Kian was different from the rest.
At twenty-four, a final-year college student, his name drifted through the campus like a familiar tune. People knew him not just for his talent, but for the way his voice seemed to soften even the coldest mornings—gentle enough to calm restless hearts, powerful enough to linger long after the song ended. When he sang, the world slowed down. Conversations faded. Even time seemed to listen.
Yet behind the admiration, behind the quiet stares and whispered praise, Kian stood alone.
He always had.
Orphaned before he could understand what loss truly meant, he had grown up without lullabies sung by a mother or the reassuring weight of a father's hand on his shoulder. What filled that emptiness instead was silence. Long corridors. Empty rooms. And his own voice echoing back to him when he sang, simply to remind himself that he existed.
Love, to Kian, was never loud.
It was never flashy.
It was something sacred—slow, patient, and soft. Like honey pouring without urgency. Like a song meant to be felt, not performed.
Girls confessed to him often. Some were confident, some shy. Some wrote poems, some cried, some smiled as if rejection was impossible. They admired his face, his fame, the applause that followed him wherever he went. And every time, he turned them down—gently, respectfully.
It wasn't arrogance.
It was resonance.
None of them felt right.
None of them felt like her.
He didn't care about beauty, wealth, or popularity. All he wanted was a girl who would fall in love not with the image of him on stage, but with the man hidden inside his music. Someone who would hear the loneliness between his lyrics. Someone who would stay when the clapping stopped. Someone who understood his silence better than his words.
Lately, though, something strange had begun to happen.
He started seeing a girl.
Not in dreams—but while fully awake.
She appeared beside him when he sang alone in his room. He felt her presence when the wind brushed past his shoulder, almost like fingertips lingering there. In the pauses between his verses, he could hear her breathing, slow and steady, as if she was afraid to interrupt the music.
Her eyes were unforgettable—deep brown, endless, alive with emotion.
But her face…
Always blurred.
Always unfinished.
Like a painting waiting for its final strokes.
In his visions, she was an artist. He often saw her sitting quietly, sketching him again and again, as if afraid he might disappear if she stopped. Sometimes her hands trembled as she drew, her tears soaking into the canvas, turning into stains of longing and love.
Kian felt it—her care, her prayers, her affection—reaching him from a place he couldn't name.
A dimension just out of reach.
It was madness, perhaps.
But it was a beautiful kind of madness.
His friends noticed the change.
Arshdeep and Harsh, the only ones who truly knew him, grew worried. They tried to pull him back into reality, tried to ground him.
"You need a girlfriend, bro," Arshdeep said once, forcing a laugh. "Not a hallucination."
Harsh didn't laugh. He studied Kian for a moment before saying quietly, "You need therapy."
Kian only smiled.
His eyes drifted somewhere far away, half-closed, as if he was listening to a melody only he could hear.
"She exists," he whispered when no one was listening.
"Maybe not here. But somewhere. She exists."
His notebooks filled with lyrics meant for her—songs without a name, love letters without an address. His guitar strings hummed with emotions he couldn't explain. His soul began to move in sync with the rhythm of her imagined breath.
It felt as if the universe had drawn the outline of a woman into his fate—perfect, precise—yet refused to fill in the details.
The emptiness of never being loved slowly transformed into something far more painful.
The ache of loving someone who might not even be real.
Yet to Kian, she was more real than anyone else.
One quiet morning, sunlight spilling softly through the window, Kian sat with his guitar resting against his chest. He began to sing—low, almost a whisper, as if afraid the moment might break.
And then he felt it.
Not imagined.
Not forced.
Warmth.
Presence.
Like someone invisible sitting beside him, listening closely… smiling.
Kian closed his eyes and kept playing.
Across the city, in a quiet room soaked in afternoon sunlight, Geetanjali sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by scattered sheets of paper and the familiar smell of charcoal and paint. Faint smudges stained her fingers, her kurti, even the edge of her cheek—marks of someone who lived more in her art than in the world around her.
She exhaled slowly and set her pencil down.
Fifteen.
This was the fifteenth sketch.
A boy she had never met.
A boy she could not name.
The face on the paper was, as always, unfinished—blurred where clarity should have been, as if her hand refused to cross that invisible line. No matter how many times she tried, the details slipped away. But the eyes…
The eyes were unmistakable.
Deep. Quiet. Heavy with unspoken songs.
They looked at her as if they carried entire winters inside them.
Geetanjali stared at the sketch for a long moment, her chest tightening in a way she couldn't explain. She didn't know why she kept drawing him. She didn't know why her hands trembled every time she reached the eyes, why her heart ached as if she had known him for years.
She brushed her thumb over the page, right where his blurred face began.
Somewhere inside her, a strange certainty settled.
Without ever meeting—without knowing each other's names—they were already moving toward something inevitable. Toward a love no one ever warns you about.
A love born in imagination.
A love quiet and impossible.
A love destined, somehow, to spill out of dreams and bleed into reality.