If you were a paper boat and I were too, we'd sail where the sky spills its silver hue. Not knowing the shores that might come to greet, we’d let the wind choose which paths our bows meet.
Made from pages of different tales we’ve known, still stitched by the same soft wrinkle of home. Your folds from a map that’s kissed by rain, mine from a letter still warm with a name.
Through puddle-lakes and ribbon streams, we'd paddle through the stitched-up seams. Breathing in the wet earth’s sigh, and flowers whispering as we pass by.
If the water curved your edges thin, I’d smooth you back, draw your corners in. And when my spine sagged from the weight I bore, you'd mend my hull till I sailed once more.
We’d dance where moonlight braids with the tide, and stars weave lanterns that the waters guide. As fleeting as breath on a winter pane, yet steady as roots that no storm can strain.
They say, to send a paper boat adrift downstream is to send your hopes into someone’s dream. Each ripple sketches the course we have crossed, each crinkle guards the treasures the waves once lost.
In the simple charm of paper and crease, we’d find the art of turning small things into peace. For every journey, no matter how far, begins with two boats beneath the same star!
There’s a room in my house that nobody visits. Not even me. It’s just there—quiet, undecorated, almost anonymous.
But sometimes, passing by, I glance inside and see a chair perfectly at ease in its own company.
It sits the way some people do, after years of knowing themselves—arms loose, open, restful like turning away from noise.
The ceiling fan hangs motionless. Its blades stretched like quiet limbs, at peace in their respite.
‘We don’t need to spin to matter,’ it seems to whisper to the brass lamp below, who stands steady like a loyal soldier.
Its burgundy shade tilted at the precise angle of contemplation. It’s not slouching, neither it is rigid. But simply angled to cradle the soft spill of light.
A desk leans into the corner, legs uneven but unconcerned. The drawers still stick on the left side, as if taking a breath to remember how they moved once.
On its surface, a closed notebook, an uncapped pen, a paperweight shaped like a cloud and a chipped mug with a faint ring of tea dried inside. Beside it, a wooden ruler with faded numbers, a spool of thread, and a single key whose lock has long been forgotten.
The mirror, oval and old, tilts slightly upward, watching the light walk the ceiling through the day. Letting light, not faces, be its memory.
A small shelf by the window sags gently in the middle, lined with three mismatched books, a tiny glass jar of marbles, and a clock that ticks only when it feels like it.
The linen curtains are faded and frayed. They flutter with no urgency, dancing slowly, only when they want to.
On the floor, a woven basket rests in the corner, holding nothing but the smell of old wicker.
A calendar hangs on the wall, still open to last October. No one flipped the page, and nothing fell apart, as though the months since never mattered.
And standing there, I realise, that not everything is waiting to be filled. Some rooms already hold the light they were built for.
This room has made a home of its solitude. It gathers stillness like a well gathers rain. It holds it the way glass holds morning light.
It asks nothing of laughter or company, nor of the clatter that haste brings, yet it would welcome them like old friends.
Perhaps that is the art. To be full in yourself, yet keep a chair pulled out for whoever wanders in.
When light touches your skin, it is already eight minutes and twenty seconds old. Which means, by the time you felt warm, the warmth had already begun its journey.
Because sunlight takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach Earth, travelling at 300,000 km/second, crossing 150 million kilometres just to arrive quietly on your skin.
And you, call it a morning.
As if it hadn’t fought through voids, brushed past comets and silence, carried fire in its ribs just to land on the curve of your shoulder.
And I think that says something. Maybe love is like that, too. Already on its way. Even if you don’t feel it yet.
So when the air around you feels hollow, when your name sounds like a question in your own head, when no one calls back, when your messages sit unread, it doesn’t mean love isn’t coming.
It might just be in transit.
Maybe it’s stopping somewhere to gather courage, or trying to read the map with shaky hands.
Because some things take time.
Even the sun, in its hushed faithfulness, must voyage through space before it reaches your windowpane.
Perhaps love isn’t late. Maybe it’s just moving at the speed of something certain.
Maybe it’s a whisper leaving someone’s lips right now, that will echo in your name tomorrow.
Maybe it's footsteps turning the last corner, hands rehearsing what to say when they eventually see you.
Maybe love is already wrapping the gift, missing the train, catching the next one, running through the terminals of hesitation, with your name in its pocket and hope in its breath.
It might not arrive with fireworks or with orchestras. It will simply stand at your doorstep, breathless and real.
And when it finally arrives. When it lands gently on your side, when it presses its quiet forehead against yours. You probably won’t ask why it took so long.
You’ll just say, “I always knew you were on your way.”
Because light always comes. And love? Love is light.
When it’s real, it takes its time. To cross the distance, to cross doubt. But it shows up, where it was always meant to. Only because it refuses to get lost.
Today, everything is brown. The sky wears a coat of wet cardboard, creases folding softly into clouds. Light filters through like old film; sepia, dust-kissed, like a memory sketched in condensation.
The air smells like the earth after rain. Not like the first splash, but the hush, the whisper of belonging between the soil and clouds.
The leaves? They no longer argue with the wind. They curl up like pages half-read and left beside the bed. You can almost hear them mumble old love poems to the pavement.
And the trees, they stand with their skin darkened, soaked in memory. Patient listeners, who've spent the night collecting echoes from the wind, storing them in rings, we'll never see.
In the kitchen, tea sits still. Draped in the colour of grandmother’s stories. Steam rising slow, not eager to escape; like thoughts that have nowhere else to be.
There’s a bowl of walnuts, little brown brains hiding secrets; dreaming of those high branches, they’ll never climb again.
A cinnamon stick leans in the corner jar, cracked but fragrant. Its bark split like an old book's spine opened too often by hands reaching for comfort.
There’s a leather jacket slouched over a chair. The kind that remembers every shoulder it held. Its arms droop like tired hugs, and its pockets still hold ticket stubs from movies seen in another life.
Time moves slowly today. Like coffee cooling in a chipped mug, like rainwater running over a mud path, not rushing anywhere. Just carving quiet paths, no one notices.
Some memories come in shades of brown. Not black, not white, just right there.
Today is not grey. It does not twinge like blue or sting like red.
It is brown. And brown lingers. It tiptoes through a house, settling in corners, content to stay unseen and at the same time never truly gone.
I read it somewhere that fireflies speak in flashes of light. Each, perfectly timed. The male glows every five seconds, and the female waits 2.5 seconds to reply.
Made me wonder. Isn’t love—the whole maddening thing—also just a matter of timing?
We forget, it’s not always about feeling the same, but feeling it at the same time. What if you blink too early, or too late, and miss the one meant for your glow?
Like that friend who loved you as if spring, tapping on your window, just after you left to chase the monsoon. Or the one who showed up, the day you stopped waiting.
Sometimes, it’s not that love disappeared. It arrived. But it knocked at the wrong hour.
Maybe you both were ready to bloom, just not in the same season. Like you both were under the same sky, but living in different timelines.
The truth is, love may have spoken your language, but not your timing.
And that’s, not miscommunication, that’s misalignment.
Because sometimes, love is almost like fireflies. It carries the spark, but misses the moment. It knows how to shine, but not when to.
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.
I’ve left the door unlocked, but not open. Just in case yourpaws remember the way back.
Because hope, hope still lives here. Quietly. Like dust on your old leash. Like sunlight falling on the empty spot by the door where you used to wait; tail curled, eyes wide, wearing joy like a crown.
I still reach for the sound of you; your paws, your sighs, the soft panting that once played background music to our everyday.
But the house is still. Too still. And grief? Grief is a ghost that keeps licking my hands like it remembers how you used to.
You looked like a storm, but you felt like a warm fire in winter. A lion who bowed to love. Fierce in form, but never once did you raise your voice at the world.
Not even when it was cruel. Not even, when it took you from me.
They say dogs love unconditionally, but you... you redefined the word. You made it feel like home after a long, brutal day, like safety in a storm.
Now I come home, and my arms forget there’s nothing left to reach for anymore.
The absence of your welcome is the loudest thing in the room.
Some say time will soften the edges. But what do they know? They didn’t lose the best part of themselves in the shape of a dog with eyes like forgiveness and a heart too big for this world.
And I… I ache with the knowing that the door will stay unlocked forever, but never again swing open to the joy of your face.
I’ve left the door unlocked, because some part of me still hopes, that maybe the universe will get it wrong, and maybe you’ll find your way back just once more.
Until then, know this: You were, you are, and you always will be loved without measure, missed like breath, remembered in everything.
And when I cross whatever threshold comes after this life, I hope the first thing I see is the tail wagging like time never passed. And the light in your eyes calling me home to a place without endings.
If you forget me, then let it be thorough. Let it be like pulling petals off the last flower I ever gifted you. Not a single one spared to press between your pages.
Forget how my voice once sounded like home on days when you couldn't find one. Forget the soft chair of my attention, how you sank into it like it has always been yours.
If you forget me, let it be a total eclipse, dark enough that even the stars we named after each other are swallowed without a trace.
Forget that I didn’t flinch when you handed me the trembling map of your trauma and asked me to still love you.
Forget the poems I folded like secret letters and left on your pillow. Forget the metaphor that compared your laughter to spring arriving early, and the simile that said, you felt like a prayer answered in silence.
Because love, real love…isn't a song on shuffle. You don't get to skip to the chorus and pretend the verses never happened.
So if you must forget me, do it with conviction. Let the memory of us be a house that burned down and not a postcard you revisit when the weather inside your chest turns stormy.
And I…I’ll unlearn the language that once sounded like your name, wipe clean the margins where I scribbled you into meaning.
I’ll forget you, like waves, forget the names of the shores they once kissed.
I won’t just forget you. I’ll forget the version of me that ever thought you were worth writing for. And I’ll forget the softness of every poem I ever wrote!
April, with its polite sky and blooming lies, returns each year like a guest I never invite, but always prepare for…
It walks in like it owns the place. It hangs its coat next to my sorrow, makes itself at home and whispers, "Remember?"
I do. I remember everything.
How love was the only language you ever needed! You didn’t say it much, but you brewed it, poured it into cups of tea that somehow made the world feel less heavy.
You were the warmest part of the room, even when you weren’t in it. Your smile didn't just lit it up, but it made it feel...safe. How you never took up space, instead just filled it with peace! Like everything aching could rest for a while.
And your humour? Your jokes…they were the classic dad kind. Silly. Predictable. The kind that made me sigh, then laugh anyway.
They don’t make people like you anymore. I don’t think they know how. You were proof enough that goodness can still be quiet.
If grief were a book, April would be the heaviest page. Folded in the corner. Tear-stained. Unreadable some days, unskippable on others.
Do you know...? I don’t drink tea anymore, not in a way I once did anyway. Not because I stopped liking it, but because no one makes it like you. Somehow, every cup now tastes like absence. Like a hug that stops halfway through because it remembers you're gone.
Tell me... Are you okay? Is the sky as soft as they say? Do you miss me the way I miss you...with the kind of ache that sits behind the eyes, burns behind the ribs, waits in the quiet like silence before a scream.
Do you watch me when I crumble in mid-conversations, because an old song slipped through the speaker, and reminded me of you?
Because here...every April, I lose you all over again. It's not like the first time; not like a sharp, sudden ending, but like a story I know by heart that still breaks me in the retelling.
Accidental Epiphanies 