It had been two years since Riyan left. The seasons changed, the campus emptied, life moved on like it always does — slow and cruelly silent in the places where someone once existed.
Anaya never stopped writing.
One rainy afternoon, while browsing old books at the same bookstore they almost met in, she opened a secondhand poetry collection.
A folded paper fell out.
The handwriting was messy, rushed, full of emotion. She froze.
Her name was on the first line.
> "Anaya,
I don't know if you'll ever read this.
Maybe I'll leave it in the poetry section where we almost met, or maybe I'll carry it with me forever.
But I had to write it anyway…"*
As her eyes traced the words, she felt a hundred versions of herself shatter and come back together.
> "I noticed you. Every time.
The way you looked away when I looked at you.
The way your silence said more than any voice ever could."
"I wanted to stop you that day at the station. I should've.
But I didn't. I was afraid — of beginning something I didn't know how to hold."
"But maybe, in some parallel life, we talked.
Maybe you smiled. Maybe I said everything I should have."
The letter ended without a goodbye.
No contact. No place. No 'let's meet someday.'
Just feelings — raw and real — trapped in ink, hiding in a book that waited years to be opened.
She sat there, the letter pressed against her chest, as the rain whispered stories on the window glass.
Anaya didn't try to find him. She didn't write back.
Some stories aren't meant to be rewritten.
Some hearts only pass through you — not to stay, but to stir something eternal.
That night, she opened her journal and wrote something new.
Not about him.
About herself.
---
Final lines:
> "He was a sentence I never said aloud,
But I became a whole poem because of him."