For my brother

You are younger, but every time, you ended up teaching me something bigger; showing me how to see the world differently.
Softer, slower, with more breaths than answers.

We grew up inside stories.
Books, films, shows, fading credits, a thousand lifetimes we lived without leaving the room.
Because somehow, the worlds we imagined, the universes we stepped into, they only made sense when we lived them together.

What was the point of a twist if I couldn’t watch your face change?
What good was a poem or a story if we didn’t both underline the same line?
It wasn’t the fiction that mattered.
It was the fact that we believed in it together.

It was our thing. Still is. Even in silence.

You were the first person I ever wanted to protect without knowing how.
And maybe that’s how I first learned to love completely, without measuring what came back.

I have fallen more times than I can count, but not once did you stand there saying ‘I told you so.’
You just sat beside the bruise until it forgot it was hurt.
Never with advice, but with a comic timing so perfect, even the pain had to laugh.

When we fight, you walk away silently, without a word.
And something freezes behind my eyes, as if saying a word would break you, and staying silent might break me.

I pretend it doesn’t hurt. You pretend not to notice. We’ve always been good at pretending.

Still, when everything feels like it’s falling apart, you appear in the doorway and ask, “Didi, chai banayegi kya?”
Like love can still be boiled back into a cup.

Our childhood dreams may have grown old, but I still see bits of them in your eyes, shining faintly in your laughter, and lighting up my memories in the gentlest way.

And your laugh, that full, reckless kind, it makes the world easier.
Please don’t let the noise or the weight of our losses, steal that child in you.

So  do not change. Do not conform.
Stay that boy who speaks without speaking, who stitches silences like a thread finding its needle, who knows how to forgive like the morning that arrives; tender, certain, even if the night before wasn’t kind. 

- Neha Sharma