That none of it was fiction. Not the trembling hands. Not the sleepless nights. Not the paragraphs that looked too tender to be true. You arrived so casually into my life that even now it feels absurd that a human being could alter the climate of another person so completely. Before you, i wrote to survive silence. After you, i wrote because silence became impossible.
People will underline my lines someday and call them delicate. They will ask me where i learned to love like that. I will laugh quietly because there was no learning involved. There was only you sitting across from me in coffee shops while the world kept happening outside the windows. There was only your voice during random walks home. The way ordinary streets began feeling cinematic because you were walking beside me. The way goodbye started terrifying me long before it ever arrived.
And maybe that is what nobody understands about writers. We are not inventors. We are archivists. We collect moments before they disappear. The curve of a smile during a difficult week. Half-finished conversations at train stations. The warmth of someone’s shoulder during cold evenings. We store these things inside language because reality itself feels too fragile to trust.
You became every metaphor without trying. Every song i paused midway because it sounded too much like us. Every page i had to close because it suddenly carried your face between the lines. Loving you did not make me wiser. It made me observant. Suddenly i noticed how light falls on people you care about. How laughter changes when it is genuine. How certain names begin to feel heavier in the mouth because of how carefully you pronounce them.
One day these poems will belong to strangers. They will read them in cities i have never visited. Maybe they will send excerpts to people they love. Maybe someone will cry over words that were born from nights i spent missing you. And the strangest part is that they will never know you. The person responsible for all of it. The invisible fingerprint on every sentence.
They will think i possessed imagination when in truth i only possessed memory.
You were the beautiful thing. I was merely paying attention.
–aaditya
