Aaditya Bajpai

  • The Space Between Seconds

    So, do you know when I remember you? It’s in the spaces between seconds.

    It’s not in the loud hours or the tired nights, it’s in the pauses between them. When the world exhales and forgets to breathe for a moment, that’s where you live. In the almosts. In the might-have-beens. In that half-beat between when my heart forgets to beat and then painfully remembers how to.

    You know, I don’t remember the sound of your laugh anymore, not fully, but I remember how it felt like sunlight spilling into a place that never saw dawn. I don’t remember your exact words, but I remember the quiet after them, the kind that used to hum like safety and now hums like ghosts.

    Some days I tell myself I’m fine, and I almost believe it. Then the kettle whistles, or a stranger says your name, or a song decides to hurt me on purpose, and suddenly I’m right back there. Right back in that tiny room where the air knew your shape. Right back in that night where I thought we were infinite.

    It’s funny, everyone talks about memories like they’re solid things, like photographs in albums. But mine are liquid. They slip through everything I try to contain them in. They spill into my mornings, stain my afternoons, soak into my sleep. And I let them. Because forgetting you would mean forgetting the only version of me that ever felt real.

    You once told me that love is supposed to make you whole. Maybe you were right, maybe you weren’t. Maybe love just makes you aware of the holes you didn’t know existed before. Maybe that’s why I keep writing to you even when you’ve stopped listening. Because language is the only way I can pretend you’re still somewhere on the other end of the silence.

    I think I’ve made peace with not finding peace. Maybe that’s what growing up is, learning to live with the ache instead of trying to erase it. Letting it hum softly in the background, like a secret song only I can hear.

    So, do you know when I remember you? It’s in the spaces between seconds

    -aaditya.

  • A Thousand First Times

    If only I could tell you, how much I love you

    Falling in love with you has never felt like something I decided. It was more like something that decided me. Like my body already knew how to breathe you in before I even understood what it meant. It is my favourite thing I have ever done and the only thing I will ever want to keep doing. Again and again. Even when the weight of it feels too much. Even when I think I have given everything I have. I would still wake up with the same smile. I would still let myself fall like the first time never ended.

    If tomorrow stripped me of everything I own. If silence was all I had left. I would still choose the ruin of loving you. Because who am I without this hopelessly sensitive heart. Who am I if not the person who feels too much. Who believes too much. Who risks everything for the warmth of being close to you.

    There is nothing simple about it. It is reckless. It is heavy. It is tender enough to hurt. But in the breaking there is life. In the ache there is proof that I exist. And if I could only ever do one thing forever it would be this. To fall into you. To keep falling. To make the fall my home.

    Because without you I am only a body moving through time. With you I am a heart that remembers what it means to be alive. And that is why I will never stop. Not in this life. Not in any other. Always you. Always the fall. Always the smile that comes with it.

    -aaditya.

  • If the world ended in Her name

    Kafka wrote, in one of his letters to Milena, that “Dear Milena, I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep in Vienna, and say: Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.”

    And then I think of you. Not in a way that is linear, not in the way that sane minds think of another, but in a way that bends in on itself, like light trying to fold back into its own shadow. What Kafka said, I wish to say, though with a trembling that I cannot hide. If the world did end tomorrow, I would not ask for explanations, for your careful reasons, or for the logic you cradle in your palms like broken glass. I would only say, “Come with me. Let us love like cowards never could.”

    But the world does not end. And therein lies the cruelty. It keeps moving, like an unkind clock that mocks the weight of our longing. And so I circle around you, endlessly, in words that refuse to arrive.

    I wonder if my love for you is an apocalypse already disguised as devotion? Because every time I think of your name, the world does collapse for a moment, the streets blur, the air trembles, and my chest becomes a house with all its windows shattered open. Perhaps the world ends a thousand times a day, but only for me. And you, you walk untouched, unaware, as though immune to the ruins I carry.

    Yet, if I had his courage, the courage of Kafka, who never quite had the courage, I would come to you and say, “The future is a lie; tomorrow is a fraud. Let us burn the maps and calendars and live in the violent honesty of this second.” Love me now, not later, not someday, not when the world gives permission, but now, as though the world had already ended, and the silence after the end belonged to us.

    But I do not come. I only write. And writing is my cowardice & my devotion braided into one long, endless, unraveling confession. So, in the end, I keep loving you through my words. Because even the words and worlds might end, but my love for you won’t. 

    –aaditya.

  • A Twenty-Five Minute Love Story?

    11:22 A.M., Juggernaut, Connaught Place, New Delhi

    It was just another humid afternoon in Delhi, the kind where time feels heavy and slow, like it’s leaning on your shoulder. I found myself at Juggernaut in CP, seated near the window, sipping filter coffee and waiting for my idli and sambhar to arrive. I hadn’t come searching for anything. Maybe some quiet, maybe just the comfort of South Indian food that tasted like home even if it wasn’t. The kind of lunch you eat with no expectations and a mind full of to-do lists. And then she walked in.

    She came with a friend. Her laughter was the first thing I noticed, before I even turned to look. The kind of laugh that doesn’t ask for attention but gets it anyway. She had curly hair, loose and alive, and skin that felt brighter than the afternoon sun trying to press its way through the glass. Her eyes held mascara like a secret, just enough to make you feel like you were noticing something private, something not meant to be seen by everyone. She was wearing a pink kurti, embroidered gently with threads that caught the light like her smile did. But honestly, I don’t remember much of the kurti. I spent most of the time looking at her eyes, trying not to be obvious about it, failing miserably.

    She was happy. Not the performative kind of happy people wear on their faces for selfies, but the rare, real kind. She clicked a few pictures, laughed with her friend, and sipped her drink. I, on the other hand, forgot about the sambhar cooling beside me. I had picked up a pen from my bag and was writing bits of her onto the tissue paper on my table. Just words. Curly. Kurti. Bright. Smile. Something about her needed to be written down, even if it was only to be thrown away later or folded into the pages of a diary I would pretend I don’t read anymore.

    And then, our eyes met. Brief. Soft. Almost accidental. But something in that half-second stretched longer than it should have. I smiled. She smiled back. I think I even blushed, which isn’t something I do anymore, or so I thought. And then she looked away. That was it. No dramatic pause. No music in the background. Just the quiet return to reality that hits when you realize a moment has ended even as you’re still inside it.

    She left the cafe not long after. Her smile walked out with her. But something stayed. Something tender and inexplicable. I finished what was left of the cold sambhar, paid my bill, and booked an Uber like a person who hadn’t just written a stranger into a poem that would probably never be read aloud. But she lived on. In the ink of a borrowed pen. On a napkin that carried the faint scent of her perfume. In a corner of my memory I didn’t know I had left vacant.

    What should we name this incident? I am figuring that out still. For the time being, let’s remember it as a 25-minute love story?

    –aaditya.

  • Love and Other Words

    There are some things that silence cannot hold. Her name, for instance, always escapes it. It spills out of me like sunlight through the cracks of an old window, soft and stubborn and unwilling to stay quiet. Do you ever feel like you’re lying down in a field full of sunflowers, the sunlight brightening up your face, with this cool wind blowing the strands of your hair, and suddenly soft romantic music plays in your head? I have. And that’s the proof; I am in love.

    I have tried, I swear I have tried, to speak of her with restraint, but she makes poetry of my breath. And what can a man do when even his pauses begin to rhyme?

    She is not merely beautiful, though even the stars might dim themselves in her presence out of humility. No, she is good. In a way the world no longer teaches. There is a mercy in her laughter that forgives even the worst parts of me. And when she speaks, it is not only my name that she calls, but some forgotten version of myself I had long abandoned. With her, I am more than I have ever dared to be.

    You once told me that love is a kind of madness, a soft unraveling of the sensible self. Then let me be unmade. For if all love is madness, it is the sweetest kind, a fever I do not wish to break. I would trade reason for the sound of her footsteps and certainty for the chance to hold her hand on an uncertain day.

    She is not the answer to my life’s questions. She is the question itself. I will dedicate a lifetime to asking her the right questions. The one that makes the rest of the world fall into place, not because she solves it, but because she makes it worth solving.

    And so I love her. Not in loud declarations, but in the way I move toward the light when I hear her voice. In the pauses I save just for her. In other words, I no longer need to say it.

    –aaditya

  • The Geography of Almost

    There are nights I wake up in the middle of a sentence I never started. My tongue remembers a name my mouth refuses to say. I sit at the edge of my bed, elbows to knees, and trace shadows on the floor like they’re maps to a place I never had the courage to go. Sometimes I think love is just muscle memory, your body turning back even when your mind has made peace. Or maybe that’s grief, I’m not sure. The two have started blending like colours in a storm, and I can’t tell whether I’m drowning in longing or being reborn by it.

    There are people you never stop writing letters to, even when they’re not reading. People who haunt your poems not as ghosts, but as punctuation, showing up as commas when you try to move on, ellipses when you almost do, and a question mark every time you think you’ve stopped feeling. I laugh too loud now, like I’m trying to echo into a version of myself that once made someone feel safe. But it’s strange, isn’t it? How safety can feel like a shiver in your spine and danger can feel like coming home. I don’t trust what feels like comfort anymore.

    I think I’ve been chasing the version of love I imagined before I ever knew what it was. Not the kind they sing about or the kind they leave you with in movies, but the kind that sits quietly in your throat when you’re pretending to be fine. The kind that slips out when you overexplain your silence or apologize for being too much. I’ve loved in metaphors and been left in parentheses. I’ve waited in doorways that were never mine to walk through. I’ve been both the echo and the mouth that started it all.

    Someone once told me I romanticize everything about her. But tell me, what else do you do when reality doesn’t fit your heart? I’ve built cities out of glances and entire galaxies out of half-meant sentences, all for her. I’ve survived more on imagined tomorrows than remembered yesterdays.

    I don’t know if I want to be loved or just understood. I don’t know if I’m healing or rehearsing. There’s a difference between moving on and pretending you have. I keep confusing the two.

    So tell me, is this what you call the space in between being a hopeless romantic and a hopeful lover?

    –aaditya

  • if destined, even those a thousand miles apart will meet (有缘千里来相会)

    There’s a Chinese phrase, 有缘千里来相会, yǒu yuán qiān lǐ lái xiāng huì. It means if destined, even those a thousand miles apart will meet. A quiet kind of faith. Not loud like fate with its thunder and signs, but patient, the belief that what is meant will make its way, even if it wanders. Even if it’s late. Even if it arrives laughing, out of breath, holding flowers it picked along the wrong roads.

    I think of that phrase when I look at you. Not because we were apart, but because we could have been. All it would have taken was one missed train, one earlier flight, one decision made slightly to the left and we might never have known. That thought used to scare me, but now it makes me love you more. Because despite every ordinary thing that could have kept us from meeting, we did. Not like a collision. Not like a miracle. But like a sentence that’s been waiting too long for its comma.

    You walked into my life like you had always been circling the block, just waiting for the right time to knock. And I opened the door like I had been expecting a package I never ordered but somehow already missed. We didn’t fall in love, not really. We remembered it. Like our hearts had practiced this dance before, in some life where we wore different names but held hands the exact same way. Like the laughter we share now is an echo from something we forgot to carry over, but finally found.

    And it’s funny, isn’t it, how love can be so confusing. Not in its chaos, but in its peace. I kept waiting for the twist, the storm, the unraveling. But instead, you stayed. We made tea. We talked about the shapes in clouds. You told me you once tried to write a poem and gave up halfway because it felt too raw, too much. I told you I think love is like that. Not always needing to be finished to be beautiful. And then we sat in silence, not awkward, not empty, just full.

    Maybe destiny doesn’t mean we were made for each other. Maybe it means we chose each other anyway. Even across the distances. Even across all the little elsewheres that could have been. Maybe love is the quiet miracle of reaching the same point from opposite directions. And maybe, just maybe, we are the ones who kept walking. Because something inside us knew, when it’s right, even a thousand miles isn’t far.

    -aaditya

  • Oranges and You, Just One Last Time

    I would peel oranges for you, but would you bookmark the page of the book I was reading if I accidentally fall asleep? That’s all I’m asking. Not devotion, not declarations under moonlight or songs on empty balconies. Not the ache of love, but the hum of it, so soft it’s nearly mistaken for silence.

    I mean, I would hold the umbrella slanted toward you, letting my shoulder soak, even though I hate the rain. I would learn the names of the people you only mention once, remember the smell of your shampoo just in case you forget. I would stay up past my thresholds and undo my rituals just to make space for the mess you bring. But I wonder… if the weight of quiet things I do ever echoes in your chest when you breathe in my name?

    Sometimes love is just the sound of a kettle boiling when you didn’t ask for tea. Or noticing the way someone dog-ears their pages and never correcting them. It’s not grand, it’s grazing.

    You see, people write poems about falling, but no one writes about staying. No one tells you how loud the silence is when the page turns without you. Or how the spine of a book bends differently when your hands aren’t the ones touching it.

    I once folded a paper crane and whispered your name into it before letting it drift down a river. I don’t know why, I think I just wanted the water to know too. The current was gentle that day.

    But I guess this is where it all bends inward. Where I stare at your shadow across the room and realize I’ve always given things without receipts.

    I’ve peeled oranges into perfect moons, just so the juice wouldn’t stain your fingers. I’ve watched you laugh at books I’ll never understand, but never asked you to understand why I cried over a single comma.

    Maybe I fear love isn’t mutual, it’s just mirrored. Maybe I keep loving people who are only evernlooking at themselves in the glass I become for them. Still, I’d peel oranges for you, again and again. But, Would you bookmark the page of the book I was reading if I accidentally fall asleep?

    -aaditya

  • koi no yokan (恋の予感 – “The premonition of love”)


    Title: Koi no Yokan
    (恋の予感 – “The premonition of love”)

    The subtle sense, upon first meeting someone, that you will inevitably fall in love with them.

    There are certain nights that don’t end.
    Not in sleep.
    Not in silence.
    Not even in forgetting.

    I met her between two seconds. Not a full moment

    no, something briefer. Something before memory, before decision. The way a drop of ink might already know it’s meant to spill into a poem. That’s when I felt it: koi no yokan, not quite love, not yet, but the certainty that it will be.
    I think my heart bowed before I did.

    She didn’t say much. But it was the way she looked at empty chairs, as if they all remembered someone. The way she picked at coffee mugs like the rim held secrets. You don’t fall for people like her.
    You remember that you already did.

    I tried to fight it with logic, measured breaths, practiced detachment. But koi no yokan is a liar. It doesn’t scream. It doesn’t ask. It settles. Like smoke in a closed room. Like light through paper walls.
    And that night, I wasn’t breathing smoke, i was inhaling her inevitability.

    I don’t know her name.
    But I know I’ll love her.
    And in some ways, maybe I already do.
    That’s the cruelty of koi no yokan
    it’s not love.
    It’s worse.
    It’s the whisper before the scream.
    It’s the outline before the absence.
    It’s knowing the fire is coming, and warming your hands anyway.

    And if you ever feel it…
    You’ll understand.
    This wasn’t a meeting.
    It was a prophecy.

    –aaditya

  • I tried to be my own muse for once. I couldn’t do it though. I can write her in a book, but can’t write myself in a word.

    Sometimes I stand in front of walls and beg them to echo, not because I want to hear anything back but because I want something to break that isn’t me. I pour ink in my coffee hoping it’ll taste like something truer than water and regret, but it only ever spills into silhouettes shaped like her laugh. I kept thinking if I shut my eyes tight enough, my mind would forget the self I became around her, but  the effort was only there on paper. 

    And so I tried, didn’t I? Tried to dress my own silence in metaphor, parade it around like look, here, here is poetry that doesn’t depend on the ghost of her shoulder. But every time I wrote “I,” it turned into something half-formed, half-felt, half-ashamed of its own self. My voice wore her perfume. My metaphors dragged her footsteps behind them. Even my empty lines had her breathing between them.

    I carved temples out of sentences and put mirrors where altars should be, thinking maybe if I saw myself blurry enough, I’d believe it was art. But no chorus followed. No thunder cracked. Just the quiet guilt of knowing I had always been a vessel for someone else’s wonder. She was symphony. I was scaffolding. Even my breaking wasn’t beautiful enough to draw blood from anyone but myself.

    I’m tired of writing her with reverence and myself with ellipses. Of pretending I can fill a page when all I’m doing is bleeding onto it hoping no one notices the shape is still hers. I made her immortal in metaphors. I buried myself between the margins. And when I tried to write a line about loving myself, it came out hollow.

    Once I held a mirror to my chest and asked it to name me. It cracked. Said I was too much reflection and too little presence. Said my heartbeat stuttered in paragraphs. Said I was living as the afterthought of a girl I couldn’t stop mythologizing. 

    I laughed. Told it I never learned how to hold a pen unless it was to paint her into someone worth reading.

    Maybe this is what it means to fail quietly. To want to be seen and only know how to make someone else visible. To want to be muse and artist and end up being neither; just an echo with semi-decent handwriting.

    I screamed into a void once and it whispered her name back. Not because it missed her, but because it didn’t know who else I could be.

    I tried to be my own muse once. But I only knew how to sculpt her out of my ruin. I can write her in a book. But I can’t even write myself in a word.

    –aaditya.

Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started