The fluorescent lights of the 10th-grade classroom felt harsher than usual. Outside, the school was a chaotic symphony of shouting students, moving benches, and the rhythmic drone of teachers introducing "The Most Important Year of Your Lives." But inside my head, there was only silence.
I sat at my desk, my notebook open to a fresh page, but the ink stayed in the pen. I wasn't seeing the chalkboard. I was seeing the way the morning light had hit her shoulder in the van. I was hearing that "Hi" on loop, like a song I couldn't stop playing.
"Bhai, where are you lost?"
The voice of my best friend broke the trance. He was leaning over his desk, looking at me with a mix of confusion and amusement. To him, I was just his friend who usually had a joke or a comment ready. Today, I was a statue.
"Nowhere," I said, blinking the classroom back into focus. "Just... thinking about the syllabus."
"The syllabus? On day one?" He laughed, hitting my shoulder. "You've been staring at that wall for ten minutes like it's a cinema screen. Tell me, what's the real matter? Did you see someone?"
I looked at him—someone I trusted with everything—and for a second, I wanted to tell him. I wanted to say, "I think the world just shifted in the van this morning." But the feeling was too new, too fragile. It felt like if I spoke it out loud, the magic would evaporate. It was a secret I wanted to keep in my pocket for a little while longer.
"It's nothing, man. Just didn't sleep well," I lied.
He didn't believe me, but he let it go. That's the thing about being fifteen—we have a thousand secrets, and we recognize the look of one even if we don't know what it is.
The rest of the school day was a blur of gray. I walked through the corridors like a ghost. Every time I passed the Marathi medium wing, my heart would skip a beat, my eyes instinctively searching for a glimpse of a particular face or the color of her uniform. I was a hunter looking for a sign, a poet looking for a rhyme.
Then came the afternoon. The van ride home.
The energy was different now. The morning's cool air had been replaced by the heavy, humid heat of the afternoon. The van was louder, filled with the exhausted chatter of students wanting to get home to their lunches and their naps.
She was there, sitting in the same spot. But the "shift" had left us both in a strange place. The easy conversation from the morning had transformed into a heavy, thick silence. It wasn't an awkward silence, but a "loaded" one.
I sat beside her, but I couldn't find the words. I was so afraid of saying the wrong thing that I ended up saying nothing at all. I looked out the window, watching the trees of the colony blur past, but in the reflection of the glass, I could see her. She was quiet, too, staring ahead, perhaps processing her own day. The space between us—barely an inch of the vinyl seat—felt like an ocean. I wanted to reach out, to ask her how her day went, but my throat felt tight.
When the van finally stopped at her gate, she got off with a small, polite nod. No "hehe" laugh. No playful glint. Just the sound of the sliding door closing with a metallic thud.
I walked into my house, ignored the snack my mom had left on the table, and went straight to my room. I shut the door and sat on the edge of my bed.
The silence of my room was loud.
I thought about how I had lived fifteen years without ever feeling this "pull." I thought about the warning my friend from the colony had once whispered about her past—words I had filed away as "noise" but were now echoing in the back of my mind. I pushed them away. I didn't want to hear about "past" or "holes" or "games."
I wanted to understand why my heart felt like it had been physically moved.
I realized then that love—or whatever this was—wasn't like the movies I'd seen. It wasn't all slow-motion running and background music. It was this: a heavy chest, a distracted mind, and the sudden, terrifying realization that your happiness was now tied to the presence of another person