It came quietly, like most things that used to hurt.
Aarav wasn't even looking for it. He was scrolling past blurry reels and odd memes on a tired afternoon when the bookstore post appeared in his feed. A familiar handle had liked it. The photo was soft — sunlight bleeding over shelves stacked with paperbacks, a corner table with two cups of tea, and a book open to a dog-eared page.
He almost kept scrolling. Almost.
But then he saw the caption:
"If stories could smell, this one would smell like the first rain. Quiet, aching, beautiful. Highly recommend."
The book's title — Dust and the Moonlight — felt like a whisper from another life. The author name was fake, of course. Just the pen name he used online. The photo credit, however, read:
@niya.books
For a second, the room folded in on itself. Aarav didn't move. The fan above him kept humming, the kettle in the kitchen clicked, but everything else stilled.
She had read it.
She didn't know it was him.
Or maybe she did and said nothing. But he doubted that.
The story in that book wasn't about her, not directly. But the undercurrent — the ache, the absence, the way the protagonist kept writing letters to a girl who never replied — it was carved from a memory he never completely buried.
Didn't comment.
He just sat there with a strange, soft ache in his chest, the kind that doesn't hurt but also doesn't let you breathe easy.
---
That evening, he walked to the corner tea stall. Not for the tea — he didn't even finish it — but for the noise. The clink of glasses. The distant honks. The uncle yelling at someone for extra sugar. It reminded him he was real. Alive. Not just a floating thought from the past.
He watched people pass. Two college kids giggling over a single plate of samosa. A man with tired eyes scribbling numbers into a tiny ledger. A girl, maybe fifteen, with headphones on and a novel in her lap.
He thought about Niya again.
He didn't know who she was now. Maybe she still underlined her favorite lines. Maybe she still laughed before finishing a joke. Maybe the boy who had hugged her back then was still in the picture. Maybe not.
None of it mattered, really.
Because something else had changed.
For the first time in years, Aarav didn't feel like the boy who had waved and been left unseen.
He had written. He had survived. And quietly, unknowingly, a piece of his heart had reached hers — even if it arrived wearing a fake name, even if she didn't know the hands that built it.
That was enough.
---
Later that night, Aarav reopened the manuscript folder.
He had a habit now. Every time he felt something too big to hold, he didn't talk — he wrote.
A new document. Blank. He stared at the cursor blinking like a heartbeat.
He began typing:
To the girl who once gifted me silence…
He stopped. Deleted it.
Then typed again:
She never saw me. But I saw her smile. That was enough.
He saved it. Didn't title it. Didn't know if it would ever become a real story. But it was there. Like breath. Like memory. Like something no bookstore shelf could ever fully contain.
Aarav closed the laptop, turned off the light, and let the night hold him — soft, unjudging, still.
---
The next morning, the bookstore post had three hundred likes. Niya had replied to a few comments. One of them asked, "Why this book?"
Her reply was just one line:
"Because it felt like someone wrote it after watching me walk away."
Aarav smiled.
He didn't write back.
He just opened a new page.