Diary ka panna

28/01/26

There was a time when loving him felt like breathing.

Natural, effortless, alive.

I still remember the first few months — the way he looked at me when a stranger in Lucknow said I looked pretty.

The way he smiled as if the compliment was for him too.

The quiet pride in his eyes, the gentle teasing, the softness he never showed anyone else. I loved his reaction when I got a cake for him after we won the riding tournament. My knight in shining armour waali feeling you know? The rajkumar coming on a horse. It’s so silly.. 

And maybe that is why the ache still returns, unexpectedly, like muscle memory.

When I wear a saree.

When I pass places we visited.

When an old song plays.

When I see a father teaching his child to fly, and it reminds me of the story he once told me — little Nikhil sitting inside a helicopter with his father explaining every button with patience and joy.

I wanted him to have something like that with our kids someday.

That hope was tiny, unspoken, but real.

And that is why letting him go feels like losing an entire future, not just a person.

I was not perfect.

I won’t pretend I was.

I lied at times.

I acted impulsively.

I tried to fill my loneliness with the wrong things — things that I later regretted.

I crossed boundaries that mattered to him deeply.

I hurt him in ways that I should have been more mindful about.

He wasn’t perfect either.

He held on to anger long after conversations could have saved us.

He didn’t always tell me what broke him — he expected me to just “know.”

He shut me out again and again, and somewhere along the way, we both stopped seeing the scared human inside the other.

We both failed each other.

Differently, but equally.

I don’t want to be the villain in this story.

But I also don’t want to pretend I was the victim.

We were two flawed people trying to love each other with wounds we hadn’t healed.

A few days ago, something shifted.

A friend reached out to me — broken, hurt, confused — and for the first time in months, I wasn’t thinking only about myself.

I was present for someone else.

I understood her pain because it reflected mine.

And in that conversation, something clicked:

I have been waiting for a man who has already made his choice.

He chose someone else.

Maybe he chose her because of timing.

Maybe because she was familiar.

Maybe because she didn’t trigger his insecurities the way I did.

Maybe because it was easier to return than rebuild.

And it hurts — of course it does.

It feels like losing him all over again.

But the part that finally broke me wasn’t that he chose her.

It was realising that I kept choosing him even when he stopped choosing me long ago.

My complaint of him never stopping me, or telling me to come back to him.. I always wanted him to hold my hand and never let it go and just pull me towards him like he did that one time in Kolkata where I accidentally called myself his wife for the first time. The glee on his face when he teased me was so adorable. But I know ki woh zyaada expressive hain nhi, toh kuch hota bhi toh nhi batate.

I built my healing around the hope that he would return. I waited, held on, punished myself, blamed myself, moulded myself into a version I thought he would love again.

But love cannot be resurrected by self-blame.

Love cannot be begged back.

And I don’t want to lose my self-respect for someone who no longer sees my worth.

This isn’t revenge.

This isn’t drama.

This isn’t “I don’t care.”

I care.

Maybe more than I should.

But I also care about myself now.

So here is my goodbye — not out of bitterness, but out of clarity:

I loved him genuinely.

I loved him with the kind of innocence that felt clean, white, and protected.

I loved him in a way I had never been loved before.

But that chapter is over.

He is choosing his life, and for the first time, I am choosing mine.

I will not disrespect what we had.

I will not rewrite him as a villain.

I will not rewrite myself as a martyr.

We were imperfect people who couldn’t meet each other’s needs at the right time.

That is the truth.

I miss the old him — the one who laughed with me, protected me, teased me, held my hand as if it mattered.

But he isn’t that person anymore.

And maybe I am not that girl either.

So this is my last page for him:

Thank you for the love we shared. I’m sorry for the pain we caused each other.And I hope you find happiness in the life you’ve chosen. Had you not been someone else’s, I would asked you to hug me kabhi. Tight waala remember? The countdown one? But soch ke darr lagta hai if it isn’t similar to how I’ve memorised us, toh kya hoga?

As for me —

I’m trying not to wait at the same spot anymore. It’s gonna be hard as hell because there is gonna be a lot if crying I know. But I’m walking forward. I’m choosing peace. I’m choosing dignity. I’m choosing myself.