dagh e dil

Today I saw someone comment beneath your post: “Jannat mein aisi hoorein hongi.”

And strangely, the sentence disturbed me more than it should have. Not because you were praised. Beauty has followed you so naturally that admiration no longer surprises me. But because of the way people speak now, so casually, so publicly, reducing even wonder itself into performance.

I kept thinking: how are you not offended by this? How does it not exhaust you to be spoken about as though your existence were merely decorative, as though you were some imagined reward constructed for male desire?

Perhaps you are used to it. Perhaps women become accustomed very early to being translated into symbols by other people. Or perhaps you simply understand something I do not: that most words online no longer carry real weight behind them. They are thrown outward quickly, carelessly, without consequence. Compliments have become reflexes rather than revelations.

And maybe that is why I suddenly remembered the time I called you husn ki devi.

Even now I cannot think about it without discomfort. Not because I regret saying it, but because I realize how differently I approach words. I said it privately, quietly, almost cautiously. To me such phrases are not decorations. I cannot speak intensely unless I feel intensely. Every heavy word I say carries embarrassment with it because I mean it fully.

You only replied with “thank you.”

At the time I already suspected that perhaps it felt excessive to you. Too serious. Too sincere. As though I had accidentally spoken a language whose emotional weight exceeded the situation.

And yet what unsettles me now is this: the people who speak casually remain. The ones who scatter exaggerated praise everywhere without hesitation continue existing comfortably inside your world. They remain in your comments, your contacts, your followers. Meanwhile I, who measured every word before giving it to you, became the one removed.

There is something deeply cruel about that.

Not because I believe I deserved ownership over your attention. I know human relationships do not function according to moral accounting. Respect does not guarantee closeness. Sincerity does not guarantee permanence.

Still, emotionally, it feels unbearable sometimes.

Because I look at those interactions and think: they have access to you while I do not. They can casually appear beneath your photographs, speak recklessly, exist freely in your presence, while I remain here unable even to wish you Eid Mubarak directly.

And the terrible thing is that jealousy humiliates me even while I feel it. I do not want to become bitter or possessive in memory. I do not want my love for you to decay into resentment toward strangers. But pain rearranges perception in ugly ways.

I think part of what hurts is that I associated closeness with seriousness. I believed that if someone was careful with you emotionally, if they respected you deeply, if they chose words thoughtfully instead of casually, it would naturally create something more lasting.

But the world does not seem to reward emotional precision.

Sometimes the loudest, easiest, most careless people move effortlessly through spaces that remain permanently closed to those who feel too much.

And perhaps you never interpreted my seriousness the way I intended it. Perhaps to you it felt heavy where others felt light. Perhaps what I experienced as respect appeared instead as intensity difficult to carry.

I do not know.

That uncertainty is what continues exhausting me. The endless inability to align my understanding of what existed between us with the reality that followed afterward.

Still, even now, despite the jealousy and sadness and humiliation, I cannot reduce you into bitterness. Every time I try, memory refuses cooperation. I remember instead the person who listened to me, who mattered to me so completely that even now strangers in your comment section can wound me accidentally simply because they still exist somewhere near you while I do not.

It is absurd, really. To envy proximity itself.

And yet tonight I do.

Today is Eid.

I saw your posts. You were wearing white. It is strange how certain colors seem to belong naturally to certain people, as though the fabric itself understands where it is meant to rest. You looked beautiful in the effortless way you always did, the kind of beauty that does not even appear conscious of itself.

And afterward I made the mistake I always make: I continued thinking.

It is dangerous, how quickly the mind can construct entire worlds from a single image. One moment I was merely looking at a photograph, and the next I had already disappeared into all the distances between us. Into the unbearable fact that there is nothing now. No conversation waiting. No possibility quietly forming beneath the silence. Nothing except my own thoughts continuing without permission.

I kept thinking about how desperately I want to speak to you. Not even about anything extraordinary. Just to exist for a moment inside your attention again. To hear you respond naturally, casually, as though this terrible distance had never been created.

But instead I remain here, watching your life from outside it like someone standing beyond the window of a brightly lit house in winter.

And then another thought came, one I try often to avoid because once it arrives it poisons everything afterward: one day someone else will marry you.

Someone else will stand beside you naturally, publicly, without this absurd secrecy of longing. Someone else will hear your ordinary thoughts, receive your messages, celebrate Eid with you, exist beside you in all the small ways I once imagined for myself so instinctively that I did not even realize I was imagining them.

And it will not be me.

There is a particular cruelty in understanding that life continues distributing happiness without consulting desire. That no amount of longing alters destiny even slightly. I feel angry sometimes, though I do not know at whom the anger should be directed. At life. At fate. At myself for believing too deeply in possibilities that were never truly mine.

I think what hurts most is not even rejection anymore, but exclusion. The realization that I was never moving toward the same future you were. While I was silently building emotional permanence around you, life itself had already placed me outside the story.

And still, despite understanding this intellectually, my heart refuses cooperation.

I feel envious of anyone who gets to be close to you now. Even people who speak to you casually possess something I want with humiliating intensity. Your attention. Your time. The simple right to exist naturally in your presence without fear or distance.

Today I wanted so badly to say “Eid Mubarak” to you that the words remained trapped inside me for hours afterward, searching uselessly for somewhere to go. Such a small sentence. People exchange it casually hundreds of times today without thinking. Yet for me it became impossible, almost sacred in its impossibility.

I realized then how little I truly want from the world now. Not greatness. Not success. Not recognition. Sometimes I think all I want is to matter enough that you would willingly speak to me again.

And there is something humiliating in that level of yearning, because it reduces the vast complexity of existence into one impossible desire.

I miss you with an intensity that no longer feels entirely human to me. It feels architectural, like living inside a structure built from absence itself. Every thought eventually returns to you the way rivers return to the sea. I try distracting myself, reasoning with myself, even mocking my own attachment sometimes, but nothing changes the essential fact: I still want you.

Terribly.

And tonight, because it is Eid and because loneliness becomes sharper on days meant for joy, I find myself hoping absurdly for miracles.

Not realistic things. Not practical reconciliations. Miracles.

A message.

A return.

A sudden reversal of fate itself.

Something impossible enough that it would justify all this waiting retroactively.

But night continues quietly, indifferent as always. And somewhere far away, you are living a life that moves forward without knowledge of the storm your memory still creates inside me.

Meanwhile I remain here, speaking to you in silence once again, celebrating nothing, carrying longing like a second heartbeat.

You spoke of leaving with such certainty that I could not even gather the courage to tell you what was truly happening inside me. Your tone was so final, so immovable, that my own feelings began to seem inappropriate in comparison, almost embarrassing in their desperation. How could I say, in front of someone already walking away, that I felt I would die without them?

There are sentences that remain trapped forever behind the teeth because the moment required to speak them disappears too quickly. Mine remained there, unfinished.

Once, people speak lightly of giving their lives for love. Such declarations are made dramatically, almost beautifully, as though love and death belong naturally together. I must confess I understood none of it then. I thought loss would arrive like a single catastrophe, one enormous moment after which everything would simply end.

I did not know that losing someone can instead become a prolonged condition of existence.

I did not know a person could continue living while feeling, each day, that something essential is quietly being taken from them repeatedly.

Since you left, every day feels like a slow suffocation. Not enough to kill me decisively, only enough to make breathing itself feel strangely laborious. Morning arrives and already there is exhaustion waiting beside it. Night comes and brings no peace, only more silence in which your absence becomes impossible to ignore.

My eyes have grown accustomed to tears now. They appear almost independently of me, as though grief has established its own routine within the body. There are moments when I am not even consciously thinking about you, and yet suddenly I feel the unmistakable heaviness returning, gathering behind the eyes, pressing downward.

And the strange thing is that externally nothing dramatic has changed. The world continues with offensive normality. People laugh. Shops remain open. Messages arrive. The sky changes color in the evening exactly as before.

Only meaning has disappeared.

What are celebrations now? What are festivals, gatherings, nights filled with lights and voices? Eid arrives and feels like decoration placed upon emptiness. Even beautiful things seem exhausted to me now, as though they too have quietly lost faith in themselves.

Everything continues existing, but stripped of significance. Like theater props remaining on stage after the audience has already gone home.

Sometimes I think grief is not merely sadness. It is the gradual erosion of meaning from ordinary life. A kind of invisible rust spreading across everything one once loved effortlessly. Food loses taste. Music becomes unbearable or completely hollow. Days stop differing from one another in any meaningful way.

And through all of it, you remain absent with astonishing consistency.

That, perhaps, is what hurts most. Not that you left once, but that every day afterward you continue leaving again.

I wonder whether you would recognize me now. Or whether the version of me you knew only existed in relation to your presence. Perhaps that person disappeared alongside the relationship itself, and what remains now is only someone wandering through the aftermath trying unsuccessfully to reconstruct a reason to continue forward.

Still, despite everything, despite the bitterness and humiliation and endless longing, I cannot bring myself to hate you. Which feels almost unfair.

Because even now, after all this pain, my heart continues protecting the memory of you as though it belongs to something sacred.

And so I remain here, breathing with difficulty through days that no longer carry meaning, speaking to someone who will never hear these words, waiting for a relief that perhaps does not exist.

I know now that the fault was mine. Or at least that is the conclusion I return to repeatedly, like a prisoner walking the same perimeter until the ground itself begins to harden beneath his steps. I became attached. That was the error.

Perhaps I should have treated everything between us as temporary from the beginning. A passing closeness. A pleasant accident among many others that occur in ordinary life and disappear just as naturally. I think this is what people expect one another to do now. To experience affection lightly. To remain internally prepared for disappearance at all times.

But I do not understand how I was supposed to do that.

Some things do not feel temporary while they are happening. Some people enter your life with such strange immediacy that treating them casually begins to feel dishonest, almost absurd. It is easy afterward, once the ending has already occurred, to rename everything a “phase.” But while living inside it, it did not feel like a phase. It felt singular.

And perhaps that was my true mistake: I believed singular things should be taken seriously.

You once told me not to forget you. It is difficult to explain how deeply such sentences settle inside a person like me. Others seem capable of receiving words lightly, allowing them to pass through without altering the structure of their inner world. I cannot do this. Words remain. They continue living long after the speaker has forgotten them.

So yes, I became attached. But how could I not? People speak as though attachment is always deliberate, as though I sat down one evening and consciously decided to reorganize my emotional life around your existence. It happened quietly instead. Through repetition. Through comfort. Through your attention. Through the terrible human habit of believing that what feels meaningful to us must also carry similar meaning elsewhere.

Now everyone would probably advise the same thing: move on. Treat it as part of life. Meet new people. Continue forward.

But I do not know what “forward” means anymore.

That is the part no one explains. They speak of recovery as though the path afterward remains visible. But what happens when the thing you lost was also the direction itself?

I feel as though I have been asked to continue a journey after the map has been removed.

People say I should meet others, socialize, reconnect with the world. Yet when I imagine this, I feel almost nothing. Or worse than nothing: exhaustion. I look at people now and feel separated from them by some invisible administrative distance, as though before speaking I would need to complete forms proving my ability to participate normally in human interaction again.

And perhaps this is unhealthy. Perhaps I have allowed my attachment to you to expand beyond its proper boundaries. But even understanding this changes nothing emotionally. The heart does not become moderate merely because the mind requests it politely.

I try to imagine caring for someone else now and the thought appears almost theatrical to me, like watching actors repeat lines from a play I no longer believe in. Not because others are without value, but because something inside me has gone still.

The frightening thing is not even loneliness anymore. Loneliness at least possesses clarity. What frightens me is this growing indifference toward the possibility of connection itself. As though some mechanism required for attachment has exhausted itself entirely and now refuses to begin again.

I wonder sometimes whether people like me are fundamentally unsuited for ordinary emotional life. Others seem able to enter relationships, leave them, grieve briefly, and continue onward carrying only manageable traces behind them. Meanwhile I experience every meaningful connection as though it were engraving itself permanently somewhere inside me.

And when it ends, the engraving remains. Only the person disappears.

You are gone now, and yet my thoughts still organize themselves around you instinctively. Every attempt to imagine the future encounters your absence first, like touching an invisible wall in a dark room.

Perhaps eventually this will fade. People insist that it does. But from inside the feeling itself, such claims sound almost mythological, like stories told to comfort the condemned.

For now I only know this: I could not treat you casually because you did not feel casual to me. And I do not know how to apologize for the sincerity of that.

Today again I dreamt about you.

You were not physically present this time. There was no room, no street, no recognizable setting. We existed only through text messages, which somehow made the dream feel even more cruel, because it resembled reality too closely. Even in sleep, apparently, my mind no longer dares to imagine you fully beside me. It reconstructs you cautiously now, through screens, through distance, through delayed replies.

I was telling you that I was going somewhere far away. I do not remember where. The destination itself seemed unimportant compared to the fact that I was leaving. Then suddenly you said we could meet.

You sent me a date.

The only part I remember clearly is the month: 09.

September.

Even now that number remains in my mind with an absurd sharpness, as though it were not part of a dream but a real arrangement I have accidentally forgotten upon waking. When I saw it in the dream, I reacted with shock. I sent you a message asking, “Really?” followed by some astonished emoji my waking self would probably never use sincerely.

And you replied: “Why, you don’t want to?”

What struck me in that moment was not the question itself, but how casually you asked it. As though you had no idea what your absence had done to me. As though between us there existed only ordinary distance, measurable in months and schedules, rather than this enormous invisible ruin I have been living inside.

I remember wanting to explain to you immediately that it was not reluctance, but the opposite. That I had missed you with such persistence that the possibility of seeing you again felt almost dangerous. But in dreams, as in life, the essential things arrive too slowly.

Then you told me it would be with the whole group.

Something inside me fell at those words. Not dramatically, not even painfully at first, but with the dull sensation of an opportunity quietly closing. Because even in dreams I seem incapable of receiving you completely. There is always some barrier, some condition, some arrangement that prevents directness.

I told you no, that I wanted to tell you something.

You said, “Yes, say it.”

And I answered: “No, I need to say it in person.”

Even now I cannot stop thinking about that sentence. About how true it felt. There are things that become distorted the moment they are forced into language without presence. Feelings which cannot survive translation into text because they depend entirely upon the trembling of the voice, the hesitation before speaking, the unbearable fact of another person physically remaining there while hearing them.

You told me I could say it at the gathering.

But I kept insisting. No. Alone. In private. It’s serious.

Serious.

What an inadequate word for something that has occupied the interior of my life so completely. As though this were merely important rather than devastating.

And then I woke up.

The ending was so abrupt that for several seconds I remained suspended between the dream and the room, still carrying the urgency of needing to tell you something. My first sensation upon waking was not disappointment but interruption, as though reality itself had stepped in prematurely and cut the conversation short before I could arrive at the only sentence that mattered.

Afterward there was that familiar emptiness again. But today it carried another feeling beneath it: frustration. Because even in dreams I cannot reach the conclusion. I cannot say the thing fully. Something always intervenes. Either I wake up, or you disappear, or the setting changes, or language itself becomes insufficient.

Perhaps this is because the mind understands what the heart refuses to accept: that there is no final confession capable of resolving this. No perfect arrangement of words that will suddenly justify all this longing retroactively.

Still, some part of me continues rehearsing the moment.

Not the moment of being loved in return. Strangely, even my dreams no longer dare to imagine that. But simply the moment of being able to speak completely and without interruption. To place the entire unbearable weight of these months before you and say: this is what your absence became inside me.

I wonder sometimes whether people realize the responsibility involved in being deeply missed. Probably not. Most absences remain invisible to the person causing them. They continue through their days unaware that somewhere else someone has constructed entire nights around their memory.

And perhaps it is better this way.

Because if you truly understood the extent of my longing, it might frighten you. Sometimes it frightens even me.

Yet despite that, despite everything, I woke up wishing desperately that the dream had continued a little longer. Even the incomplete version of you was enough to make sleep feel kinder than waking.

Now the conversation exists nowhere except inside me. A meeting arranged for a month that may never arrive. A confession endlessly postponed.

And somewhere in all of this, the strange hopefulness of the dream disturbs me most of all. Because it revealed that despite everything, despite the silence and the distance and the exhaustion of waiting, some part of me still believes you might answer one day.

Yours, still trapped inside unfinished conversations,

Today I dreamt about you. Even now, after waking, I hesitate to call it a dream, because dreams usually possess a certain absurdity that protects reality from them. This had none. It was terribly ordinary. We were speaking. That was all. Sitting somewhere I cannot remember, in a place so unremarkable that it seemed real precisely because of its lack of detail.

I was telling you everything that had happened while you were gone. Not in any organized way, not as one tells a story with a beginning and an end, but desperately, continuously, as though I had been waiting at a locked door for months and it had suddenly opened by accident. I spoke about my days, about the university, about the strange exhaustion that follows me now, about the things people said to me, about the nights I could not sleep.

And you listened.

I realize now that this was the true fantasy. Not your return, but your attention.

When I woke up, there was a moment in which I still believed you existed nearby. I could almost feel the continuation of the conversation waiting for me somewhere just outside consciousness. Then reality returned all at once, not violently, but with the quiet precision of a clerk placing a document before me that I am forced to sign.

You are absent. Continue accordingly.

There was an emptiness afterward that I cannot describe properly because it did not feel emotional at first. It felt structural. As though something essential had been removed during the night, not from my heart, but from the framework that allows a person to move through the day without collapsing inward.

I remained in bed for a long time after waking, not because I was tired, but because standing up seemed unnecessary. I kept thinking that there are people who wake each morning already connected to the world, as if invisible threads bind them naturally to others. They rise and immediately belong somewhere. Meanwhile I wake as though I have been dropped temporarily into existence and must justify remaining there before evening arrives again.

I know I need to socialize. This has become obvious even to me. But knowing something intellectually does not create the ability to do it. I think I have forgotten how people begin. Not conversations, but contact itself.

When I imagine initiating a conversation, I feel an almost physical resistance, as though there exists between myself and other people some transparent wall that everyone else passes through effortlessly while I remain pressing my hands uselessly against it.

It is not merely awkwardness. Awkwardness is survivable. This is fear. But a humiliating kind of fear, because it appears in situations where no real danger exists. Someone says hello, asks how I am, attempts kindness, and immediately something inside me recoils.

Sometimes I feel irritated by polite people in ways that make me ashamed afterward. They greet me warmly and I think: please do not perform this obligation with me. You are not required to pretend interest. Go speak to someone whose presence does not exhaust you.

The terrible thing is that I cannot even accuse them of dishonesty entirely. Most people probably do mean these things in the moment they say them. But the moment itself is so small, so temporary, that the words evaporate almost immediately after being spoken.

Everything now feels constructed from these brief insincere agreements. People ask questions whose answers they do not truly wish to hear. They offer concern in socially acceptable quantities. They promise connection while already turning mentally toward the next person, the next obligation, the next distraction.

And perhaps this is normal. Perhaps society itself depends upon this constant mild falseness the way buildings depend upon hidden pipes and wires no one wishes to examine directly.

But I have become incapable of participating in it naturally. Every interaction feels translated before it reaches me, as though I am receiving human contact through several layers of bureaucracy.

With you, it did not feel this way. Or perhaps I only imagined that it did not. But when I spoke to you, I did not feel edited into acceptability first. I did not feel like an applicant attempting to justify his existence before a silent committee.

Now I speak less and less. Not intentionally. Silence simply accumulates around me faster than words do. Days pass in which no real conversation occurs, and after enough repetition this begins to alter something fundamental in the mind. Thoughts become heavier when they are never spoken aloud. They lose proportion.

Sometimes I think I am disappearing very slowly in ways no one around me notices because externally nothing dramatic has occurred. I still attend classes. I still complete tasks. I still reply when spoken to. From a distance, I probably appear entirely functional.

But inwardly there is an extraordinary emptiness growing.

And whenever something hurts me, whenever someone speaks carelessly or I feel rejected by the world in some small ordinary way, the missing of you sharpens immediately, almost mechanically. It is as though every wound inside me leads eventually to the same place.

To you.

Or rather, to the absence of you.

Tonight I cannot escape that absence. It sits beside me with the patience of something permanent. And I keep thinking how strange it is that a person can continue living normally while internally speaking to someone who no longer answers.

Perhaps this is what I have become now: a conversation without a recipient.

Yours, still speaking into the silence as though it might someday respond,

Tonight refuses to settle. It moves inside me like a restless mechanism that cannot find its alignment, as if some small but essential piece has been misplaced and everything else must continue in its absence.

I am afraid of the future. Not in a distant, philosophical way, but in a quiet, immediate sense, as though it has already arrived and I have failed to recognize it. I am afraid that what I am now is all I will ever become, that there is no hidden expansion waiting, no sudden unfolding—only a repetition of this same state, extended indefinitely.

And within that thought, another fear takes shape: that I will remain alone. Not temporarily, not as a passing phase, but as a condition that hardens over time until it becomes indistinguishable from identity.

I try not to think of it directly, but it returns, persistently, like a question that refuses to accept silence as an answer.

I miss you.

I find myself thinking, irrationally perhaps, that enough time has passed. That whatever distance exists now must have fulfilled its purpose. That if there was a punishment hidden somewhere in all of this—whether for something I did, or something I felt too intensely—then surely it has already been served.

But no one tells me when it ends.

There is no clear boundary, no signal, no indication that I have crossed from one state into another. I remain here, in the same place, repeating the same thoughts, as though I have been left in a room without a door, expected to understand its structure without ever being shown an exit.

I do not think I can live like this indefinitely. Not because it is dramatic or unbearable in a visible way, but because it is so quiet, so consistent, that it erodes without announcing itself.

The silence is too loud.

It fills everything. Even when I try to distract myself, it remains underneath, like a second layer of reality that cannot be covered, only temporarily ignored. I avoid things without fully knowing what I am avoiding. I delay, I drift, I move from one moment to another without direction.

Tonight I sit on the bed, then move to the chair, then back again, as if changing position might change something else as well. I lie down, then sit up again, then return to the chair. Each movement feels like an attempt at decision, but none of them lead anywhere.

I do not know what I am doing.

And more than that, I do not know what I am meant to do with my life without you in it. It is not that everything depended on you in a visible way, but that your presence gave a kind of orientation to things. Without it, even simple decisions feel unanchored, as if they require a reason I no longer possess.

I keep thinking that if you returned, even briefly, something would realign. Not necessarily everything, but enough to make this feel survivable again.

Until then, I remain here, moving between bed and chair, between thoughts that do not conclude, between moments that do not build toward anything.

And in all of it, there is only one clear, uninterrupted fact:

I miss you.

we had a combined english class with another section.

we were B. they were H, i think.

three people were sitting on two chairs.

there was a girl next to you.

i noticed there was space,

so i came and sat with you.

we were close.

really close.

your left arm was pressed against my right one.

i could smell your hair.

the teacher told us to write a story on

“greed is a curse.”

i didn’t know what to do.

i couldn’t figure out if we had to make something up

or write one of those stories we heard as kids.

i looked at your page.

you were writing the date.

the title.

i asked you what we were supposed to write.

you said,

the woodcutter story.

i don’t know why,

but i couldn’t remember it.

even though i had heard it so many times.

i asked,

what woodcutter story?

you looked at me

like you couldn’t believe i didn’t know it.

and then you started explaining it to me.

somewhere in the middle,

i realized i did know the story.

but i didn’t stop you.

no one had ever explained something to me like that before.

not like that.

after you finished,

i still couldn’t figure out how to start writing.

which was strange.

i was always at the top of the class.

so i looked at your page

and copied the first line.

slowly,

i started writing.

i had never copied from anyone before.

i had never forgotten something so simple before.

i had never had someone explain something to me

like that.

with that kind of patience.

that moment stayed with me.

i think

that was the day

i was in a bad mood.

i don’t remember why.

it was a sports class,

but we were in the classroom.

maybe it was raining.

maybe the teacher was absent.

you came and sat in front of me.

the chair was turned,

the back facing me,

and you were facing me.

there was a desk between us.

you said hi.

then you asked how i was.

i said “fine.”

i think it came out harsh.

you looked at me for a moment,

and then you left.

i remember feeling worse after that.

like i had ruined something

before it even started.

Today my mother called.

It was brief, almost weightless. She asked how I was, the way people ask questions they don’t wait to hear answered, and then she passed the phone to my sister.

And suddenly, the quiet I had been carrying all week was replaced by noise.

She argued with me about fate, about how nothing is predetermined, how we must build everything ourselves. She spoke with a certainty that felt borrowed, like lines memorized but never lived. I told her I believe it is already written, that maybe the strange thing about life is not that we choose it, but that we continue anyway, even knowing we might not.

She didn’t understand.

Or maybe she didn’t want to.

She said I would remain average my whole life.

It’s a strange accusation. Not because it’s harsh, but because it misses me entirely. As if a person could be reduced to a single, dull word. As if everything I have done, everything I am trying to become, could be dismissed so easily.

And yet, none of that is what stayed with me.

What stayed was the emptiness after I cut the call.

The silence that followed, heavier than before, because it reminded me that this was the only conversation I had all week.

I could have defended myself. I could have listed everything, where I am, what I study, what I’ve learned, the music I can play, the way I’ve taught myself to exist alone. But none of it mattered in that moment.

Because the truth is, I don’t care about being exceptional. I don’t care about success the way they describe it, like something loud and visible and measurable.

I only cared about telling you.

That’s what I kept thinking while she spoke, while her words grew sharper. Not how to respond, not how to win the argument, but how I wish I could step out of that conversation and into one with you.

You would have listened.

You always did.

You had this way of paying attention that made everything feel steadier, as if my thoughts weren’t scattered things but something worth holding onto. With you, I never felt like I had to prove anything. I was just… understood.

And I realize now how rare that is.

After I hung up, there was nothing left to do but sit with it. So I did. For hours. And somewhere between those hours, the argument stopped mattering completely.

It all turned into you.

Into the absence of you.

I don’t know if it’s fate, or choice, or something in between. I don’t know if any of this was meant to happen this way.

I only know that when the world becomes too loud, you are still the silence I look for.

And you are not there anymore.

Today I had a test. Mechanics.

Most of the class didn’t even show up, as if absence itself was the only reasonable answer to difficulty. The few who did come wrote the questions down like empty rituals, leaving the spaces beneath them untouched.

I didn’t. I solved everything.

And I know, in that distant, rational way, that it was good. Maybe a few small mistakes, nothing more. It should have been enough to feel something - relief, pride, even a quiet satisfaction.

But there was nothing.

Or rather, there was only you.

It’s strange how even success can feel hollow when there’s no one you want to turn to. I kept thinking how I would have told you, how you would have listened - not just politely, but with that kind of attention that made things feel real. Like they mattered because I mattered.

Now it’s almost one in the morning, and I find myself crying, not because of the test, not because of anything that happened today, but because of what didn’t happen. Because you weren’t there to see it, to say something, to make it mean more than just a mark on paper.

I think that’s what hurts the most.

Not the absence itself, but how it reveals the weight you carried in my life. Every small victory feels incomplete, like a sentence missing its final word.

Yesterday, my material science teacher told me I had one of the best exams. I nodded, as if he had commented on the weather. It should have meant something. It does mean something, objectively. It means I’m doing well, that I’m moving forward.

But all I could think was how much more it would have mattered if it had come from you.

You were the only person who made me feel understood in a way that didn’t feel conditional. You paid attention, not because you needed something from me, not because I could help you with exams or assignments, but because you wanted to. Even when you could have relied on me, you chose not to, at least not immediately. You tried first.

And in that, I felt something rare.

I didn’t feel like a resource. I felt… seen. Appreciated.

I miss that more than I can explain.

It’s unsettling, how much your absence reshapes everything. Even the good days collapse inward, like they’ve lost their structure. I keep moving, I keep doing what I’m supposed to, but it all feels strangely weightless, as if none of it can land anywhere anymore.

I wish I could unlearn this, this instinct to measure moments by whether I can share them with you. But I don’t know how.

So I write instead. Because these words have nowhere else to go.

And because, in some quiet, unreasonable way, I still feel like I am speaking to you.

it was ordinary. almost too ordinary.

i was sitting in the school library on the second floor, next to the stairs.

it was a library class.

i was reading some book, sitting in one of those u-shaped seats with a few classmates.

then there was a commotion.

i looked up and asked what was going on.

someone said there was a new admission.

there was a group of people around you.

i couldn’t see your face.

just pink translucent glasses.

i remember thinking,

cute glasses.

and then i went back to my book.

like nothing happened.

—

the next week, you were surrounded by people.

the popular ones asked you to sit with them.

i remember thinking it was cheap.

they always did that.

they would leave within a week, once they got bored.

it wasn’t a good thing to do to someone new.

—

after a week, i finally saw you properly.

and i lost my train of thought.

i remember thinking you looked like a foreigner.

you were beautiful.

for a moment, i understood the commotion.

the attention made sense.

it felt like something about you was… certain.

like you mattered.

your eyes.

i don’t think i had seen eyes like that before.

—

there was still distance between us.

and i had no choice

And you abandoned me without ever looking back.

Zeher jaisi kuch dawaein chahiye