Naina

Tonight grief didn’t come through a memory first.

It came through a song.

Naina.

I don’t know what it was about the way it was sung tonight, but it felt like the music was carrying a kind of tenderness I haven’t felt in a long time. The moment the song began, my mind didn’t stay in the room I was sitting in.

It went straight to you.

Suddenly I could see you so clearly.

I imagined holding your face gently in my palms the way I used to. Looking straight into your eyes the way I once did when everything between us felt simple and safe. Your eyes were always the first thing I noticed about you. Yahi aankhein mujhe kha gayi. This song somehow reminded me of them — that quiet depth they had when you looked at me.

In my mind I kissed your hands, your wrist, god I remember feeling your pulse quicken beneath my lips. I imagined placing your hand on my heart the way I once did when I wanted you to feel how fast it was beating. Imagined you kissing my forehead. Imagined me kissing your eyes. 

For a moment it felt like stepping into another world.

A softer one. A world where you loved me the way I believed you did once. A world where we were still the two people who tried to hold each other through difficult nights instead of becoming the pain in each other’s lives.

And then one night when I gave into the urge and tried to call you, the quick hang up got me back to reality. You had blocked me. Again.

I cried. Not the quiet kind of crying that slips out in silence. I cried in a way that felt like something inside me was tearing open again.

There are moments when I miss your presence so much that the feeling almost scares me. Not because I don’t understand it, but because I don’t know what to do with it anymore. Sometimes I think about coming to you and simply telling you how I felt today. About the strange moments when your absence becomes louder than anything else in my life.

But then the other thoughts arrive too.

I think about you and the life you are building now. I think about the images that exist in my mind of you standing beside someone else.

Those thoughts hurt in a different way. They stop me.

They remind me that love is not always enough to make two people remain in the same place.

There are moments when my heart feels like it is pulling me toward you with everything it has. And there are moments when another part of me holds on tightly and says — don’t go back to a place where you are no longer wanted.

So I stay here.

In between.

Missing you.

Remembering the softness of the moments we shared.

And at the same time trying to keep my own heart strong enough to carry the reality of where we stand now.

Today a song reminded me of you in the most tender way possible.And maybe that is the strangest thing about love.

Even when the story ends, the smallest things — a voice, a melody, a word like naina — can take you back to the exact place where your heart once lived.