It’s a random Friday afternoon, and “Phiriye Dewar Gaan” hums faintly from my phone — soft, almost hesitant, like it knows it’s trespassing into old memories. I let it play anyway. Music has a way of finding the ghosts we’ve learned to live with. And just like that, I’m back in March of this year.

You were the breath of fresh air my heart had been craving for without knowing it. The kind that fills the lungs too suddenly, makes the chest ache a little, and yet feels like survival. You arrived without warning — no build-up, no grand beginning. Just a quiet entry into my world, and somehow, everything after that felt different.

I still remember how it started — how your name lit up my phone screen for the first time, how ordinary that moment was, and how it would later hold extraordinary weight. We talked about small things at first: the weather, favorite songs, movies that felt like memories. And then, before I knew it, you had slipped past the guarded edges of my heart, making yourself at home in its unlit corners.

It wasn’t dramatic — it was gentle, like sunlight seeping in through curtains. I wished for us to last, you know? I really did. I wanted us to survive the shifting seasons, the uncertainties, the inevitable distances. I pictured us in all the tomorrows I hadn’t lived yet. I wanted to believe that maybe, just maybe, some stories don’t have to end.

But life — or fate, or timing, or whatever name we give the cruel poetry of it all — had other plans.

I think about that last meeting often. It’s strange how you never really know it’s the last one until much later. You walk into it thinking there will be more — more conversations, more laughter, more days that begin with your name and end with your voice. You don’t realize you’re standing in the final scene until the credits start to roll in hindsight and the director shouts “CUT!”

That day, I remember, the sky was undecided — half cloudy, half sunlit, like it couldn’t choose between holding on or letting go. We met as we always did- all our friends around us, easily, naturally. I remember your smile — not the bright, carefree one, but the softer one, tinged with something I didn’t have the courage to name. We spoke like everything was normal, like we weren’t already fading. And maybe that’s what made it harder.

I didn’t know that it was the last time I’d hear your voice the way I knew it then. I didn’t know it would be the last time your name would feel warm on my tongue, before it turned into a quiet ache I’d carry silently. I didn’t know it was the last time you’d look at me and see us– and not two people who were no longer reading the same book. Not a person who was too much for you. Not a person who was easy to let go, and easier to forget.

And yet, the universe, in all its irony, decided that my birthday would be the last day our worlds touched. I sometimes think about that — how the day meant for beginnings became an ending – in itself. I don’t know how it happened — how our laughter turned to distance, how comfort turned to silence. But there it is: my birthday, frozen in time as the day I unknowingly said goodbye to someone I was still wishing to meet again.

There are nights when I replay our story like a reel — fragments of conversations, laughter echoing through late hours, words that now feel too tender to touch. You live in me like that — as a montage of the polaroid pictures we never took. The almosts, the nearlys, the could-have-beens. If I close my eyes, I can still see them — blurry snapshots of a love that never found its way into permanence. A love that only lived in my mind and not yours.

Sometimes, I wonder if you remember me too — not as a person, maybe, but as a feeling. A fleeting comfort. A familiar tune that plays unexpectedly and pulls you back for a second before fading into background noise. I wonder if certain songs still remind you of the me you let slip through.

It’s funny, isn’t it? How something that felt infinite can shrink into memory, into something you carry like an old ticket stub from a concert that once changed you. I don’t hate it anymore — the ending, the silence, the distance. I’ve made peace with it. Some stories aren’t meant to last; they’re meant to move you. To make you see yourself differently.

You will always live in me — not as a wound, but as a quiet part of my becoming. You were the reminder that I could feel deeply, that I could still be undone by beauty. You were the fleeting season that made everything else pale in comparison.

So here I am, months later, on a random Friday, with that same song playing — not to mourn, but to remember. To smile at the memory of us, blurry and unfinished, but real.

Because maybe that’s all love really is — a series of beautiful moments, stitched together by the ache of knowing they can’t last. And you, you will always be my favorite unfinished story.

Somewhere, in a parallel universe, maybe we did take those polaroids.
Maybe we stayed.
But here, in this one, I’ll keep you as you are — a soft blur of laughter, light, and the faint echo of “Phiriye Dewar Gaan” on a random Friday afternoon.