All hail, The Void.

You may wonder, "What on earth is this man trying to convey with such a fictional title?" Come on, doesn't it sound catchy?

Lend me your ears lads, because this is going to be one hell of an explanation.

So you see, I had this friend. For starters, people would look at him and assume him to be an average student. Look closer at his social media accounts, and you'll think of him to be an astounding playboy ruling over the condos with lust and love. However, it is the former assumption which stands true to this day. You see, this young lad never had his chance at love, let alone lust. To be honest, his love life was more or less like the moon. It's only his side that was visible, and was shown, and was the only thing people (and himself) could feel. The other side was just black. Nothing at all. Deserted.

So after a couple of incidents, he decided to let go off all of this. His friends, including me, told him he was worth better, but he wouldn't listen. He gave up on love and affection. For a guy who had a herd of girl friends in school, surprisingly he hardly had any in college. And he was happier than ever.

So one fine day, he got attached to this woman he got to know through a social media site. They met within a couple of days, flirted around, all the fun stuff. However he was hell bent on not falling for her - until his birthday. He received probably one of the biggest messages anyone has ever sent him, which completely changed his look towards her. He let go off all his vows against love. His scent was no longer filled with the menacing aroma of lust. His fragile heart was ready to face the odds, whatever they were meant to be.

A couple of months passed. Things were going well for him, and to his luck, this gem of a girl, this pearl from the ocean, seemed to shine better than ever. Shimmering his life with her affection. He had finally found the one girl he had been looking under his bed for all these years.

A couple of days passed by. There had been some mishaps going on in their lives. A couple of misunderstandings. Soon after, the pearl didn't really seem to shine much because that same pearl, to his eyes, looked like a lava rock. Dark, brittle, hurt his feet that held him up for so long. Apparently she never liked him. Poor lad, I felt sorry for him the second he told me this. I didn't have words to console his grief.

I asked him why it mattered so much since she was pretty much the fourth girl to have pushed him down the same cliff he had been pushed from before. To this, he said, "I have been her friend for 3 months. In these 3 months, she transitioned from being my flirt buddy, to a friend, to a close friend, to a best friend, and finally to something I thought she would never become. But what never struck me was the pace of our relationship. The escalation was way too quick, and the feeling of ecstasy that she gave me in those months was so clear, that I wasn't aware of the possible outcomes. And it has now gone back to best friend, from a post that I had saved for her. My everything. She transitioned from telling me that she would date me, to telling me she never saw me more than a best friend. But one thing was certain. Both of us would never know how much we meant to each other. At least, she would never know."

After a little bit of investigation myself, I soon found out that this woman had suffered from a breakup herself, and was just getting over it and wasn't ready for a relationship at all.

Now coming back to the title. The Void is just empty space. Cluttered space and time with nothing else in it. There's no reason for its existence. It's a paradox on its own, placed there by a being far superior than us to let us know that even nothing can lead to something.

My friend loved a girl. She was his world. His feelings grew every time she mentioned she too liked him. On a deeper thought, his feelings were probably misguided tones of affection. Maybe, her words never actually meant anything more, but his eyes revealed a different meaning. However, the girl values him more than anything.

The girl went through a rough patch and needed to get over it as soon as possible to get on with her life. She found my friend and got attached to him soon enough. She used his feelings to develop her own for the sake of feeling sane, and away from the dismay she was led into a few months back. She decided to stop it all there once she felt better.

I just stated two possible and parallel instances that could have led to the final happenings of my friend's story. Are there more instances that can be derived from that single story? Well, of course. Innumerable instances, that lead to one single ending. An unsolvable paradox, a void of its own. In the end, the Void won.