Two more years pass, yet nothing truly moves. Time continues its quiet cruelty, while I remain exactly where grief leaves me—half-alive, half-remembering. The walls of my room fill with her face. Every canvas carries the same woman: soft eyes, a smile that once rested against my forehead, a presence that refuses to fade. Her name still trembles inside my chest, lodged between breath and pain. The world, however, begins to notice me again. My family calls. They move to Kasoli, seeking peace, seeking healing, and they ask me to come home. You need people, my mother says. I don't want people. I never did. But I want Kasoli. Because once, long ago, she walked its slopes with me, fingers woven into mine, mist curling around our laughter. Maybe the same air still remembers her. Maybe it will remember me too.
Kasoli feels unchanged, as if it never agreed to let the past go. Pine trees stand like silent guards, watching lovers come and disappear. The hills curve gently, as though shaped by old footsteps. Even the air carries a sweetness that unsettles me—the kind that can either heal you or haunt you forever. I walk alone, tracing paths my heart already knows. Every stone feels familiar. Every bend whispers her name. I sit on the bench where our photo still lives somewhere in a forgotten phone gallery—her head on my shoulder, my smile unearned. I stay there far too long, staring at empty space, waiting for time to make a mistake and bring her back.
It happens on the third evening. Or maybe it happens because my heart wants it too badly. Near the cliff trail, I see her—wrapped in a shawl, standing against the wind. The slope of her shoulders. The way she braces herself against the cold. My breath catches. My mind stops. Vaasu. I don't think. I don't reason. I run.
"Vaasu!"
The name tears out of me, raw and unfiltered, carrying years of regret and hope tangled together. I reach her and pull her into my arms, bury my face against her shoulder as if the world might finally make sense again. My heart pounds like it has found its way home. She doesn't push me away. She holds me back.
But not with recognition.
She holds me the way someone clings to the edge of breaking. Her body shakes. She cries quietly, the sound fragile and cracked. Confusion floods me as I step back. The face before me is close—but not hers. Softer jaw. Different eyes. Familiar pain, unfamiliar soul.
"I'm sorry," she says, voice trembling. "I thought you were someone else."
"So did I," I reply, hollow.
We stand there in silence, two strangers soaked in the same kind of loss. Her name is Meera. She looks young, worn thin by grief, her cheeks flushed from tears and mountain air. When she turns to leave, I ask without thinking why she was crying. She pauses, then answers softly, "Because I still miss someone who taught me what love feels like… and left without teaching me how to forget it."
That sentence cracks something open inside me. She isn't Vaasu. She never will be. But her pain speaks a language I know too well. I offer her my scarf. Our fingers brush briefly—nothing electric, nothing romantic—just two broken people acknowledging each other's wounds beneath a pink-stained sky.
After that, I see her again. And again. At a café near the church. At the same table. Always with her sketchbook. Her pages are filled with unfinished faces. "They all look like him," she admits once. "But the smile never comes right."
We don't exchange stories. We exchange silences. We sit together without expectations. She doesn't ask me to heal. I don't ask her to forget. We simply exist—side by side—like people learning how to breathe again.
Sometimes, I catch myself looking at her for half a second too long, forgetting she isn't the woman my heart still belongs to. Guilt follows immediately. No one can replace Vaasu. Not even someone who resembles her grief so painfully. And yet, for Meera, I become the first person who doesn't rush her sorrow. I sit beside her when she cries, the way one sits near a fragile flame, careful not to blow it out. Slowly, she speaks more—about music, about skies, about things that once stopped mattering and now begin to hurt again because they do.
I don't feel love. I can't. My heart is still a locked room. Maybe it always will be. But sometimes, when Meera smiles—not at me, just near me—it feels like something long buried stirs.
And then one morning, as we pass a painter's stall, she stops before a half-finished canvas. A woman. Incomplete. Her eyes missing. Meera studies it quietly and says, "You should complete her."
I ask why.
"Because," she says gently, "I think you know how her eyes should look."
I don't answer.
Because I know those eyes belong to someone I lost.
And somehow… they are beginning to belong to someone standing beside me.