The room was barely big enough for a mattress, a foldable desk, and a single window that didn't quite shut properly. The paint on the wall peeled in soft curls. The fan clicked every few minutes like a heartbeat that had forgotten how to be regular. But Aarav didn't mind.
This was the first space in his life that was entirely his.
He laid down on the floor with his notebook pressed to his chest, back against the bare wall. He could hear the neighbors fighting on one side and someone watching a daily soap too loud on the other. But inside this small cocoon of his — it was quiet.
Not silent. But his kind of quiet.
Sometimes he wrote on the foldable desk. Sometimes on the floor. Sometimes sitting cross-legged on the mattress with tea cooling beside him. The words didn't always come. But when they did, they felt more honest than they ever had.
He no longer tried to impress. He just wrote.
He didn't mention Niya by name anymore. But she was still there, in the way his characters paused before speaking, or the way someone smiled without knowing why.
One of his favorite lines he'd written recently was: She smiled the way forgotten songs sneak back into your head — soft, unexpected, and a little sad.
He wondered if she would ever read it.
Then he shook the thought away. That wasn't why he wrote anymore.
Most nights, he ate rice with salt and one spoon of curd. On better days, Yuvaan dropped by with extra curry or a pack of biscuits. They'd sit cross-legged, laugh at terrible jokes, and talk about the newest stories Aarav was working on.
Yuvaan never asked how he was holding up. He just made sure Aarav laughed enough to forget the answer.
Aarav pinned a page to his wall the night his fifth story crossed 1,000 reads. It simply said:
Not bad for a boy who was supposed to be someone else.
The room remained small. The silence stayed.
But Aarav had grown large enough to fit inside his own life.
And he was still writing.
---
There was a rhythm to his days now. He woke up with the sun spilling across the floor like an apology, stretched his limbs, cracked open the window, and let the city pour in. It didn't matter if it was the honking of impatient rickshaws or the chaiwala yelling prices — it was all real, and it reminded him he was still here.
Every morning, he wrote something. A paragraph, a line, sometimes just a single word. But it was his ritual. And somehow, that made the world feel less like a place that had moved on without him.
He had taped another quote above his desk, just next to the chipped light switch. It read:
"I write not because I have something to say, but because I need somewhere to bleed."
No one knew who said it first. But it felt true.
Money was tight. Sometimes terrifyingly so. The kind of tight where he counted coins before stepping out. Where he sometimes skipped dinner to keep the data pack going. But he had stories. And slowly, those stories began finding strangers who stayed.
People commented.
"I don't know why, but your stories make me cry in the best way."
"This one reminded me of someone I used to love."
"I think I saw myself in this. Thank you."
He read each one like it was oxygen. Not for ego — but for evidence. That somewhere, in a world too big and too fast, his voice had landed softly in someone else's heart.
Niya was still a ghost in his writing, a thread woven between metaphors and silences. He had stopped trying to untangle her from his stories. Maybe she would always be there — the girl who didn't see him, but somehow became the lens through which he learned to see himself.
On rainy afternoons, he sat by the window and let the water speak. He wrote about drizzle love and stormy regrets. About cracked cups and apologies that arrive too late.
He had one favorite scene in his drafts — a boy and girl sitting across from each other, not speaking, just breathing the same air. And it was enough.
He reread it often. It never made him sad.
He thought it might be his version of peace.
---
One Sunday evening, the landlord came by to fix the fuse box. He stepped into the room, looked around, and said, "You live here alone?"
Aarav nodded.
The landlord stared at the taped pages, the books stacked like towers, the notebook with the corners frayed. Then he simply said, "Looks like a writer lives here."
Aarav smiled. "Trying to be."
The man left without charging for the fuse.
That night, Aarav stared at his reflection in the dark window. Not looking for answers. Just noticing the boy staring back. A little thinner, a little paler, but his eyes — they held something now.
Something that might be strength.
Maybe it wasn't the kind of life his parents had imagined. Maybe they still didn't understand. Maybe they never would.
But here, in this quiet room with chipped paint and dreams scribbled on recycled paper, Aarav had something they could never take — choice.
He chose to write.
He chose to stay.
He chose to live in a world where silence was not punishment, but poetry.
And in that choice, he had already won.
---
That night, he started a new story. It was about a boy who builds a home inside a room too small for dreams — and somehow, dreams anyway.
The last line simply read:
"And when the world stopped looking for him, he found himself."