It didn't happen with a proposal.
No rose in hand. No rehearsed lines. No dramatic buildup.
One day, she just looked at me and smiled a little longer than usual.
And I smiled back.
From that moment on, we just knew.
We didn't call it anything at first. There were no "Will you be mine?" clichés, no over-the-top gestures. We simply became something more—more than best friends, more than anything I had ever known.
She'd wait for me after school with two cups of chai, even though she hated tea.
I'd carry her extra books in my bag, even though she could manage.
She'd scold me for not bringing a sweater in winter.
I'd mock her for her dramatic poetry readings.
We were a walking contradiction—teasing and tenderness in perfect balance.
We started taking detours while walking home.
Five-minute walks became twenty.
A turn that led away from her house, just so we could talk longer, hold hands behind the wall, or sometimes walk without saying anything at all.
And when we did speak, it wasn't grand love poetry—it was soft confessions and silly plans.
"I want to live near the mountains one day," she'd say.
"I'll open a tiny book café for you there," I'd reply.
Sometimes she'd look at me with those eyes that held storms and softness both, and say,
"You feel like the whole world to me, you know that?"
And I'd whisper back, "You are mine."
Every day felt like a movie montage.
Shared lunches.
Late-night texts.
Inside jokes.
Nicknames.
Little notes slipped into each other's notebooks.
And the world?
The world could go to hell. We had our own.
Even our silences had meaning now. I didn't need her to speak for me to understand. A glance, a sigh, the way she twisted her hair when she was nervous—I knew it all. I memorized her like lyrics to my favorite song.
No label could ever fully explain us.
We weren't perfect, but we were ours.
And for the first time in my life, I wasn't afraid of being seen.
Because someone had already seen me, entirely—and stayed.
In her presence, I wasn't the guy who always kept his emotions locked away.
I was the one who laughed too loud.
The one who felt too much.
The one who finally knew what it meant to belong.
This… this was love.
Not the kind that shouts to be heard.
But the kind that whispers, "I'm here."
And means it every single time.