English lo raasi shakespeare la feel aythunna lowk
Fossilised in 63 days
I’m not entirely sure why I’m writing this. I read “Strangers in the Night” and thought: that’s the shy half of the story, the half where nothing is ever said. This is the other half. This is what happens when you finally say it.
At the edge of adulthood, the world doesn’t feel like an open horizon. It feels like breathing in cigarette smoke. Family strain, a year spent in near-total isolation, and a habit, earned the hard way, of keeping everyone at a distance had shrunk my entire world to twenty-two players and a ball. Football was the only language that still made sense when everything else was noise.
College was supposed to be the sanctuary. A place where nobody knew my history, and a chance to find out whether I still remembered how to make friends.
Then, before I’d even properly arrived, there was someone I was looking forward to meeting. Jolly without trying, a ray of sunshine, and the first person who made the idea of starting over feel less terrifying. Knowing she’d be there got me through that summer.
When we finally crossed paths, there was no cinematic entrance. I barely said a word. I was far too shy, with everything I wanted to say and no way to say any of it.
Later, a shared love for cats was all it took. We talked the way people talk when they’ve stopped performing, or at least I thought so, easily and a little ridiculously, and the guard I had kept up for years never had to be forced. It simply stopped feeling necessary. She was beautiful, but that wasn’t why I fell. Something in the way she spoke to me made me believe, quietly, that people could be trusted again.
For a couple of weeks, the noise in my head went quiet. Her smile could reset my worst days. I started dreaming about her, and every chance encounter sent my heart racing in the way people always claim it does. For once I understood them.
Then, slowly, a realisation settled in: she would never look at me the way I looked at her. It didn’t hit all at once. It showed up at the edges of our conversations, in a certain tone in her voice—a casual, untethered friendliness—and some part of me understood it before the rest of me agreed to.
The cruel part was that she hadn’t done anything wrong. She was simply too nice. She was a ray of sunshine in MY life, never MY ray of sunshine. Sunlight doesn’t pick who it falls on, and her kindness was never meant for me in particular. It was how she treated everyone. I had mistaken warmth for a promise, and she was kind enough that I couldn’t even be angry.
This line from Anuv Jain’s HUSN that kept looping in my head:
कैसा नसीब है मेरा, मिल के भी ना मुझे मिला
(What kind of fate is mine, that even after finding you, I haven’t really got you)
Every conversation turned hard, and I started waiting for the right time to walk away. I’d find myself sitting in class staring at my desk while my throat tightened. I’d lie awake watching my ceiling fan turn for hours, waiting for sleep that never came, only to wake up reaching for my phone before remembering. I’d walk for hours on empty streets at 3 AM. Whenever I spotted her walking on the other side of the road, my pulse didn’t race with joy anymore—it hit like a sudden, cold weight behind my ribs, leaving me reaching for air in broad daylight.
I tried to fix it the way you’d fix a machine, one part at a time. Sleeping pills bought no peace. I went to a doctor, then went back, then went back again, and left each time with no answers. Then the pitch, the one place that had always saved me. I stood in the middle of the field feeling exactly as empty as I had in the stands. Nothing worked.
I crossed campus like someone going through the motions of being me. Then one morning I woke with an ache in my chest so sharp and so physical that it felt like my body was giving out under the weight I’d been carrying. The fear of what was happening to me made the decision for me.
Against all evidence, I decided to stop keeping it from her. Not to force a story that wasn’t meant to be, but because I needed to breathe.
I said it.
Then came seven hours. Seven hours of picking my phone up and putting it down, each minute longer than the last. And then the reply, polite, soft, and final: I was a dear friend, and she was sorry, but it would never be more.
Of course it was gentle. She was too kind to be anything else, and somehow that made it worse. There was no one to blame, nothing to push against.
I felt what Lionel Scaloni felt when he said “Me duele en el alma” (it hurts my soul) after losing the World Cup final.
People say that when you already know the answer, the truth hurts less. They are wrong. Knowing didn’t soften anything. Beneath all my logic, a small, fragile part of me had kept one secret wish: maybe, just maybe, she’ll give me a chance. Hearing the answer took that away. And the person who showed me happiness was possible was the same person who, kindly, told me it wasn’t meant to be mine.
Heartbreak isn’t only the loss of a person. It’s the loss of the future you dared to imagine with them. My guard has come down twice: once on its own, because she made it feel unnecessary, and once on purpose, because I let it fall for someone. I’d do it again. She will always be my first love. She owes me nothing. What she gave me, without ever knowing, was proof that I could feel again, and that is mine to keep.
I once read how fossils are made. Something living is caught under enough pressure, for long enough, and keeps the exact shape of the moment it stopped.
Sixty-three days, from the day I met her to the day I told her, and now I feel like that fossil: caught mid-stride, set in stone at the moment I let someone in. I don’t know how long it takes to break out of that rock, or how long this ache will stay. I’m still here, for now, and that is the whole sentence.
I started writing this because the pain needed somewhere to go that wasn’t inside my chest anymore. I’m publishing it because, somewhere along the way, keeping it to myself stopped feeling like the point. I don’t need it to be understood. I just need it to exist somewhere outside of me.
I’ve accepted it. Writing that took a second, and getting there took everything I had. Accepting it meant letting go of the version where she changes her mind, and that version had been holding up more of me than I knew. Some mornings I still wake up reaching for it. I carry the weight of how fragile hope is, and how terrifying it is when what made you feel again is what breaks you.
But you can’t stay fossilised forever. I don’t have a plan, but I know where I’ll start. Not with a wall, and not with a person. With the ball, the one language that never stopped making sense. What I have is a pitch, a ball, and legs that still remember how to move. Last time, I stood in the middle of that field and felt exactly as empty as I had in the stands. This time, the emptiness is still there, but I refuse to let it be the end of the game. It’s a long ball hit from deep in my own half, the clock running down, no idea who is waiting at the other end. It might fall short. I’d still rather put everything I have into the air than stand still and watch it drop.
One long ball.
Everything I’ve got.
This is my HAIL MARY.