The Company I Keep

The first time I saw her after she left, I was making tea for two.

It was a Tuesday, three months and sixteen days since Zoya had walked out with her suitcase and that look in her eyes that said she was already gone. I stood at the kitchen counter, sugar crystals scattered around two cups, and watched her perch on the windowsill like she always did when she was thinking.

"You put too much sugar in mine," she said, swinging her legs the way she used to.

I knew she wasn't there. Of course, I knew. But my hand still hesitated over her cup, and I still found myself saying, "Sorry, I forgot you stopped taking sugar."

She smiled that soft, crooked smile that used to make me forget my own name. "It's okay, Rohan. I know you're trying."

The rational part of my mind, the part that still functioned in the daylight hours, understood what was happening. Grief, loneliness, the brain's desperate attempt to fill the silence that had grown too heavy to carry. But understanding something and living with it are different countries, and I had already packed my bags for the one where she still existed.

Dr. Varma called it a "manifestation of unresolved trauma." My mother called it "a phase." My friends, the few who still called, didn't know what to call it, so they stopped calling altogether.

I called it Tuesday. And Wednesday. And every day that followed.

She appeared at random moments while I was brushing my teeth, standing in grocery store aisles, and sitting in the passenger seat of my car. Always solid enough to seem real, always familiar enough to break my heart all over again.

"You haven't been eating properly," she'd say, watching me heat up another cup of instant noodles.

"Neither have you," I'd reply, because even in my hallucinations, I was still trying to take care of her.

"I don't need to eat, Rohan. I'm not really here."

"I know."

"Do you?"

The conversations were like tha,t circular, honest in a way our real ones had stopped being toward the end. The Zoya in my mind said things the real Zoya had held back, admitted truths that reality had been too complicated to contain.

"I never stopped loving you," she told me one evening, as I sat on my couch, watching a movie she would have hated.

"Then why did you leave?"

"Because loving someone and being able to live with them aren't the same thing. You know that."

I did know that. It was the thing we had both been too afraid to say when she was packing, when I was begging her to stay, when we were both drowning in the space between what we felt and what we could actually build together.

My job performance suffered. I'd catch myself laughing at something she'd said during meetings, or pausing mid-sentence to listen to her commentary on whatever presentation was boring us both to tears. My colleagues grew concerned, then uncomfortable, then quietly began excluding me from projects that required "team collaboration."

"You're scaring them," Zoya observed one day, as I sat alone in the office cafeteria.

"Good. They're scared of the wrong things anyway."

"What should they be scared of?"

"The fact that we spend most of our lives pretending we're not dying. That we waste years on conversations that don't matter with people who don't see us. That most of us will go our entire lives without ever really being known by another human being."

She was quiet for a moment, her imaginary fingers tracing patterns on the imaginary table between us. "Is that what happened to us? We stopped knowing each other?"

"No. We knew each other too well. That was the problem."

The months passed. I learned to function around her presence, to live a life that looked normal from the outside while conducting an ongoing conversation with a woman who existed only in the spaces between my thoughts and needs.

She became more real to me than the actual people in my life. We had long discussions about books she'd never read, movies she'd never seen, and dreams she'd never had. I told her about my day, and she told me about the places she went when I wasn't looking, imaginary cafes and impossible libraries, conversations with my grandmother who had died when I was twelve.

"Do you miss the real me?" she asked one night, as I lay in bed staring at the ceiling.

"You are the real you."

"No, I'm not. I'm the you that you wished I could be. I'm all the things you loved about me without any of the things that made us impossible."

She was right, of course. The Zoya in my mind never got frustrated with my silence. She never felt suffocated by my need to solve every problem, never pulled away when I tried too hard to hold us together. She was patient where the real Zoya had been human, understanding where the real one had been righteously angry.

"I'm a better person in your head than I ever was in real life," she continued.

"You were perfect in real life."

"No, I wasn't. And neither were you. That's why I left."

"Would you leave again? If you were real?"

She considered this, her head tilted the way it used to when she was thinking through something complicated. "I don't know. Maybe we would have learned how to be different."

"Or maybe we would have destroyed each other more slowly."

"Maybe."

The call came on a Thursday. Seven months and twelve days after she'd left, four months and twenty-six days after I'd started seeing her everywhere.

"Rohan?" Her voice on the phone sounded different, smaller, and uncertain. "I'm... I'm coming back. I know we didn't part well, and I know you probably don't want to see me, but I have some things I left behind, and I thought maybe we could "

"When?" I interrupted.

"Tomorrow? If that's okay?"

I looked across the room, where she sat curled in the armchair, reading a book that didn't exist. She looked up at me with eyes that held no surprise, no fear, only a kind of gentle sadness.

"It's okay," she said, though I hadn't asked her opinion. "I understand."

"Tomorrow is fine," I told the phone.

She arrived at 3 PM, carrying the same nervous energy she'd had the day she left, but softer somehow, worn smooth by whatever months she'd spent learning to live without me.

"You look..." she started, then stopped, studying my face the way you might study a map of a place you used to know well.

"Different?"

"Thinner. Quieter. Like you've been living underwater."

I wanted to tell her that I had been, that the surface of reality had closed over my head months ago, and I'd been breathing different air ever since. Instead, I offered her tea.

"No sugar," I said automatically, and she looked at me with surprise.

"You remember."

Of cours,e I remembered. I'd been making her tea without sugar for months.

She moved through the apartment like a tourist in her own past, touching things gently, carefully, as if they might disappear. I watched her, and I watched the other h,er the one who had never left, who was now sitting on the couch with her legs tucked under her, observing this reunion with the detached interest of someone watching a play.

"I thought about you," the real Zoya said, settling into the chair across from me. "Every day. I kept thinking I should call, but I didn't know what to say."

"You could have said anything."

"Could I? When I left, you were so angry. And hurt. And I was so sure that staying away was the kinder thing to do."

The hallucination, Zoya laughed softly. "She doesn't know, does she? That you've been talking to me this whole time."

I looked between the,m the woman who had left and the woman who had stayed, the one who was real and the one who was true. They could have been the same person, except for the way reality sat differently on their shoulders.

"Rohan?" the real Zoya said. "Are you okay? You seem... distracted."

"I'm fine. Just..It's's strange, seeing you here."

"I know. It's strange being here."

We talked for an hour carefully, politely, like people who had once known each other's bodies but had forgotten each other's languages. She told me about the job she'd found, the small apartment across town, the friends who had helped her remember who she was when she wasn't part of us.

I told her about work, about my mother's calls, about the books I'd been reading. I didn't tell her about the conversations I'd been having, the company I'd been keeping, the way I'd learned to live in two worlds at once.

"I should go," she said finally, though she hadn't collected any of the things she'd supposedly come for.

"Should you?"

She looked at me, then really looke,d and I saw recognition flicker across her face. The way I was sitting, the way I was listening, the way my eyes kept drifting to the empty space beside her.

"Rohan," she said gently, "who are you talking to?"

The question hung in the air like smoke. The hallucinati,on Zoya watched me with interest, waiting to see what I would choose.

"You," I said finally.

"I'm right here."

"I know. But you're also..." I gestured to the couch, where she sat translucent in the afternoon light. "There."

The real Zoya followed my gaze, saw nothinand g, understood everything.

"How long?" she asked.

"Since about a month after you left."

"What does she say?"

I looked at my imaginary companion, who smiled and shrugged as if to say, Tell her whatever you want.

"She says she loves me. She says she understands why you had to leave. She says she's sorry for all the ways we hurt each other." I paused. "She says things you never got the chance to say. Or things you said that I wasn't ready to hear."

The real Zoya was quiet for a long time. When she spoke, her voice was thick with something that might have been tears.

"And you know she's not real?"

"Of course I know."

"But you still talk to her."

"Yes."

"Every day?"

"Yes."

She absorbed this, her fingers tracing the arm of the chair the way the other Zoya's fingers traced invisible tables.

"What happens now?" she asked. "Now that I'm back?"

I looked between them again, the woman I had loved and lost, and the woman I had created from that love and loss. One was flesh and breath and the possibility of new mistakes. The other was memory and longing and the safety of a story that could never disappoint me again.

"I don't know," I said honestly.

The real Zoya leaned forward, her eyes searching my face. "Would you choose her over me? The one in your head?"

It was the question I had been avoiding for months, the choice I hadn'trealisedd I was making every time I set out two cups instead of one.

"She's not you," I said finally. "She's who I needed you to be when I couldn't handle who you actually were."

"And now?"

"Now I don't know if I remember the difference."

She stood up, moved toward the door, then stopped. "I came here thinking I could apologise. Thinking maybe we could find a way to be friends, or at least find a way to forgive each other. But I can't compete with a version of myself that only exists to love you."

"I'm not asking you to compete."

"Aren't you?"

The hallucination Zoya stood too, walked over to where the real one stood, and for a moment they occupied the same space, past and present, memory and possibility, the woman I had lost and the woman I had built from the pieces.

"Choose," the real Zoya said.

"Choose," the imaginary one echoed.

But Ihad alreadyd chosen, hadn't I? I had been choosing for months, every time I preferred the conversation in my head to the silence in my apartment, every time I found comfort in love that asked nothing of me because it wasn't real enough to be disappointed.

"I can't let her go," I said.

The real Zoya nodded, her face cycling through expressions I couldn't read. "I know. I understand, actually. It's easier to love someone who can't leave you again."

"Zoya "

"No, it's okay. Maybe this is what we both needed. You get to keep the version of me that you can live with, and I get to keep the version of you that exists in my memory, the one who loved me before he knew how complicated I could be."

She opened the door, paused,and  looked back at me one more time.

"Be happy, Rohan. Even if it's not real. Especially if it's not real."

After she left, I sat in the silence for a long time. The imaginary Zoya settled back into her chair, picked up her invisible book, and we resumed the life we had built together in the spaces between what was and what might have been.

"Was that cruel?" I asked her.

"Probably."

"Do you mind? Being chosen over someone real?"

She looked up from her book and smiled that soft, crooked smile that had never disappointed me, never would disappoint me, because it existed only as long as I needed it to.

"Mind? Rohan, I am the love you have left. I am everything you couldn't say and everything you wish you had heard. I am the conversation that never ends and the forgiveness that never runs out." She closed the book, leaned forward. "I'm not real, but I'm true. And sometimes that's enough."

Outside, the city hummed with the lives of people who had learned to love in the real world, with all its complications and possibilities and everyday destructions. Inside, I lived in the world I had built from loss and longing, where love was always patient, always kind, always exactly what I needed it to be.

I made tea for two, no sugar in hers, and we settled in to spend another evening in the country where she had never left and I had never had to learn to live without her.

It wasn't real, but it was ours. And some days, that felt like enough.