The Window Seat

"Then I met you in that same white saree I had gifted you. The same earrings. The same place. But this time, we were strangers. I know you didn't notice me. I wanted it that way. I wanted to quietly disappear from everyone's life without making anyone wonder where I had gone.

That night, I was sitting alone at 3 a.m., questioning my choices for what felt like the thousandth time. And after questioning them again and again, I finally understood, perhaps nothing had ever really been in my hands. Every uncomfortable situation broke something inside me. Every small inconvenience left a void I never knew how to fill. But I couldn't say any of this out loud. I was certain nobody would understand. And even if they did, I was too tired to explain. I only liked it when it rained. Somehow rain was incredibly relatable to me. It felt like a version of me shouting with my heart open at the top of my voice and crying, not because I needed some sort of consolation, but because of how I felt about myself.

You know every morning I would wake up with some unknown pain settling heavily inside my chest. As time passed the feeling used to vanish as I smiled wholeheartedly in front of everyone. I would laugh, talk, make jokes, pretend everything was fine, while somewhere inside, I was constantly falling apart. Nobody noticed. Maybe that was the funniest part. I had become so good at being alright that even I sometimes forgot I wasn't. And then I realised, I didn't want any of this. All these plans, expectations, achievements, disappointments, maybe they had only been excuses. A pretext for running away from myself. I didn't even know what I was running towards. I know this sounds like escaping. But I'm not trying to escape anything. I'm just tired. Tired of trying to understand everything. Tired of explaining myself. Tired of pretending that things don't affect me when somehow, everything does. Maybe you reach a point where you realise you're different from the rest of the world. Not because you can't adjust - you can. You can laugh with people, make friends, love them, want them to stay. But somewhere underneath, there's a quiet certainty that they'll never completely understand you. And maybe the hardest part isn't being misunderstood. It's being too tired to explain yourself anymore. So I decided to leave. Not dramatically. No final goodbye. No suitcase packed in the middle of the night. No letter left behind. I simply began disappearing. A message left unanswered here. A meeting skipped there. My name slowly fading out of conversations.

People rarely notice someone disappearing when that person has spent years pretending they were never hurting. Maybe I wanted it that way. I thought distance would make things easier. I was wrong. Because no matter how far you go, there's one person you can't leave behind. Yourself. That's how it began. Not with a decision. Not with a tragedy. But with a quiet realisation at three in the morning that I no longer recognised the person staring back at me from the mirror. For the first time, I wondered, what if I stopped running? What if, instead of becoming someone else, I finally tried to understand the person I'd spent years avoiding? I didn't know then that some questions, once asked, refuse to leave you alone."

Reading up to this point, Ananya's heart felt unbearably heavy, as though a stone had settled inside her chest. Something caught in her throat. She wanted to cry, but she was sitting in a crowded bus, surrounded by strangers. So she simply stared at the letter, trying to understand what she'd just read. She had never expected to find it. Even now, she was still convincing herself it was real. The letter had been tucked quietly inside her notebook for months, a notebook she barely opened, the kind she'd inevitably reach for the night before an exam, hunting for something she should have studied weeks ago. She had never imagined there was something else inside. Something meant for her. Something she was never supposed to find like this. "Madam, the ticket." The conductor's voice pulled her back. "Ticket? Oh, yes." She handed him the ten-rupee note.

As he took it, something flashed through her mind. Six months ago. The same bus route, the same familiar chaos, him standing right where she stood now, only it had been a different bus. For a second, the present disappeared. She could almost see him again. "You see, everyone on this bus is carrying an entire world in their mind and body. It's not that they're living in that world - maybe they're just surviving it. But they're good actors. And here you are, afraid to even join the drama club." "Can you stop being philosophical all the time? It's 8 a.m." "See, I'm just motivating you." He giggled. Everything flashed before Ananya's eyes. The chai stall near college, where he always ordered two cups and drank only one, "because sharing chai is a personality trait, Ananya, not everyone gets to have one." The argument over the last samosa, which he lost on purpose, she realised only now. The window seat that was "non-negotiable" on every bus, every time, because he told her once, half-joking, "if things get too loud inside my head, at least I can look outside and pretend I'm somewhere else." She hadn't understood what he meant. She had laughed. "Madam, aage badhiye." Someone behind her wanted to get past. She stepped aside without seeing them. Six months. Six months since his replies had started arriving a day late, then three days late, then not at all. Six months since the group chat had quietly stopped tagging him, the way you stop setting a place at the table for someone who hasn't shown up in a while, not out of cruelty, just habit, just the slow forgetting that happens when a person makes themselves easy to forget. He had made himself very easy to forget. That was the thing nobody talked about afterward. He had spent so long being the loud one, the funny one, the one who checked on everyone else, that when he finally went quiet, it didn't look like a warning. It looked like relief. She remembered the call. Not what was said, she could never remember what was said, only the sound of her own voice asking a question twice because the first time, some part of her refused to hear the answer. She had not cried. Not that day. She had sat very still, the way you sit when you've just understood that stillness is the only thing keeping you from falling, and she had thought, absurdly, of the samosa. Of him pretending to lose. How long had he been pretending to lose?

The notebook had sat closed for months after that, not from avoidance, just from the ordinary neglect of a notebook nobody has reason to open. She had never imagined there was anything inside it waiting for her. That was the cruelty of it. He hadn't needed her to look. He had simply left it there, patient in a way he had never been in life, and let time do the rest. He had tucked the letter in without asking, the way he did everything. Quietly. Without permission. Without waiting to be caught, even this. The bus jolted. She gripped the pages tighter, as if grief itself might slip out through her fingers if she loosened her hold even slightly. There were more pages left. She was not ready. She turned them anyway.

"I want to tell you about the gifts, Ananya. Because I never told you why I gave them. The bookmark I gave you on your birthday, the brass one shaped like a feather, I bought it the same week you told me you were scared of finishing things. Scared of endings. I thought if you had something to mark your place, you'd never feel like you’d lost it. I didn't know I'd become the thing you'd need a bookmark for. A place to return to. A page you couldn't finish. The earrings. You wore them the day we met, and I noticed, and three months later I saved up and got you a matching pair because I liked the idea of you carrying two versions of that day, the one you lived, and the one I kept replaying. The window seat. That was never a joke. That was the closest I ever came to telling you the truth. I gave you the aisle seat every time because I needed somewhere to disappear to that wasn't your face, because your face always made me want to stay, and staying was getting harder than I let on. And the last cup of chai I didn't finish, I left it for you on purpose. I always did. I don't know if you noticed. I hope you noticed. And now my brave girl, as you read this, please don't shed tears for me. Fulfil all the dreams that you said to me. Look carefully. I am always out there, in the form of cloud, rain, sunlight. Every time you feel one of them on your skin, that's me, still keeping my promise of never really leaving you." She pressed her palm flat over the page, over his handwriting, as if she could keep all these from disappearing by sheer force of wanting. The bus reached her stop. The doors opened. People pushed past her, already gone, already somewhere else. Ananya didn't move. She sat there long after the conductor called the name of her street twice, long after the bus emptied and refilled with strangers who had no idea a girl in the third row was holding the last conversation she would ever have with someone who loved her enough to leave, and gentle enough to leave quietly. She finally understood what he'd meant, that morning, about everyone on the bus carrying a world inside them. He had been carrying his world the whole time. She just hadn't been looking closely enough to see it crack. Outside, it was raining softly, with a warm streak of sunlight touching her through the bus window. The window seat beside her stayed empty the rest of the ride. She left it that way on purpose.