamps and where the Internet did not have a chance. After one-and-a-half months of festive celebrations, I returned to Kathmandu. The first thing I did upon arriving at Kalanki was to enter the nearest cyber, and bless my luck, it was load-shedding time. I can afford an extra 20 rupees for my love, I said sardonically to myself, and smiled. I searched for her on Facebook, but I couldn’t find her. I tried the link that had her username, and Facebook replied that she had deactivated her account.  What??  I was confused. I then checked Punky Prakash II’s Facebook profile. He had recently changed his relationship status to ‘married’ and had posted a status update in his trademark sick style: “lOp U foRevA mY h0neY aLoNa “ Sweet, beautiful, carefree Alonika had now changed to Punky Prakash II’s honey Alona. What a radical change, I thought

There I was staring at the cyber’s 256 ram, 40 gb computer, which surely more than 10 years old, and which informed me that my nemesis had taken my star-crossed love away, probably forever. I was feeling sad and grumpy and low and was about to leave.  Then something caught my eye. Some girl named Aashiyana Adhikari had commented on Punky’s wall: “So sweet couple, stay blessed forever”. Wow, Aashiyana, what a name, her parents must be Arabic, I thought. I looked at her profile picture, Is it Taylor Swift? I love Taylor Swift.  

Directions:

Read the Following Carefully!

01:    Stories should be original, and must be balanced by i) Plot (beginning), ii) Narrative (middle), iii) Dialogues, and iv) Conclusion (proper ending)

02:    Entries must carry at least 1,050 and not more than 1,500 words

03:    Neat typing, correct spellings (UK English) and proper cases are essential in the texts

04:     Submissions must include the writer’s full name, present status and complete postal/contact/email addresses

05:     Entries must be sent to [email protected]