Tonight felt important in a way that a salary never would for him. After eight years of messages, voice notes, and pixelated jokes, he was finally meeting her in person. The word "we" still sounded absurd in his head, as if the pronoun could be stretched and shaped into something real simply by insistence.
He couldn't sleep. His chest kept twitching like someone had wired it to a cheap buzzer labeled hope. Every time he shut his eyes he saw small, domestic images—her laugh in a voice note, a selfie she sent at midnight, the exact way she typed "lol" when she was nervous. None of those things were a face in the flesh. None of them were coffee steam and the accidental brush of a hand. His brain was a rehearsal room and the performance was tonight.
The alarm on his phone glowed at him like an accusation: 6:00 AM, July 5, 2025. He lay there and counted the ceiling tiles like a man trying to barter sleep with distraction. Twenty-five years old, a steady ₹50,000 a month that paid for a three-room solitude—kitchen, bathroom, bedroom—and all the tiny compromises that come with choosing rent over company. On paper his life looked fine. In person it was hell, an office chair that remembered his shape, and the soft, persistent ache of too many "urgent" deadlines.
~"aah man just a 5 min more sleep"
The alarm at seven felt like betrayal and mercy at once. He hit snooze like a coward and then remembered the file with the client's comments. The universe is tasteful in its cruelty: date tonight, deadline today. He slapped on a uniform, shoved a slab of bread into his mouth because ambition and breakfast did not share the same schedule in his flat, and left for work with the kind of optimism that looks like practical panic.
At the office the boss had the smile of a man who knows how to correct people by barking.
~ "You late again? U should quit this job or will kick u next time for real" boss sayed with anger in this eyes
Boss didn't need to shout that's much. The way boss said it had the same effect as a small electric shock.
~"Traffic," he said, which was cowardly and uncreative but reliable.
Boss eyes bored into him like a calendar that wanted him to remember the difference between privilege and performance.
~"I need that draft by six. No excuses. The client wants a clean version." boss sayed with tight voice
~"Understood boss don't you worry," he answered, even though his chest was doing the very particular thing panic does when you're trying to be both professional and alive.
Rafi, who sat two desks over and had the emotional range of a late-night meme, leaned in with the audacity of someone who'd already mentally RSVP'd to my life.
~"You actually meeting her tonight? After eight years? Bro, that's legendary. Don't embarrass the species."
~ "I'll try my best not to be a walking catastrophe," he muttered, and they both laughed in a way that sounded like practiced optimism.
At some point in the afternoon his fingers found the ring on his right hand like it was a compass. His grandmother had pressed it into his palm a year ago with the gravity of someone who understands that people disappear. She'd said, blunt as always:
~ "Keep it safe. If anything happens to me this will be with you."
He'd smirked at the small ceremony and promised, because that's the sensible thing you do when a woman you love gives you metal and a warning. It wasn't valuable in any market sense. It was a plain band with a faint dent where he'd once knocked it against a teacup. But sometimes objects hold the weight of promises better than people do. Today it felt a little heavier than usual, like the metal had more memory than it had any right to keep.
Work is the slow extraction of your day into smaller, manageable pieces—emails, small talk, a printer that decides exactly when to die. The hours passed in a blur of deadline alarms and polite filtered light. But the clock on his phone had reserved a persistent anxiety for 5:00 pm. Then his brain remembered the single thing it had been waiting for all day: 6:30.
~ "Shit—today's the date," he muttered to himself, and the word came out like a dare.
He shoved everything—files, small office crises—into the back of my mind and ran. The city blurred into practical shapes: a vendor folding his stall, a bus coughing, the sun sliding its light like molasses across glass. By the time he pushed open his flat door his pulse was doing little staccato beats of panic.
~ "Where are the keys—ah, here," he said, fumbling, because being late felt like a personal failure he could fix with speed.
The bathroom steam wrapped around him like someone trying to keep secrets warm. Hot water scalded the edges of his anxiety into something more manageable. He let his thoughts do the rehearsal work while the soap did the physical part.
~"First: park. Walk. Then some light shopping. Nice dinner. Necklace—save that for later."
"Don't bring up old exes. Don't compare faces to profile pics."
He practiced smiles in the mirror like a man learning to breathe properly. The shirt she'd once mentioned—nothing flash, just that color—felt right when he slid it on. Shoes clicked. Wallet in. Phone placed like a chapel offering.
~"Breath—mint on, breath—mint on," he joked to his reflection, chewing gum in a ridiculous way.
Before he left he felt for the ring out of habit. It was a small thing on a pebble chain of days: metallic, dented at one point where he'd been clumsy, ordinary enough to be invisible. Still, when he slid it over his knuckle it felt like a hinge locking.
~"This ring is from ur grandpa before he disappeared he gave me this and sayed to give it to our grandson soo Keep it safe my boy," his grandmother had told him, her voice soft as old tea leaves.
Her hand on his cheek in that memory was warm. She always spoke like instructions were blessings.
~ "I'll take care of it just like i take a good care of you grandma," he had said. It felt like a childish oath and a grown man's contract all at once.
He locked the door, flowers hidden like contraband under his arm, and walked. The florist wrapped the bouquet with quick, certain hands.
~"For a special date?" she asked, smiling like she'd seen this scene a hundred times.
~"Yeah. First meeting—finally," he answered. The bouquet smelled like green hope.
He checked the ring in the brief lull between the shop and the café. It was cool, ordinary—until it wasn't. For a second it felt warm, a pulse against his skin that wasn't his.
~ "Probably just nerves," he told himself. But the metal's tiny hum felt almost like a promise trying to wake up.
The pavement underfoot was ordinary. People walked ordinary routes. The café was only a short distance—too short for the panic but long enough for rehearsed lines to fray. He ran through greetings in his head. He imagined her laugh landing like a familiar tune.
Then something grabbed his wrist.
It wasn't the accidental graze of a crowded street. It was a yank—precise, desperate—and it pulled him sideways like an instinct that refused to argue. The bouquet was airborne, petals detonating into the dusk like confetti unwilling to be polite.
~ "oiii watch out!" someone sayed.
The word was an alarm and the world answered. Metal filled his periphery. A truck, far closer than rational distance, barreled toward the crosswalk like a beast that had forgotten courtesy. A horn screamed, a sound so raw it made his teeth ache.
There was no graceful sequence—only sudden, brutal physics. Concrete met chest with an intimacy no one should know. The bouquet hit the ground and scattered, a small, absurd halo. Pain translated itself into a language he hadn't learned. His lungs betrayed him in a wet, coppery cough that tasted like everything he'd left unsaid all at once.
And then, in the middle of the chaos, a hand closed over his.
Not a comforting brush. Not a polite grip. A hold like iron, like someone who had chosen right then to be an anchor.
~ "Don't go. Hold on—please, hold on," a voice begged, raw and small and somehow ferocious.
He tried to turn his head to see who had tried to saved him, to place the face that had risked themselves, but the world had dissolved into the front of his chest and the top of his lungs. All he could see was motion—a blurred coat, a flinch of hair—and the truck's metal reflected a smear of light that looked too much like an eye.
Someone cursed. Someone shouted to call for help. A frantic, practical shout cut through the fog:
~"Call an ambulance! Call 108! Now!"
~ "Someone stop him—catch that jerk driver! He's drunk!"
Those voices were frantic tools, attempts at fixing a thing that had no instructions. They sounded like people trying to push the world back into its right order with their mouths.
The palm inside mine pressed harder, as if willing physical insistence could push back the slide. It was warm, and the grip was honest. That warmth—but no face—anchored him for a few fluttering seconds. He felt the imprint of nails on his skin like punctuation.
~"Squeeze my hand if you can hear me!" another voice demanded—directive, professional.
He squeezed because obeying small things felt like a way to stay. The pressure came back. It said, without words, do not leave.
The last thing he felt before the world dissolved entirely was the ring on his finger burning with a strange, sweet heat, like a coin being warmed at a hearth it didn't own. The dent in its band seemed to hum, and for the first time it felt less like metal and more like a living thing trying to be heard through his skin.
Then black. Not a soft sleep. Not a curtain closing politely. A hard absence, absolute and immediate. The street—the horn—the bouquet's green smell—all of it folded into an instant that had no depth.
He was falling. Down and down into a dark that swallowed sound and weight. The fall wasn't frightening so much as bewildering; there was no ground, no stopping point. It felt like sliding out of a photograph and into a seam of the world that had been kept out of sight.
And then, in the middle of that endless descent, a light.
At first it was a pinprick—simple, stubborn. It did not burn. It waited. The darkness around it was not hostile; it was simply a field waiting for something to begin.
~ "—" a whisper threaded through the void. Not a language he had learned, but a pattern he recognized like the cadence of a song I'd forgotten.
Images brushed the edges of his mind—his grandmother's palms, the bouquet's crushed petals, the shirt in the color he'd chosen—familiar, like postcards from a life he had not yet finished sorting.
The light widened, patient and curious. It smelled of rain on hot stone and something metallic—like old coins in a warm palm. It felt like a door that had been closed for a long time and was now, finally, being opened.
He did not know whether he was being taken, tested, returned, or traded. He did not know if the hand at his side belonged to a stranger, to fate, or to something that wore the shape of both. All he knew was how it felt to be held in the absolute middle of losing everything and seeing, just beyond that loss, a gate that hummed with intent.
~"—come," the light seemed to say, and there was no malice in the invitation.
Then he fell through it. The dark gave way to something that was not night and not day—a place that smelled like the inside of a bell and the hush before a storm. And for the first time since the truck, there was a sense of being unmoored and also, strangely, of being noticed.
He didn't know where he was going. He only knew that the hand that had pinned his life to a single, frantic moment had left a map on my skin. It said he had been held. It said someone had tried. It said, in the quietest possible way, that the world had not finished with me yet.