The hallways had never felt this long before.
Or maybe… they'd always been the same.
It was just me who had changed.
Since that goodbye, time moved differently. The school remained what it always was—rows of classrooms, cracked blackboards, unfinished homework—but in my eyes, something was missing.
She was missing.
I would still see her sometimes… walking with her friends, laughing like nothing ever happened. And it hit me every time—how easy it seemed for her to move on, while I was stuck in the echo of our last hug.
I stopped going to the canteen.
Stopped standing near the art room.
Stopped replying to messages, even when my friends teased me that I was becoming a "sadboy poet."
"Bhai, ek breakup aur tumhare andar Gulzar paida ho gaya,"
my best friend Varun joked one day, slapping my back with his usual mischief.
I tried to laugh.
But even laughter had started feeling like a borrowed thing—something that didn't belong to me anymore.
Some days were worse than others.
Like the day I found her bracelet in my drawer.
A tiny, beaded thing she had left behind during one of our group study sessions. I held it for hours—fingering the little charms, pretending I could feel the warmth of her wrist in it.
She wasn't just a chapter in my story.
She was the whole book I wanted to keep rereading—even after the pages were torn.
I wrote poems on the last page of my notebooks.
Short lines. Painful ones. Not for anyone else—just for myself.
To bleed without anyone noticing.
"She walks the same hallways,
But not through my heart anymore."
One day, I saw her standing alone by the corridor window.
Her hair tucked behind her ear, watching the rain drip slowly from the rooftop.
She looked... peaceful.
I wanted to walk up.
Say something.
Anything.
But I didn't.
Because I knew that no matter how many words I found, they'd never reach the place in her heart I once held.
That's when it hit me—
She was still my world.
But I had become just a passerby in hers.
There was no big drama.
No tears in front of people.
Just a quiet kind of sadness that stayed with me in morning assemblies, math lectures, and lonely bus rides home.
And while the world moved on,
I stood still in that empty hallway…
Where love once walked beside me.