He still saw her in his dreams now and then. Sometimes he was with her again. But at times, he would be at her door, and wouldn’t find her, or would be just about to see her, but would wake up abruptly. Kris still remembered the times he spent with Marral vividly as it were just yesterday. Her soft curly hair, her cute little frock, her innocent smile, her kind eyes still haunted him. Occasionally he wondered where she might be, what she might be doing and every now and then he wondered whether she thought about him as much he thought about her. At 27, although he had been in a couple of relationships, he just couldn’t get her out of his mind.

It still bought a smile to his face when he thought about the way they used to play the ‘family’ game, where she would be the wife, he the husband, and a bald, chubby doll, starring as the child. It was the purest form of friendship he had ever known, so genuine, so real, it haunted him still.

Marral, who was a year older to him, was Catholic and went to church every Sunday like a good Christian girl, but only Kris knew that she would rather go to the beach and build sand castles with him. It would be their make believe home, about which they discussed at length.  They would sit there for hours together, under the sun, and decide which room would be what. They would decide the kind of furniture they would have, the curtains, the kind of car they would drive and who would take the kids to the school.

Marral lived on the fifth floor, and Kris lived on the third in the building next to her. Her bedroom window faced his kitchen window, which made it easy for them to communicate with each other whenever they wanted, as having a phone wasn’t as common as it is today. It was an unwritten rule that Kris would be the one who would go over to her place. Neither Kris, nor Marral remembered when that arrangement came about, but both were happy with it. And the place to meet was always the balcony. Not the bedroom, not the kitchen, not the living room, but the balcony. No one bothered them there.

Kris hardly saw Marral’s father as he was mostly at work, so he was never a problem. It was her mother that he was scared of. Marral’s mom who had lost all her hair due to chemotherapy looked to him more like an overgrown, ugly giant baby. Seeing her walk around the house with small, baby steps, as if she were just learning to walk amused him sometimes. Her face particularly, shriveled, dull and devoid of any emotions, half covered with a white mask, was an image that stayed with him for a long time.

For Kris, being with Marral was as natural as having milk and cookies every morning. So one day when Kris overheard his mom discussing his father’s transfer to another city with a neighbor, he didn’t know how to react. He tried not to break down. When he gave the news to Marral the next day, she didn’t talk to him for a whole hour. This was the first time in three years that he had seen her so mad. Just the possibility of not being able to meet each other ever again, which was pretty much certain, was too hard for their young minds to take. What made it harder for Marral was the fact that just when there was only a week to go for Kris’s departure, her mom got admitted to the hospital with severely deteriorating health. And just two days before he was to leave, her mom died of complications. She needed him the most as a friend at that time and he had to go. He couldn’t face himself. On his last day, they spent some quiet moments with each other, hardly saying a word. He sat there looking at her pale face, torn between the tragedy of her mom’s death and her best friend’s going away.   
When he got into the taxi, and looked out the backside, he saw Marral standing at her balcony hoping against hope that the happenings were only a nightmare and she would wake up anytime now to find Kris sitting next to her. As the taxi made a move, he didn’t blink, because he wanted to capture every moment of looking at her pretty face. It felt like nothing he had felt before. It didn’t hurt him as much even when his dog Rusty had died. As her face became a blur with every passing second, he felt a quiet tear falling out of the corner his eye. He stared into the oblivion, wishing for the churning inside his stomach to stop. He was not able to comprehend the myriad of emotions he was going through. His heart was weeping and begging him to go back, and assure Marral that things will be fine, that he is there for her, but it was just not possible. That was the last time he ever saw her, held her hand, twirled his finger through her curly hair, teased her about putting nail polish on her toes, and played the ‘family’ game with her.

He sometimes tried to imagine the way she might look now, how she kept her hair or how she dressed. But the face that he used to see in his dreams had grown more blurred lately. Each year eroded a bit more of his memories of Marral, washing them away like the tides swept away their castles. At eight he had thought they were just good friends, but now at twenty seven he feels it might have been love.