I met her by accident, the kind that feels scripted only after it’s already gone.
We were standing inside the Bedlam Theatre, pretending to listen, pretending to be strangers who weren’t about to collide into something irreversible. Old walls, tired wood, stories echoing where footsteps once mattered. And then there she was, leaning slightly forward, like she belonged to curiosity more than certainty.
She had that kind of light on her face that doesn’t try to be beautiful. It just is. Skin catching the day softly, as if the sun had learned restraint for her. A smile that didn’t ask for attention, but took it anyway, wide, unguarded, the kind that makes the world feel briefly forgiven. Her eyes weren’t loud. They were calm. Honest. The kind that look like they’ve already decided to trust you before you’ve earned it.
There was an ease to her. Shoulders relaxed. Hair tied back, not to impress anyone, but because the day asked for practicality. She looked like someone who laughs easily and leaves quietly. Like someone who belongs to moments, not places.
I fell in love with her there. Not the dramatic kind. The helpless kind. The kind that happens when your heart doesn’t wait for your permission.
We spoke. Briefly. Casually. As if our voices were aware of the lie we were telling ourselves, that this was just another afternoon, another tour, another stranger. I remember thinking how unfair it was that she existed so gently in a world that never gives warnings.
And then she left.
An exchange student. Temporary by design. A passing chapter pretending to be a whole book. She didn’t stay long enough for me to be brave. Didn’t stay long enough for me to say goodbye. The word never even made it to my mouth. It stayed lodged somewhere between my ribs and my throat, unfinished, like us.
No closure. No ending. Just absence.
And that’s the confusion of it. Nothing went wrong. Nothing broke. She just left. And my love story remained exactly where it began, unspoken, unfinished, unbearably warm.
Some people arrive like storms. She arrived like sunlight through an old theatre window, beautiful, quiet, and gone before you realize you were standing in it.
I saw her today. Or maybe I didn’t. Maybe it was only the idea of her wearing a familiar face, moving through a very ordinary afternoon, pretending not to undo me.
She was struggling with a grocery bag, too full, cutting into her fingers like it didn’t know how precious it was to be held by her. I remember thinking how strange it is that the world keeps asking her to carry more than she should. I remember wanting to take the bag from her, not because it was heavy, but because loving her always felt like a reflex my body learned before my mind could stop it.
There was this one strand of hair. Just one. It had escaped, like it didn’t belong to the rest of her, like it was trying to tell me something I already knew. It kept falling into her face, soft and annoying and perfectly timed. She tried to shake it away, failed, smiled at her own failure. And God, in that moment, I wanted to be there so badly, not to say anything heroic, not to fix her life, just to slide that strand behind her ear. Just that. Just the smallest intimacy that feels larger than forever.
And that’s how I knew I was in love again. Not loudly. Not dramatically. But quietly, inconveniently, like muscle memory. Like my hands remembered her even when my life had learned to live without her.
It’s confusing how love doesn’t ask for permission. How it returns without explaining where it’s been. How it doesn’t hurt, but it doesn’t heal either. It just exists. Standing across the street. Carrying groceries. Being human.
This isn’t sad. That’s the strange part. It’s tragic in the way sunsets are tragic, because they don’t stay, not because they aren’t beautiful. I don’t mourn her. I don’t chase her. I just love her, again, in this soft, useless, impossible way.
And maybe that’s enough. Maybe love doesn’t always need to be lived. Sometimes it just needs to be noticed.
I saw her here right in this garden in Edinburgh. The air was soft and cool and every corner of this place whispered of something ancient and tender. The leaves had fallen quiet under the weight of autumn. The flowers were tired. Even the sun seemed unsure of its warmth. But then there was her. Standing there like the last piece of summer that refused to fade.
She bent down and touched a leaf that had turned brown, brittle, almost gone. I remember holding my breath as if I knew something was about to happen. Her fingers brushed against it so gently that even the wind paused. And in that stillness I saw it. The leaf shimmered for the smallest second, and the green came back to life. It was as if spring had found a way to bloom through her touch.
Her eyes were the kind you do not just look at, you fall into them and never really climb back out. They had that colour of honey mixed with dusk. A warmth that holds you without asking. A light that hurts and heals all at once. When she looked up the whole garden changed its breath. The world seemed to tilt toward her, as if everything in it was trying to get just a little closer.
The curls in her hair caught the light like they were made of it. They fell freely, the way music spills from an open window on a quiet street. I remember thinking that even if time stopped right there it would still not be enough to hold her beauty. There was something endlessly alive about her, something that refused to belong to just one moment.
And I, standing there like a fool, felt the season inside me change too. Everything cold began to melt. Everything lost began to return. I think that is what love does. It takes your dying autumns and quietly turns them into spring.
How beautiful she looks when she tucks her hair behind her ear. There is something so disarmingly human about that one little gesture. It is soft and ordinary and yet it feels like the entire world pauses just long enough for my heart to forget how to beat. The way her fingers move, almost unaware of the way they draw every inch of light toward her. The way a single strand falls forward again, like even her hair refuses to let go of her face. That little moment lives rent free somewhere between my ribs, where breath becomes prayer.
She never realizes how it happens to me every single time. She thinks it is nothing. Just a way to clear her view, a small motion before she speaks or laughs. But I swear the sky bends differently when she does it. The light shifts, the air thickens, and for the briefest instant, the universe rearranges itself around her. It is such a quiet kind of beauty, the kind that never announces itself but simply exists in its own rhythm, calm and unbothered by how much I am falling apart inside.
When she tucks her hair behind her ear, it feels like she is reminding the world that she belongs in the kind of silence where everything feels right. There is something so tender about the way her hand lingers near her face, as if even her touch knows it is holding something sacred. I have seen her laugh, I have seen her cry, I have seen her walk away into rooms filled with light and sound, but nothing quite strikes me like that one effortless movement. It feels like love distilled into motion. It feels like the softest kind of confession.
I often think about how much beauty hides in the small things. The curve of her fingers, the shy tilt of her head, the way she breathes before speaking, the faint touch of her thumb at the edge of her jawline when she’s thinking. But when she tucks her hair behind her ear, everything else fades. It is the only time my heart forgets to build walls. It is the only time I stop pretending that I am not hopelessly, irreversibly, devastatingly in love with her.
There are moments when I think love isn’t supposed to be loud. Maybe it is supposed to exist quietly, inside moments like these. Maybe it lives in how I notice her even when no one else does. Maybe it breathes in the stillness between us when she looks away, unaware of how the light from the window paints her cheek like it has been waiting its whole life for her. I find myself memorizing that look, that softness, that warmth. I think of it when I am alone, when the world is cold and unkind. I think of it and I feel alive again.
Sometimes I imagine telling her all this. I imagine saying, do you know that you ruin me every time you tuck your hair behind your ear? That you make it impossible to believe that something so simple could hold so much grace? That in that single second you make time feel like it has stopped running, like it wants to stay and watch you too? But then she would smile, maybe laugh, and I would lose my courage. Because how can I tell her that something so ordinary to her is sacred to me? How can I explain that I have built entire worlds inside that gesture?
There is love that burns and love that breaks and then there is the kind that just quietly fills the spaces inside you until you do not know how to be without it. She has become that for me. Every time she tucks her hair back, I fall again. I fall into the memory of her, into the idea of her, into the impossibility of ever being free from her. I fall into that delicate ache that feels both like home and heartbreak.
And maybe that is what love really is. Not the grand confessions or the endless promises, but the little things we notice and never say aloud. The small gestures that become lifelines. The moments we hold close because they remind us what it feels like to be human. Maybe love is her, standing there in a world that will never deserve her, tucking her hair behind her ear, unaware that someone somewhere is quietly falling to pieces in the softest way imaginable.
How beautiful she looks when she tucks her hair behind her ear. I will never stop thinking about it. I will never stop falling for that small, fleeting movement that feels like the beginning and the end of everything I have ever felt. And maybe I do not need her to know. Maybe it is enough that I do. Maybe it is enough that I saw her once, that I saw her truly, that I was lucky enough to witness something that pure.
Because every time she tucks her hair behind her ear, I am reminded that beauty does not need to be loud to be infinite. That love does not need to be returned to be real. And that sometimes the smallest things, the ones we almost miss, are the ones that change everything.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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?
I kept writing, like the page remembered her better than I did, like every line was a hand reaching for her in the dark. Even when I called it fiction, it wasn’t. Each poem a quiet unveiling, not of who she was, but of how she felt. My poetry was never just words, it was the canvas where I kept painting her, again and again, until the page began to look like love.
Aaditya Bajpai 