Last Time

It was the kind of evening that made you believe the city was finally tired of itself. Even the wind moved slower, brushing past my face like an afterthought. I was standing at the edge of the terrace—not in any dramatic sense, just… standing. The old steel railing was cold under my fingers, the kind of cold that doesn't ask for attention, just reminds you it's still here.

Below, the city kept going. Horns. Voices. Lights flickering like broken promises. And above me, a half-hearted moon, as unsure as I was.

I hadn’t come here to think. Thinking had become muscle memory by now. I came here to stop. To put something down, maybe. A weight I’d carried too long, too quietly.

Her name wasn’t written anywhere here, but it echoed in everything.

Not in the romantic way people talk about lost love. This wasn’t poetry. This was old plastic wrappers in a drawer you never cleaned. This was a voice in the head that didn't even sound like hers anymore. Just… an impression. Of what I thought was love. Of what I thought was her.

We hadn’t spoken in two years.

No fights. No final goodbye. Just silence, like a song that forgets its next line and never recovers. She left the way some people do—not loudly, not tragically—just… in the spaces between texts, in the casual delays that turn into days, and the days that never find their way back.

But I never left. Not really.

I built rooms for her in my head. Kept rearranging furniture she never sat on. Played songs on loop that once made her smile. Wrote long messages I never sent. Replied to her silence with more silence, as if I owed her that.

And through all this, I called it healing.

Funny, isn’t it?

People around me believed I was moving on. And maybe I was. But only in public. Privately, I still set an extra plate. Still looked for her in strangers’ playlists. Still flinched when someone said her name, even if they meant someone else.

But today… something felt different.

Not dramatic. Not movie-ending different. Just a tiredness that sank deeper than usual.

I didn't want to carry it anymore.

Not because I stopped loving her—maybe that part never ends—but because the love had turned into something else. Something heavy. Something that took more than it gave. And I was done paying.

I pulled out my phone. Scrolled to our last chat.

“Online 678 days ago.”

No blue ticks. No goodbye. Just an empty screen and a blinking cursor where my closure should’ve been.

I typed:

“Aakhri baar tumse baat kar raha hoon… sirf apne liye.”

Deleted it.

Typed again:

“You don’t have to reply. Just needed to say goodbye out loud.”

Deleted that too.

Finally, I just wrote:

“Shukriya.”

Sent it.

It didn’t change anything.

She didn’t come back. The past didn’t rearrange itself. But something inside me… exhaled.

I stood there a while longer. No background score. No tears. Just the city breathing, and me with it.

The phone screen faded to black. I slipped it back into my pocket.

And for the first time in a long time, I walked away.

Not from her.

From the version of me that didn’t know how to let go.