I saw him again on a Sunday.
It was one of those slow, golden Mumbai afternoons where time feels suspended, and the world walks a little softer. I had stepped into a small café in Bandra—just to rest, just to breathe, just to be alone. I ordered my usual, sat by the window, and watched the city pass me by like a forgotten song.
And then, without warning, without preparation, I saw him.
Ayaan.
Seven years since we last spoke, yet I recognised him instantly. Some faces you never forget. Some names your heart refuses to rewrite. He looked a little older now—wiser, gentler. His beard was trimmed, his shirt crisp, the sleeves still slightly rolled the way he always wore them. And sitting across from him was a woman.
She was beautiful in that soft, peaceful way. She wore a blush pink kurta, delicate bangles on her wrist, and a smile that didn’t ask for attention. Her hand rested lightly on his, and he laughed at something she said. The kind of laugh I once knew by heart. The kind of laugh I used to think belonged to me.
In that moment, something inside me stilled. Not broken. Not bruised. Just… quiet.
He hadn’t seen me yet, and I didn’t know whether I wanted him to.
Ayaan and I fell in love in the most ordinary place—the fourth floor of a publishing house in Pune, where we worked side by side editing manuscripts and sipping lukewarm chai in the break room. Love, for us, wasn’t grand or cinematic. It was found in shared office lunches, in stolen glances over paper stacks, in the way he’d send me terrible shayari over email just to make me laugh.
I never needed fireworks with him. He made the everyday feel holy.
We’d stay back after hours, not for work, but because the quiet of the office at night became our little world. He’d hum old songs while writing poetry on scraps of paper, and I’d pretend to focus on edits while memorising the curve of his smile. He once told me, over a broken stapler and two cups of vending machine coffee, “Let’s grow old together, Meera. You, me, a flat with bad lighting and a bookshelf that keeps collapsing.”
And I had said yes. Without blinking. Without doubting. Because with him, forever didn’t feel like a promise—it felt like a fact.
But life has its own edits.
When I told my family, they didn’t scream. They simply stopped. Conversations faded into silence. My mother refused to look me in the eye, and my father turned his disappointment into sentences I can still hear on lonely nights. “You’ve forgotten who you are.” “This isn’t our way.”
I tried to fight. I really did. But guilt has a way of folding itself into your spine. And when my father’s health started slipping, and the pressure turned from words into tears, I broke.
I told Ayaan I couldn’t marry him.
Not because I didn’t want to. But because I wasn’t brave enough to choose a world where I lost everyone else I loved.
He didn’t yell. He didn’t beg.
He simply looked at me, his voice steady but his eyes wrecked, and said, “I would’ve waited, Meera. I really would’ve waited a lifetime.”
And then he left.
I never loved anyone after him.
Not because I was holding on to hope, but because somewhere, I knew I had already lived my great love. I didn’t need another. I didn’t have space for one.
Friends suggested therapists, arranged meetings, dating apps. But I always smiled politely and stepped away.
Because how do you explain that some loves are so complete, so full, that even though they didn’t last—they never really left?
And now, here he was.
Years later, sipping coffee with his wife, looking content, settled. Whole.
He turned, eventually, and saw me.
Our eyes met.
And in that small, suspended moment, everything came rushing back—not to ruin me, not to stir longing, but to remind me gently of what once was.
The late nights in the office. The quiet dinners. The dreams that once felt so reachable. The way he whispered “goodnight” like it meant forever.
He looked surprised. Then a small, knowing smile spread across his face. He nodded. I nodded back. There was no wave. No conversation. Just a soft, respectful recognition of a love that once lived loudly in both of us.
His wife glanced at me and smiled too. Kind. Unaware. I liked her instantly, which surprised me.
She didn’t steal him from me.
Life did.
And that’s the kind of heartbreak you don’t blame anyone for.
I finished my coffee slowly, letting the warmth steady the ache blooming inside me.
When I stepped outside into the fading sun, I didn’t cry.
I thought I would. But instead, I felt something far more delicate.
Peace.
Because I had loved deeply. Truly. The kind of love people write about and rarely feel.
And though it didn’t end at a mandap or with shared last names… it was real.
I had already lived my “happily ever after.”
It just came early. And ended quietly.
Some people look for love all their lives.
I had mine.
And even though it didn’t last a lifetime—
it shaped mine.
And sometimes, that is enough.
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