Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It's a long name, and it doesn't do justice to how you are now. You, my love, are the victim of something pitiful and terrible- a past you let bleed into the present. How would you feel if I tell you that I am nothing more than a voice inside your head? If I tell you, my shift in pronouns while referring to David makes sense; that I am simply a kinder projection of a character you ended yourself in the recent past; a talking photograph; a hologram tucked away in your cerebral wrinkles; a companion you desperately needed after you pulled that trigger on your bastard of a boyfriend?

That's me, isn't it? Those hazel eyes that always made you feel like I were staring directly at your insides; those baggy jeans and faded t-shirt, that disdainful gait you fell for? I still remember what you said to him-me, on that evening. The twilight was addictive, and your confession of hopeless love made it incurably immortal. When I decided to move away, and things began to grow apart, you were unfailingly honest with vocalising your decision to move on. It was I who couldn't recover. I, who was still chewing on our relationship like a dried strip of gum. I, who decided, with an anonymous letter, to scare you with threats about flooding the Internet with that tape, and hack you back into my arms.

I remember you when you first came to bribe me into inaction. You had recently broken; your eyes were swollen as bluebottles, and your face was smudged as an impressionist's work. I didn't relent. Instead, I saw the chance to leech money out of you for life.

On the day of the seventh instalment, you were seventeen thousand rupees' poor, and smiling. The impressionist was gone, and so were the bluebottles. I barely had time to digest this sudden, radiating confidence before you uncovered a dark little Forty-Four. I saw you tremor just a little before pulling the trigger.

Happy? Happiness was a joke. What you hadn't realised was, this little game was all that had kept you going. You wept for days on end, sometimes feeding your hunger with guilt and piano. The pressing weight of having done something so extraordinarily criminal burnt you inside out.

Yes, you remember it all now- those little bouts of mental convulsions; the neighbours often heard you scream 'nonnimus' at the top of your lungs. It wasn't granny, Nisha. Or that episode a few months ago, where you literally wrenched your second premolar out in search of a mango hair? You were losing your mind. And before long, your mind found a way.

You synthesised a second me- a me that you wanted in the first place. This me was everything opposite. He would talk to you all the time. He would help you get through problems. He would be consistently and mildly condescending to you, but would never turn away did you need him. The me you always desired. The me I could never be.

The me that I am right now.

And then, as the final touch in adding meaning to your life, you devised the same conundrum all over again.

You partially knew- you knew it was odd that I referred to David like I was him, and you knew there existed definitely no friend that could reside in a six-inch box. You kept going; your need for me overpowered any logical double takes.

If you're still sceptical, take a closer look at the two addresses printed on that letter. Identical to the 't'.

You are too fragile for recovery, Nisha, and too weak for another breakdown.

Let's break this loop once and for all.

For the second and final time, raise the mango hair.

And pull.