The Way It Felt

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  • The Cloud I Never Sent

    It’s 2:37 a.m. Couldn’t sleep, got tired of staring at the ceiling, so here I am. Let’s see what comes out.

    You’ve become part of my day and honestly I didn’t even notice when it started. There’s no moment I can point at. I just looked up one day & you were already there, in the normal stuff. You know last week I saw a cloud, it looked funny like it was judging someone & I took a picture because I thought you’d laugh at it too. Then I kept staring at the send button for a minute, didn’t send it though. What do I even say “here’s a cloud”?.. so it’s just in my gallery now. I open it sometimes and look at it.

    I do this a lot these days. Walk through a bookstore & think, she’ll go straight to that one corner, the section nobody checks or see an empty chair by some cafe window & think that’s your spot obviously. 

    Not that I’m thinking about you all day & no i’m not mad as well…nothing like that. Its just you come up in between things somehow. Someone laughs a certain way somewhere and for a second you’re just there too…now what can i do?

    And our talks are usually about nothing, actually…nothing at all. But after we talk idk why, the day feels much lighter, easier, every single time…now I’ve stopped trying to figure out the reason.

    All I know is love doesn’t feel the way I always imagined it would.

    Idk maybe,maybe not..but mine’s not like that at all. It’s smaller than that, dumber maybe? It’s seeing something nice and just wishing you were there to see it too, not even telling you that. It’s hoping you got home safe on a day we didn’t even talk, if I’m being honest.

    I don’t really know what I am to you. Maybe nothing much..maybe just a name that comes up sometimes. Idk & I’m okay with not knowing (umm actually i’m not) & weird thing is, I don’t think I even want the usual thing back, ‘you feeling the same’ (oh c’mon! you also know that i’m lying here jus to look mature). 

    I just want you to know someone is out there hoping you’re doing fine, loving you & all those stuffs you know.

    I think I’ve become better bcz of this, actually (i mean i think so). 

    More patient than before, notice small things I used to just ignore. You never asked for any of this..not once..not a single thing, & still somehow I changed. Don’t ask me… “why”?

    No idea what’s gonna happen. Maybe nothing.. hopefully something. I’ve stopped guessing, it doesn’t work like that anyway.

    But sometimes I think..lets say fifteen years down the line, some version of us.. older, sitting somewhere & one of us bringing this up. Maybe we’ll read this then and laugh about the cloud thing. Maybe that day doesn’t come at all, who knows. But I’d still write it either way.

    Funny how I never sent you that picture… but somehow ended up writing all this instead.

    Anyway… that cloud’s still in my gallery!

  • Where Time Sat Down

    I do not remember choosing this path.

    Only the stairs..

    waiting where I hadn’t been looking,

    rising without urgency,

    as if they had already accepted

    that not everything reaches somewhere.

    I climbed them anyway.

    They felt familiar…

    like a conversation I never finished,

    or a feeling I once set aside

    thinking I’d come back to it later.

    At the top, there were houses

    not empty, just no longer expecting to be filled.

    Their walls held time the way people do..

    quietly, without explaining what it changed.

    Cracks ran through them,

    not broken, just… honest.

    Like things that stay,

    even after you’ve learned

    not to speak about them.

    Sunlight rested there, soft and unhurried,

    touching everything like it knew it didn’t need

    to make anything brighter.

    I thought I would feel alone.

    But it felt more like being understood

    without being seen.

    There was something in the stillness

    in the old lamp, in the narrow sky,

    in the way the air held itself

    like a presence that didn’t ask

    who I was or why I had come.

    A red vine leaned over a wall,

    quietly alive, holding on

    the way some parts of us do

    long after we pretend we’ve let go.

    I stayed there longer than I should have.

    Long enough

    for certain thoughts to return

    without the sharpness they once had.

    Long enough to realize

    not everything unresolved is meant to be fixed.

    When I finally turned back,

    nothing followed me.

    The stairs didn’t stop me.

    The houses didn’t ask me to stay.

    Some places just like people

    don’t ask you to understand them.

    They don’t explain what they carry,

    or why they feel familiar.

    They just meet you

    in the quiet parts of yourself,

    you’ve been avoiding…

    and leave something there..

    not closure, not answers, just a softness

    where something used to ache,

    and a silence that no longer feels empty.

  • You Didn’t Fall in Love. You Filled in the Blanks

    Okay so, weird theory incoming.

    I don’t think we fall in love with people. I think we fall in love with the idea of them that we build in our own heads.

    I know how that sounds. A little cold, maybe even a little insulting. I thought so too when this first occurred to me. But then I kept watching people around me fall in love & fall out of it too & honestly, it just kept making more & more sense.

    Here’s what I mean.

    When you meet someone new, you don’t actually know them yet. You know bits and pieces. A few good conversations, the way they laugh at their own jokes, that one story they told you about their childhood or their mom or the time they moved to a new city not knowing anyone. Maybe even a random 1AM text that made you smile for no reason.

    That’s it. That’s all you’ve got.

    So what does your brain do with the rest? It fills in the blanks. Automatically, without asking your permission.

    You meet a guy who remembers something small, like the name of your best friend or the fact that you don’t like spicy food and suddenly he’s “thoughtful.” You meet a girl who stayed calm and patient during a rough phase and suddenly she’s “emotionally mature.” Somewhere along the way you decide this person would never lie to you, never bail on you, never turn into someone you don’t recognize.

    Except… they never actually promised you any of that. You just decided it, on their behalf.

    And once you’ve decided it, something sneaky happens.. you stop actually getting to know them. You start dating the version of them you made up. Their good version, the highlight reel your brain quietly edited together from a few good conversations & one really nice evening out.

    Honestly, that’s probably why the beginning of a relationship feels so good. It’s not really about the other person yet. It’s about the story you’re writing. Not knowing everything about someone isn’t scary at that point.. it’s exciting, because your imagination gets to fill in the gaps with whatever you want.

    Then slowly, real life shows up.

    You start seeing things that don’t match the story. An opinion that surprises you, a fear they never mentioned before, a selfish moment or bad mood that came out of nowhere. Nothing dramatic, usually just… them. The actual, whole, unedited person, showing up in places your imagination hadn’t gotten to yet.

    And this is usually the part where someone says, “You’ve changed.”

    Sometimes that’s true. But a lot of the time? Maybe they didn’t change at all.. maybe you just ran out of blank pages to write on.

    I genuinely wonder how many breakups are really about the other person & how many are about watching a story you wrote fall apart. Because those are two very different kinds of pain. Losing a person hurts in a clean, obvious way. But watching an illusion crack is confusing.. you don’t even know who to be upset with. Them, for not being who you imagined? Or yourself, for imagining it in the first place?

    Maybe that’s the real difference between the early stage and the long haul stage of love. Early on, you’re imagining someone. Later, you actually have to see them.. flaws, contradictions, bad days & all.. and decide if you still want to stay.

    And weirdly, that part.. the seeing, not the imagining.. might be the harder thing to do. But it’s also the more real thing. I don’t think that’s a depressing thought, even though it might sound like one.

    I think it means the real version of love doesn’t start the moment you meet someone. It starts the moment you stop needing them to be a character & just let them be a person with flaws & all.

    And honestly? That’s the version worth staying for i guess. Anyway, that’s just a theory.. could be wrong as well. Let me know if you’ve felt it too.

  • Fractures of the Heart

    We drift through rooms crowded with echoes, Touching faces that mean nothing, Speaking words that vanish before they land. Our hearts have become abandoned cities, And we walk their empty streets alone.

    We traded closeness for convenience, Warmth for appearances, Truth for the hollow applause of strangers. Fear built walls taller than any love could climb, And selfishness quietly claimed our names.

    Why is it like this? Because we mistook silence for strength, And shadows for company. Because we are terrified of the raw pulse of connection, Of letting someone see the cracks that bleed, Of letting our souls be mapped and remembered.

    Yet even in the ruins, there is a fragile light. A whisper between the broken, A warmth in the space where eyes meet Without pretense, without demand, A spark that trembles, Promising that even the deepest fractures Can become the veins through which love flows.

    We were never meant to drift as echoes, To be fragments in glass halls. We were born to collide, To bleed, to break, and to find In each other the map back to ourselves!

  • The Whole Way Home

    I’ve been driving for hours. Empty roads, radio static, that low hum of nothing. And somewhere between my ribs and the rearview mirror, old “I love you’s” keep echoing, the ones that used to mean something.

    Because they did, once. Saying it meant I’ll stay, I’ll fight for you, whatever this turns into. Now it just means, I don’t know.. you’re cute, I’m bored tonight, let’s see how long this lasts.
    Nobody says that part out loud. But that’s kind of what it’s become.

    People fall in love like they’re ordering fast food now. Quick. Hot. Disposable.
    I’ve watched someone say “I love you” over coffee like it’s just punctuation.. something you say because the silence felt too long, not because you meant it.
    Text it before the coffee cools down & break up before the next sunrise. And somehow everyone’s fine with that…i mean how?? Nobody stops to say wait, this is insane.. we’ve turned the realest thing we have into something you can caption with a heart emoji and mean nothing by it?

    I keep thinking about how rare those words used to be. How you’d actually wait for someone to mean it, because you knew they wouldn’t say it unless they did. Now it’s almost the opposite. You hear it fast and you brace yourself, because you already know what’s coming after.

    Maybe that’s why I don’t trust the loud kind anymore. The kind that announces itself.

    The real stuff, when I’ve actually seen it.. doesn’t talk much. It’s two people driving at 2 AM with no music on, and neither of them feels the need to fill it. It’s someone staying on a random Thursday when staying isn’t convenient and there’s no one around to give them credit for it. Quiet. Almost boring, if you didn’t know what you were looking at.

    You can say “I love you” a thousand times and not mean it once. Or say nothing the whole drive home, and somehow the other person still knows.. in the way you look at her a second too long at a red light, in the way you listen like it costs you something to look away.

    So yeah.. i keep driving. Past the billboards, past the group chats, past a world that’s turned the one real thing we’ve got into sale… buy one, get one.. but for limited time only.

    But me? I’m not waiting for someone to say it right anymore.
    I’m just waiting for someone who jus sits beside me, holds my hand like she means it, & stays the whole way home like it was always going to be her.

  • The Place Where We Stop Performing

    I can tell you exactly why I loved my childhood house. There was one step on the stairs that always creaked. I’d try so hard to avoid making a sound, but somehow that step never let me win. I can even tell you why I loved a song I heard once on a bus years ago and never found again. It started playing right when the window seat finally opened up. I don’t remember the lyrics anymore but i remember the feeling.

    But ask me why I love the people I actually love, and I’ve got nothing. Not one clean answer.

    “Because they’re caring”… sure, but so is the neighbour aunty who force feeds me every time I visit, and definitely I’m not writing anything about her. “Because they get me”… Maybe. But my barber gets me too, i mean technically, and that relationship isn’t the one keeping me up at night.

    Every reason I come up with sounds like it could belong to anyone. Which is strange, because the feeling itself doesn’t. Maybe that’s the trick of it. Love was never built on reasons. If it were, the day the reason changed, the feeling would’ve quietly packed its bags and left.

    Except it doesn’t. You hear gossip so good your hand reaches for the phone before your brain catches up, then you remember you can’t call them anymore. You still find yourself typing “reached home?” at midnight to someone who never replied to your last three texts. Their favourite song comes on in a stranger’s auto and for a second, they’re there before the song even is.

    Funny how memory works, right? It keeps tiny things you never asked it to.

    And here’s something nobody really says out loud. We like to believe we love people because of their best parts. The nice photos, good conversations, the version of them that’s rested, funny and easy to be around.

    But somewhere along the way, you get attached to the ordinary things too. The way they steal food off your plate like it’s some kind of birthright, when they whisper the entire movie to you while you’re both watching the same movie. The way they’re always ten minutes late and somehow still manage to make it sound like you were the impatient one.

    You’d think those things would get annoying enough to matter. Instead, they become part of the person. And you’d notice if they disappeared.

    Has anyone ever caught you on one of those days where you’re snapping at everything, replying in one word answers, irritated for reasons even you don’t understand… and simply stayed? Not fixing anything. Not asking twenty questions. Just stayed. I’ve started thinking those moments matter more than the grand ones.

    We treat love like it’s the highlight reel…the trips, the anniversary posts, the expensive dinners. But for me, it’s the random Wednesday version of you, with a headache and nothing interesting to say, that tells the truth. When someone still chooses your company on a day like that, it means something.

    Funny enough, we remember the fights more clearly than the perfect evenings. Maybe because an argument about whose turn it was to book the cab, or why they disappeared for four hours without replying, quietly reveals how much this one person matters to you. People don’t spend that kind of energy on strangers.

    Here’s the part I actually wanted to write about. Most of us are “performing” almost all the time without even noticing it. Being the funny one because that’s the role we somehow ended up with years ago, being the calm one, the strong one, the mature one…always! Saying “I’m fine, yaar,” bcz it’s quicker than explaining what’s actually going on.. and they won’t even understand you as well.

    And then, every once in a while, you meet someone around whom all of that becomes unnecessary. You say something embarrassing and don’t spend the next hour regretting it. You’re stuck in traffic together with nothing to talk about, and somehow the silence doesn’t need rescuing. You show up looking exhausted with a headache, wearing yesterday’s mood on your face and nobody seems disappointed that you aren’t your best self.

    That’s a strangely comforting feeling. When was the last time you didn’t have to explain yourself? Not bcz someone understood every thought in your head, just bcz they never demanded an explanation in the first place.

    Ask people why they fell in love, and most won’t have one dramatic answer. What they usually remember is much quieter than that. Things became easier, being tired stopped needing an apology, silence stopped feeling awkward..and all. They laughed a little louder, hid a little less. Without noticing, they became a slightly more honest version of themselves. Maybe that’s why it’s so difficult to explain love.

    At some point, you stop paying attention to when you fell for them, you just notice you don’t have to perform anymore.

    Maybe we’ve been asking the wrong question this whole time. Not “What is love?” Maybe the better question is, “Who lets you stop pretending?”

    Bcz every now and then, if you’re lucky, someone comes along who doesn’t just love the polished version of you. They stay when you’re sleepy, impatient, a little childish, or having one of those days when you can’t even explain what’s wrong. Through the overthinking, the stolen fries, the forgotten replies, the random silence, the laugh that’s a little too loud, the bad mood that has nothing to do with them, the reassurance you never ask for but secretly hope they’ll give, and the moments when you say the wrong thing at the wrong time. The ordinary you. The one that isn’t trying to impress anyone. Just trying to be.

    And one day, almost by accident, you realise something else has quietly happened. You aren’t trying so hard anymore. You look up and think… oh. there I am.

    That’s who I’ve been this whole time. Maybe that’s why losing someone never feels like losing just a person. It feels like losing the only place where you didn’t have to perform.

  • If Love Had a Favourite Season

    I don’t think people fall in love the way they remember falling in love.

    Ask someone how it happened and they’ll usually have a whole story ready, rehearsed almost. A first conversation, first date, some single moment where, apparently, everything changed.

    To be honest, I don’t have that. If you asked me when I fell for you, I’d sit there way too long before saying “I don’t know,” and I’d actually mean it, not in a cute way, just honestly.

    Maybe it was the afternoon you laughed at your own joke before you’d even finished telling it… laughed so hard people two tables away looked over, and you didn’t even notice. I don’t remember the joke. I don’t think I ever really registered it, I was too busy watching you lose it over your own sentence.

    Or maybe it was the evening we decided to walk instead of taking an auto because we were “almost there.” Umm.. I dont think so, we were like forty minutes away and we both knew it and neither of us said it out loud.

    Or maybe it wasn’t either of those. Honestly it’s probably not even a real memory, just one I’ve decided to believe.

    There’s this one time I was standing in a restaurant, staring at a menu for way too long, and before I’d even picked something I caught myself thinking, she’d probably get the pasta. You weren’t even there that day. I hadn’t spoken to you since morning. But somehow you’d wandered into a decision you had no idea I was making.

    That’s the annoying part about all this. Nothing announces itself when it’s happening. You don’t know you’re in the middle of something until much later, when you’re trying to trace it back and every memory looks equally likely to be the one.

    For a long time I thought love lived in the big stuff. Birthdays, trips, the long drives, the things people actually post about. I don’t think that anymore. Most of it happens in places nobody would bother taking a photo of.

    Standing outside a trial room because “two minutes” was twenty minutes ago. Arguing about where to eat until someone gets hungry enough to just give in. Putting something back on the shelf mid-shop because you suddenly remember they hate that brand, and not even mentioning it, just quietly putting it back.

    I couldn’t tell you why any of that matters. It just does, somehow.

    The thing I keep coming back to is goodbyes. Why do they take so long? You hug, someone says “text me when you’re home,” you both say bye, and then nobody actually leaves. Someone points at a random dog. Someone remembers a thing they forgot to say. Someone goes “wait…” and suddenly it’s five more minutes and nothing important is even being said. It’s just harder to leave than you thought it’d be, every single time.

    I barely remember what we actually talked about, most days. If you asked me to recall an actual conversation I’d probably fail. What I remember is how you talked… starting one story, getting distracted because something outside the window caught your eye, and somehow ending up telling me about something from three years ago instead. Then stopping mid sentence, looking at me and going “wait, what was I even saying.” Neither of us ever knew. It didn’t matter.

    That’s what I think I miss, actually. Not the conversations. Just how easy they were to have.

    A few weeks back I was in line at a cafe behind this woman who ordered two coffees.. one for herself, one for someone who hadn’t shown up yet. “Less sugar,” she told the guy, “and make the other one really hot, he likes it too hot.” No call, no checking. She just knew. I don’t know why I’m still thinking about that honestly, some stranger’s coffee order, but I am.

    Maybe because that’s what actually knowing someone looks like. Not the anniversaries or the speeches. Just remembering they ask for extra tissues and then never use a single one. Knowing they’ll insist they’re full and then ask for one bite of yours anyway. Knowing they pat every pocket before leaving the house even though they’ve genuinely never once forgotten anything.

    Small, dumb, specific things. You don’t sit down and memorise them, they just get in there.

    And then one day there’s nobody left whose small dumb things you know anymore.

    I think that’s the part that actually gets people. You don’t just miss the person… you miss all the little corners of your day they used to sit in without you noticing. You stop checking the weather before you leave because they aren’t there to remind you. You stop grabbing their chocolate at the shop out of habit. You stop glancing at the empty chair when a waiter asks if someone else is joining. It doesn’t happen all at once. It’s slower than that, and somehow worse because of it.

    My phone told me storage was full a while ago. Asked if I wanted to delete old chats. I ended up staring at one for a long time… not really reading it, just looking. There was a version of me in there who genuinely believed we’d stop arguing about stupid things eventually. He really thought that.

    I deleted it. Locked the phone. Put it in my pocket. Then just stood there for a second longer than I needed to, which felt stupid, but it did feel bigger than deleting some messages. I don’t think it was really about the messages at all.

    I don’t know if love has a favourite season. Maybe every season just borrows someone for a while, and that’s why rain makes one person think of a bike ride and makes someone else unable to walk past a cafe without remembering some conversation from years back. Memories don’t really care about dates. They just hang on to whatever felt like something.

    I couldn’t tell you what you were wearing the day I realised I loved you, what we ate, what day it even was. What I remember is walking home after nothing had happened, it was a completely normal day and somewhere between saying bye to you and getting to my door, I kept noticing things I wanted to tell you badly but couldn’t. A dog asleep outside a shut shop. A sign with a word spelled wrong. Some guy trying to ride a bicycle with three bags of vegetables hanging from the handle.

    None of it mattered. I just wanted to tell you anyway.

    It’s not one big moment. It’s the quiet, annoying feeling that an ordinary day is somehow incomplete until you’ve told someone about the dog and the badly spelled sign.

    You don’t notice it’s happening. You just look up one day and realise you’ve been living like that for a while.

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