Aaditya Bajpai

  • i have lived a thousand lives, but I fell in love in this one when I met you.

    I have been a thousand people. A warrior with calloused hands and a heart turned to stone. A scholar bent over books until my eyes burned. A wanderer who knew every road but no home. I have tasted victory and defeat, held newborns and closed the eyes of the dying, built cathedrals, and watched them crumble to dust.

    I have known many things. Power. Loss. The quiet satisfaction of work well done. The hollow ache of waking up alone in a bed too big for one person. I have been rich and poor, celebrated and forgotten, loved and left, and sometimes all three in the same lifetime.

    But I never knew this.

    I never knew the way sunlight catches in your hair when you laugh. I never knew how a single text from you could turn an ordinary Tuesday into something worth remembering. I never knew that love could feel like coming home to a place I had never been, like finding a room in my heart I did not know existed until you walked in and turned on the light.

    I have lived a thousand lives, but I fell in love in this one, where I met you.

    It started small. A conversation that lasted longer than it should have. A shared joke that made us both snort with laughter. The way you remembered the little things, the coffee order, the name of my childhood dog, and the story I told you once about learning to ride a bicycle and falling into a hedge. You listened. You really listened. And somewhere between the small talk and the deep talk, between the silence and the song, I fell.

    Not the dramatic, sweeping-off-your-feet kind of falling. The slow, steady kind. The kind that happens when you realize you are happier with someone than without them. The kind that sneaks up on you when you are not looking, like spring arriving after a long winter, like flowers pushing through snow.

    I have lived a thousand lives, but I fell in love in this one, where I met you.

    Now my days are brighter. The world is softer at the edges. Ordinary moments feel like gifts: cooking dinner together and burning the garlic bread, dancing in the kitchen to songs only we know the words to, falling asleep on the couch with your head on my chest and your breathing slow and steady against my skin.

    I love the way you hum when you are concentrating. I love how you get excited about things other people find boring. I love that you see the best in people even when they do not deserve it, that you believe in second chances and happy endings and the possibility of something better waiting just around the corner.

    You make me want to be better too. Not because I am not enough, but because with you, I want to be more. I want to build something beautiful. I want to fill this life with laughter and adventure and all the small, sweet moments that add up to a lifetime of love.

    I have lived a thousand lives, but I fell in love in this one, where I met you.

    Sometimes I think about the other versions of me. The ones who never found this. The ones who settled for less, who convinced themselves that companionship was enough, that passion fades, that love is a story we tell ourselves to make the loneliness easier to bear. I wonder if they feel the absence, even if they do not know what they are missing. I wonder if they look up at the stars and feel something stirring in their chest, a longing they cannot name.

    I hope they find their way here. I hope they find their way to you.

    Because this, what we have, is rare. It is bright and lovely and real. It is the kind of love that poets write about and singers sing about and people spend their whole lives searching for. And I found it. In this life. In this moment. With you.

    I have lived a thousand lives, but I fell in love in this one, where I met you. And I would choose you in every single one of them.

    -aaditya

  • I will always share the same moon as hers

    I will always share the same moon as hers.

    However far she has gone — down the road, across an ocean, into a life I don’t get to see anymore, into a quiet I never wanted — none of it reaches the sky. The moon doesn’t measure miles. It doesn’t count the years between two people, or take sides, or forget a face. It only knows how to rise, and how to be seen, and how to pour the same soft light over everyone it loves, all at once.

    So tonight it finds her first. It lays its light across her shoulders the way I would, if I could reach that far. It sits at the foot of her bed like something loyal, and watches over her sleep. And then — in the very same breath — it turns, crosses all that dark, and comes to find me at my window too.

    The same light. The same moon. Touching us both.

    We are not as far apart as the map insists. We are two people under one lamp left burning in the hallway of the sky. When she looks up, she is looking at the exact thing I am looking at — and our eyes meet there, in that white and quiet place, even when nothing else can bring them together.

    And when I miss her — and I do, and I will, I always will —
    I don’t have to reach for the phone, or the past, or the words I never said.
    I only have to step outside.

    Because the oldest promise in the world is hanging right up there, where neither of us can ever lose it.

    Whatever else changes. Whoever else leaves. However long the road becomes

    I will always share the same moon as hers.

    And in the only way that has ever really mattered, we are never truly apart.

    -aaditya.

  • the weight of “could have been”

    There is a kind of grief with no funeral. No one brings food to the house for the life you didn’t get to ruin together.

    She was my could-have-been, and I was hers, and that is the cruelty most people miss: it takes two to leave a thing unlived. One person wanting is only longing. Two people wanting, in the same direction, across whatever the world wedged between them — that is a haunting with a witness on the other end.

    We were never wrong. That was the problem. Nothing broke, so there is nothing to point at. No fight to replay, no lie to forgive. Just timing, which is the coward’s word for the thing we were both too afraid to say out loud while there was still a door, and both of us standing near it.

    I know exactly where the sentence stopped. Mid-air. The way you leave a name in a drafts folder for years, because sending it would make it real and deleting it would make it over, and you cannot afford either.

    Here is what nobody warns you about: the could-have-been does not fade the way the real ones do. The real ones decay. You learn their temper, their silences, the way they load a dishwasher wrong, and love thins out into something survivable. But ours never got the chance to disappoint us. It stays lit. Preserved. Perfect precisely because we never let it become anything a person could actually leave.

    So it doesn’t hurt like a wound. It hurts like a phantom limb — a thing that was never fully there, still reaching.

    Some nights I don’t miss her. I miss the version of me that existed only when she was looking. He was braver than I turned out to be.

    And somewhere, I suspect, she does the same math. Carries the same unsent name. Stands in her own doorway. Which means we are, in a way, still keeping our appointment — the two of us, on opposite sides of a life we didn’t choose, faithfully haunting the same empty room.

    It will always be about that could-have-been. Not because it was the best thing. Because it was the unfinished thing.

    And the unfinished thing is the only kind that gets to stay young.

    –aaditya

  • Archivist of Your Existence

    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

  • Everything We Call Life Is Either Love or Its Echo

    There are people who think love is a grand event. A confession in the rain. A wedding aisle. A hand held at the airport before departure. But most days, love looks smaller than that. Quieter. It looks like someone remembering how you take your tea after hearing it only once. It looks like forwarding a song because the lyrics reminded them of a sentence you said three months ago. It looks like your mother cutting fruit and leaving it near your laptop without saying a word because she knows you forget to eat when you are anxious.

    And maybe that is why the world feels so unbearable sometimes. Not because life is inherently cruel, but because we keep brushing against the absence of love in ordinary places.

    A cold reply.

    An unanswered call.

    An empty chair at dinner.

    The silence after telling someone something that mattered to you.

    Everything in life is about love. And when it is not, it is about the hunger for it.

    Even ambition is just love wearing a suit and pretending to be practical. People work fourteen hour days not only for money, but because somewhere deep inside them is a child wanting to be seen. To be told, I am proud of you. We call it success because it sounds less vulnerable than saying please love me enough to notice my effort.

    Loneliness is not sitting alone in a room. Loneliness is making a joke and realizing nobody knows your humour well enough to understand you were serious underneath it.

    You can see it everywhere if you pay attention.

    The old man at the grocery store who starts conversations with strangers because his wife died years ago and silence has become too loud in the house.

    The friend who keeps posting online because they are terrified of disappearing quietly from everyone’s mind.

    The person who says they do not care about relationships anymore but still checks their phone at 2:13 in the morning hoping one particular name appears.

    Even anger is often wounded love. Nobody becomes bitter without first caring too much.

    A child slamming a door because their father missed another school play.

    A woman saying she hates romance because she once waited for someone who never arrived.

    A man becoming emotionally unavailable because the last time he opened up, somebody used his softness against him.

    People do not become hard naturally. Life dries them out slowly. Like wet clothes forgotten on a terrace for too many summers.

    And still, despite everything, human beings continue reaching for one another in the smallest ways.

    We send reels.

    We wait for replies.

    We save seats beside us.

    We type “reached home?” after midnight.

    We cook extra food hoping someone stays a little longer.

    We replay voice notes after heartbreak because hearing someone laugh once loved feels better than silence.

    Even grief is proof of love having existed. Nobody mourns what meant nothing.

    Maybe that is why certain cities feel lonely. Certain homes feel cold. Certain songs feel like they are touching bruises inside you. Because love is not decoration in human life. It is infrastructure. It is electricity behind the walls. You only notice it fully when it is gone.

    A person can survive without love the same way a plant can survive in a dark room for a while. Technically alive. Quietly dying.

    And maybe the strangest thing is this:

    people spend their whole lives looking for love while constantly creating it for others without realizing.

    The cashier remembering your usual order.

    Your friend sending you a blurry moon picture because they knew you would like it.

    Someone moving to the safer side of the pavement while walking with you at night.

    Your father pretending he does not understand technology just to keep asking you for help because it gives him reasons to talk to you.

    Love has never only been romance.

    It is attention.

    It is remembrance.

    It is making space.

    And the absence of it explains almost every sadness we carry.

    Maybe that is all life really is in the end.

    A long search for places where we can soften without fear.

    -aaditya

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