Nevian K, this book is for you, before we part ways.
They say every story has a beginning, but mine doesn't begin with fireworks or fate. It begins quietly, with a boy who wasn't mine, and a heart that didn't ask for permission before it fell.
I didn't fall for him the way people fall in movies, books. There was no slow-motion moment, no instant realization. It was subtler than that, softer, the way his calm voice filled an empty classroom on a hot June afternoon, the way he gave advice with a seriousness that made me feel as though my dreams mattered. I remember fumbling, nodding like an idiot, wondering how someone could sound so steady yet so alive at the same time. I thought it was admiration. I didn't know yet it would grow into something more dangerous, something that would consume me in silence.
Ours is not a love story. At least, not the kind that ends with two people finding each other. No, ours is a story written in glances, in stolen seconds that never stretched into minutes. A story that lived in dreams, in the spaces between words that were never spoken. He was always just within reach across a hallway, behind a window, in the laughter that carried over my shoulder. And yet, he was never mine.
I wish I could say I let him go, but how do you let go of someone who never belonged to you? Instead, in the folds of my notebooks, in the corners of my mind, in the way I remembered exact times. As if recording the hours could somehow make them permanent. As if writing him down would make him stay.
But he didn't. He slipped through my fingers, just as he was always meant to, because I was never the girl he looked for in a crowd. And yet he became my muse. The boy I could never stop writing about,
This is not a letter for him to find, nor a map leading back to me. It is for me for the girl who carried too much in her chest, who loved in silence, who survived the ache of watching him be someone else's without ever saying a word.
If you've ever loved someone you couldn't have, if you've ever lived a whole story in the space of a glance, then maybe you'll recognize yourself in these pages. Because sometimes, the greatest loves are not the ones we live out loud, but the ones that live quietly inside us, shaping us, haunting us, refusing to let go.