It was just supposed to be a quick detour.
I had ducked into the old college library only to escape the sudden mountain rain, the kind that smells like pine needles and damp secrets. The college corridors were quiet at this hour—students either cramming in dorms or lingering in cafés—but the library’s back section had always been my favorite hiding place. Quiet, forgotten, and smelling of old pages.
As I reached for my usual poetry shelf—Gulzar, Pablo Neruda, and sometimes Faiz—I heard voices in the next aisle.
I paused.
Not to eavesdrop. But something in the tone made me freeze.
“She still doesn’t know, does she?” a soft male voice whispered. Familiar.
“No. And I don’t think she ever should,” replied another, this one gentler, more resolute.
My heart caught a beat.
The first voice again—urgent, trembling. “But it’s been two years, Aarav. Two years since the accident. She deserves the truth. You were the reason she got out alive.”
Aarav.
I felt like the shelf itself had shifted under me. Aarav. My classmate. The quiet artist. The boy with rainy eyes and ink-stained fingers. The one I had blamed—wrongly—for walking away the night my world burned.
The accident.
Two years ago, on a foggy December evening, my car skidded off the hill-road on my way back from a failed poetry competition. I had woken up in the hospital with a fractured wrist and a memory that refused to recall the seconds before impact.
And Aarav… Aarav had disappeared from college a week after.
Now, here he was—whispering the truth I was never meant to hear.
🌧️ Chapter 1: The Memory Mist
I waited till the voices faded. My hands were shaking as I clutched Selected Poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, not even realizing I had pulled it off the shelf.
What truth?
What did he mean, “you were the reason she got out alive”?
That night had lived inside me like an unfinished poem. I had always assumed I crashed alone. No one spoke of it. No one ever said otherwise. And Aarav? I had hated him silently—for ghosting, for not checking in, for never once reaching out.
But now…
Now everything spun.
🌧️ Chapter 2: The Artist in the Rain
It took me a week to find him.
He wasn’t in class. Not in the art studio either. But he came to the old café every Friday at 5, like clockwork, sketchbook in hand, ordering masala chai and staring at the world like he was sketching its soul.
I stood across from him, my hands cold despite the warm mug in mine.
“You were there that night, weren’t you?”
His hand froze mid-sketch.
He didn’t look up.
But I saw his throat tighten.
“I wasn’t supposed to be,” he said finally. “But I couldn’t let you go alone.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He looked up now. And the eyes I had once fallen for—the ones I had memorized in morning lectures—looked unfamiliar in their sadness.
“Because I thought you’d hate me more if you knew the truth.”
I sat down.
He let out a sigh, like he had been holding his breath for years.
“I followed you after the event,” he said, voice low. “You were crying. I didn’t know if I should say anything. Then your car skidded—just like that. I ran down, pulled you out before it caught fire. The next thing I remember was someone dragging me away. I never spoke about it. No one ever asked me.”
Tears stung my eyes.
“Why didn’t you stay?”
He looked out the window.
“Because loving you didn’t give me the right to stay.”
🌧️ Chapter 3: Love Letters in Charcoal
After that day, we began to speak again. First through silences. Then poems. Then long walks under grey clouds that seemed to listen.
Aarav didn’t talk about the past unless I asked. But he showed me his art. Hundreds of pages—drawings of me. From memory. In charcoal, in ink, on napkins, on paper that had curled with time.
“You were my muse,” he said once, “even when I hated myself.”
The air between us changed. The rain, once a reminder of that night, became our companion.
One evening, under a canopy of rhododendrons, I touched his hand.
“Would you write me… not with words, but with your art?”
He smiled. “Only if you’ll write me in your verses.”
🌧️ Chapter 4: The Exhibition
By spring, the college hosted its annual art and literature festival.
This time, I wasn’t just attending. I was featured—my poems, read aloud in a dim-lit hall, with Aarav’s illustrations projected behind me.
Lines like—
[That night when my heart had shattered,
Your hands had held my soul together.]
The room was silent. And then, applause.
But I didn’t care about the crowd. I looked at Aarav.
He nodded.
🌧️ Chapter 5: Whispers No More
It rained again the next day.
Same scent, same sky.
We sat by the hilltop that overlooked the winding road where the accident had happened.
“You know,” I whispered, “If I hadn’t overheard you that day…”
“You’d still hate me,” he smiled, “and I’d still be sketching you in secret.”
We both laughed.
Then he took out something from his coat pocket. A small notebook. Covered in paint smudges. My name on the first page.
“I’ve been writing too,” he said. “Or trying.”
I opened it. First page.
"I never said I loved you. But I drew it a thousand times."
I looked at him, my eyes warm.
“I heard what I wasn’t meant to,” I said. “But maybe… I was always meant to hear it.”
And under the rain, we kissed.
The kind of kiss that forgets pain, remembers poetry, and forgives the silence of two lost years.
The End
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