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Kathmandu had its rhythm, and Siddharth had learned to move with it without really being part of it. The city woke with the sound of temple bells, honking horns, and street vendors calling their wares. He walked the streets like a shadow, blending into the crowds, avoiding attention, avoiding expectation. Nameless. That's what he called himself — not because he didn't have a name, but because he had learned to vanish in plain sight.
Every day began the same. He woke late, the morning sunlight streaming across the bed, and rolled over with a sigh. Breakfast — usually tea and toast — was barely touched, eaten with one hand while the other scrolled aimlessly on the phone. Social media, news, videos — anything that kept the world at arm's length. Sometimes he opened his textbooks, sometimes he didn't. Most of the time, it didn't matter.
The classes were a blur. Teachers spoke, wrote formulas, explained concepts, but Siddharth was already somewhere else. His mind wandered to small fantasies — not of systems or powers, but of freedom from expectation, of a day where no one expected him to succeed, where he could do nothing and not be judged. He laughed quietly at the absurdity of it, then looked around. Everyone else seemed so alive, so focused. Friends joked about exams, about careers, about future ambitions. Siddharth nodded along, said the right things, smiled when required, but inside, he felt nothing.
Lunch was always quick, often skipped, sometimes just a sandwich grabbed on the way back from class. His body was fine, his health average, but his spirit felt heavy. He envied the ease with which others carried life, the simple confidence in their steps. He had learned early that the world wouldn't wait, and yet he moved as if it could. Nameless, drifting, hiding.
Afternoons were worse. Free time that should have been filled with study, revision, or planning, became hours of scrolling, idly flipping pages, or staring out of windows. Sometimes he would lie down on the terrace and watch the clouds, thinking about nothing and everything at the same time. He imagined lives he might have had, dreams he once wanted but abandoned quietly. Medicine, doctors, helping people — a world that felt impossibly distant.
Evenings brought a strange mix of relief and anxiety. Relief that the day had passed, that no one had confronted him, that no one had asked the difficult questions. Anxiety because tomorrow would be the same, and the day after, and the one after that. The cycle repeated itself endlessly. Sometimes he thought about his father — the hope in his eyes, the sacrifices, the trust — and felt a weight pressing against his chest. A mixture of love, guilt, and fear.
Siddharth's nights were the hardest. Alone in his room, the darkness no longer hid him but forced him to see himself. He reflected on the hours wasted, the exams failed, the dreams postponed indefinitely. Nameless, he thought, is what I have become. A ghost living among the living. A student in name only, a dreamer in silence. His notebook became the one place he could speak honestly, writing truths he could not say aloud: I am not lazy, only lost. I am not weak, only scared. I want to try, but I don't know where to begin.
And yet, even in the monotony, Siddharth noticed small things that reminded him life continued. The laughter of children in the streets, the smell of rain on the stone paths, the way the evening sun touched the mountains. Simple, unnoticed details that people rarely paused to see. They didn't make the fear go away, didn't make the anxiety smaller, but they made him feel something. A faint pulse of existence, of being.
This was Siddharth's life — days that passed slowly, moments unnoticed, hours lost to distraction, and nights heavy with reflection. It was ordinary, yet heavy. Humdrum, yet suffocating. He had no name that mattered to anyone else, no mark on the world, no grand story to tell. He was Nameless — a student, a thinker, a dreamer in the shadows, surviving in silence, hoping, perhaps without knowing it, that one day the weight of nothing might lift.
And then he slept, only to wake and repeat it all again.
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