I don’t remember the first day I met them, not clearly. They were just... there. Like the rustle of the neem tree outside the school gate, or the chalk dust in the air, or the way the football thudded on the ground after a perfect volley. They weren’t people I met — they were people I grew into.
We were five. Me, Karthik, Rhea, Neel, and Zara. A chaos of personalities — loud, quiet, shy, reckless, curious — and yet, together we made perfect sense. If childhood was a storybook, we were the scribbles in the margins, the doodles of dreams and disasters. The kind teachers laughed at and parents worried over.
Our lives revolved around an old abandoned house at the end of Rosedale Lane. It was a two-storey mess of cracked tiles and ivy-covered walls. Most kids believed it was haunted, but to us, it was sacred. We called it “The Base.” That house held our secrets like a loyal diary.
We declared ourselves the “YSF” — Young Souls Forever. We didn’t realize how deep that name would one day cut.
It was in that house we made plans for the future. Karthik was going to be a pilot. Rhea wanted to open a bakery that only served desserts with names stolen from poetry. Neel swore he’d join NASA, and Zara, with her quiet rebellion, said she’d just disappear into the world with a camera and never come back.
And me? I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to remember.
Those years felt infinite. Long bike rides down cracked village roads, the thump of rain on tin roofs as we sat under one umbrella, the smell of mango pickle drying on terraces. Falling asleep at each other’s homes. Sneaking out to watch meteor showers. Crying over nothing. Laughing until we forgot why.
Time passed the way it always does — quietly, like sand slipping through your fingers when you aren't watching.
We all drifted.
Zara left first. Her father’s job took them to Dubai. She wrote for a while — letters in envelopes with foreign stamps and little pressed flowers. Then she stopped.
Rhea’s mother passed away when we were sixteen. She stopped smiling for a year. Her bakery dream folded inwards like the pages of an unread book.
Neel changed schools. We thought he’d forget us. He didn’t. But he changed, slowly — from dreaming of stars to talking only about percentages and ranks.
Karthik and I held on the longest. We sat on the school rooftop on our last day, feet dangling off the edge like we were fearless.
“Remember when we promised never to grow up?” he asked.
I nodded.
“We were dumb kids,” he laughed, brushing a tear away before I could notice.
We both knew it was the end of something.
Fifteen years later, I received a message in a dusty old group chat.
Neel: “Rosedale Lane is being demolished next week. Thought you all should know.”
My chest tightened. I hadn’t thought about The Base in years. I hadn’t thought about them.
But suddenly I was on a train home.
We met again — older, wiser, with stories we told like they were someone else’s. Neel wore a suit. Rhea smelled of cinnamon and quiet grief. Karthik had a scar above his eyebrow and Zara, surprisingly, came too — a weathered camera around her neck and a silence that spoke novels.
The Base was a ruin. Its windows shattered, graffiti across its once-beloved walls.
We walked through it without speaking. Every step took us back. To the time Neel broke his arm falling off the first floor. To the day Rhea baked us “poetry cupcakes” with lemon and rosemary. To the moment Zara kissed Karthik under the broken staircase, and the rest of us pretended we didn’t know.
And to the moment I swore I would write about this someday. That I would not let it vanish.
That night, we sat on the cracked floor, sharing old snacks and stories.
“Funny,” Karthik said, “how that felt like the best time of life.”
“It was,” Zara said. “Not because everything was perfect. But because we didn’t know it wasn’t.”
Rhea smiled for the first time in years. “We had nothing, and it felt like everything.”
The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was full — of memories, laughter, longing, loss.
A week later, the Base was gone. Flattened like it had never existed.
But the Young Souls? We remain.
Maybe we don’t see each other every week. Maybe we don’t even text that often. But somewhere in the echo of a cricket ball hitting a wall, or the smell of a monsoon breeze, we meet.
They say youth is wasted on the young. But they’re wrong.
We didn’t waste it.
We lived it.
Messy, unfiltered, imperfect. We loved like children do — wholly and without knowing how rare it was.
And now, when the world gets too loud, I write.
Because someone has to remember the best time of the life —
when we were just five young souls, building a forever in a house that never really belonged to us.
But we belonged to it.
And more importantly —
we belonged to each other.
React
