It was sometime between the third cup of watery hostel chai and the tenth failed physics problem that her name slipped into the hallway.
Not in the way you hope names return—whispered gently, with warmth still wrapped around the syllables. This was sharper. A laugh from someone else's phone, echoing off cracked cement walls.
"Niya tagged me again," someone said.
Just like that. No reverence. No pause.
And yet it made Aarav flinch. He didn't even look up from his notebook, but the world had already gone blurry. The pen paused in his hand, ink smudging under his thumb.
He stared at the page, unsure what he'd even been trying to write.
Niya.
That name used to feel like music.
Now it felt like a borrowed word. Something that didn't belong to him anymore. Like it never had. Maybe it never did.
---
Pranav, his roommate, never noticed. Or maybe he did and simply chose kindness through silence. That's the kind of boy Pranav was—he kept to himself, lived in hoodies and hums, and only spoke when something truly mattered.
"Want the rest of this bread roll?" he asked one night, offering the piece without looking up from his notes.
Aarav took it without a word. It was their quiet pact—shared food, shared suffering, shared silence.
---
At night, the lights would go out in the hallway, but not in his head.
He tried to write her into stories—Niya as a girl made of sun-warm laughter, Niya as a line of poetry that no editor would ever understand, Niya as a moment that stretched too far.
But no matter what he wrote, her name felt distant. Like a language he had once spoken fluently, now stuttering on every syllable.
He filled three pages with beginnings.
"The girl stood in the courtyard—"
"She always laughed before answering—"
"He waited. She didn't come."
None of them stuck. Every time her name appeared, it turned into static. Not pain—just... distance. That was worse, in a way.
Pain could be written about. Distance? That was just silence.
---
Pranav found him staring at the ceiling one Sunday morning.
"Dreams again?"
Aarav didn't answer.
"I had one last night," Pranav said, yawning. "I was at an exam hall, but every answer was written in poetry. I failed gloriously."
Aarav gave the faintest smile.
Then, Pranav added quietly, "Want to go out? There's a bookstore nearby. The air's stale here. You look like you need to breathe."
---
They went.
The bookstore was cramped and smelled of paperbacks and old wooden shelves. Aarav ran his fingers along the spines of novels he couldn't afford. Picked one at random, read the first line:
"She disappeared the way all real things do—slowly, and then all at once."
He closed the book. Put it back.
"Want to get it?" Pranav asked.
"I already lived it," Aarav said.
They walked back in silence.
---
That night, he tried again.
A new page. No name.
He began the story differently this time:
"There once was a boy who remembered everything—except how to forget."
It didn't need to be about her. Not directly. But everything he wrote still carried the echo of her.
That's the thing about distance—it doesn't announce itself. It builds. Word by word, night by night.
It makes you reach for someone's name and come back with only silence.
---
In his dreams now, she rarely appeared. But when she did, she was always blurry.
He'd say her name, and she'd tilt her head like she didn't recognize it.
"I think I knew someone by that name," she'd whisper.
Then she'd turn, and her shadow would walk away before her body did.
He'd wake up with a dry throat and no tears.
---
One evening, Pranav asked, "Who was she?"
Aarav blinked. "What?"
"You mutter in your sleep sometimes. A girl's name. Always the same."
He looked down at his open notebook, half-finished sentence staring back.
"I don't know," he said.
And that was the most honest thing he'd said in days.
---
It wasn't heartbreak.
That's the thing.
It was erasure.
Not loud. Not violent. Just... gradual forgetting. Like fog over a window. You keep wiping it, but eventually, the world outside stops waiting.
Eventually, you let it blur.
Eventually, you accept that maybe she never knew you at all.
And maybe that's okay.
---
That night, Aarav folded a piece of paper into thirds and wrote:
"Dear Niya, I hope someone laughs at your jokes the way I once wanted to. I hope your mornings are soft, and your coffee isn't bitter. I hope you never have to forget someone so gently that it aches. And I hope you never know what it's like to wave and not be seen."
He didn't send it.
He slipped it between the pages of a library book before returning it.
Let the words find someone else.
Even if she never would.
---
And for the first time in weeks, he slept without dreaming.
But before the light left his desk, he wrote one more thing in the corner of his journal:
"Even if no one sees me. Even if no one reads. I'll still write."