The room was quiet, like it always was when no one else believed in the kind of thoughts that ran through your head. The fan clicked as it spun, its rhythm interrupted every five seconds, as if it too was struggling to keep going. It was just past midnight. The world outside had decided to rest, but inside me, everything was wide awake.
I couldn't sleep.
There are nights that feel heavier than the others. Not because anything extraordinary happened, but because you start measuring the weight of all the ordinary things that did. Her smile. The walk back home. The silence when she didn't say goodbye. The way my heart kept remembering things I told it to forget.
The keychain lay on the table. Small. Metal. Shaped like a typewriter.
She had handed it to me so casually. "Keep it if you want," she said. That's what she always did — make small moments feel like they weren't supposed to be important, but they were. And this one, especially, sat like a bookmark in my memory. It was the kind of gift people gave without thinking. But I had been thinking about it ever since.
I stared at it under the soft light of the desk lamp. Its details were intricate — even the tiny keys had raised dots on them, too small to read, but present anyway. A quiet effort. Like her.
I opened my notebook. Pages stained with random thoughts, crossed-out lines, dumb poems that would never be read by anyone but me. But tonight, I wanted to write her a letter.
Not a message. Not something to be sent. Just a letter — to contain what I couldn't say in person.
"Dear Niya," I wrote.
Then stopped.
How do you write to someone who doesn't know the version of themselves that lives inside you?
How do you tell her that you noticed the way her fingers always curled slightly when she laughed? That her voice sometimes broke mid-sentence when she was unsure, and you never said anything, because some things are too delicate to touch?
How do you admit that even your silences began to sound like her?
I closed the notebook. I couldn't write the letter. Not because I didn't have anything to say — but because I had too much. And none of it came without a risk.
If I told her how I felt, would it ruin the quiet between us? The one we were both pretending didn't matter?
The typewriter keychain sat silently.
It reminded me of something my grandfather once said when I was too young to understand it: "Some stories aren't meant to be told. They're just meant to be lived quietly. Like prayers."
Maybe that was it.
Maybe my love was a prayer — not something to be answered, but something to be held. Like folded paper in a back pocket. Like a song you hum but never record.
I walked over to the window.
The streetlight flickered. A dog barked somewhere far off. Somewhere in the same city, maybe she was awake too. Or maybe she was dreaming. I hoped, selfishly, that it was a dream without me in it — because if she saw me even there, I'd never know how to leave.
I wondered if she had even thought about the keychain after giving it to me. Probably not. That's how these things go. One person writes it in ink, the other doesn't even remember it happened.
But it was okay.
Because I remembered. And maybe remembering was enough.
I sat down again. Opened the notebook. And instead of a letter, I wrote a story. About a boy who wanted to love, but didn't know how to be seen. About a girl who held sunlight in her hands, but never realized it. About the gap between them — not made of cruelty or rejection, just silence.
A kind of silence that feels soft. But heavy.
The story didn't have a climax. Or an ending. Just pages filled with thoughts that would never reach the person they were meant for.
When I finished, I wrote one line at the bottom:
"If love means being seen, then I'll stay invisible. But I'll stay."
I placed the keychain on top of the notebook. A small paperweight to hold down all the words I couldn't say.
And then I turned off the light.
Sleep didn't come quickly. But it came.
And for the first time in a long while, I didn't fight it.