Obsession

“Why are you smiling like that?” she asked, not looking up from her notebook.

“Like what?”

“Like you know something I don’t.”

“I do,” I said.

She raised her eyes then, slow, as if the day hadn’t been heavy enough. “And what’s that?”

“That this moment,  you sitting there, that yellow light on your face, that silver ring you keep spinning on your finger, I’m going to remember this for the rest of my life.”

She laughed. “You’re so weird.”

I didn’t say anything to that. I just watched her return to her notes, hair falling across her cheek. It was true. I was weird. For her.

Every day started with her.

Before toothpaste. Before water. Before the sun had properly arrived.

My brain had made a ritual out of her. Is she awake yet? Has she worn that navy kurta again? Is she still skipping breakfast?

I didn’t need to check. I just knew.

The brain does that when it starts orbiting someone. Forms patterns. Links sights, sounds, feelings to that one person. And I loved it. I didn’t want a way out.

There was joy in it. In remembering her voice between songs. In smiling alone when I walked past the tea stall she once mentioned she liked,  “not because of the chai, but because of the old man who never remembers my name.”

“I think about you a lot,” I told her once.

She didn’t laugh that time. She didn’t call me weird.

She just said, “I know.”

That was the thing. She never led me on. Never flirted carelessly. But she let me stay. In her orbit. In her periphery.

And that was enough. More than enough.

I noticed everything. I noticed she carried two pens,  one black, one green. That she had a small scar on her left knuckle. That she only wore kajal on Tuesdays, and even then, only lightly. That she always paused two seconds before answering a question in class,  like she was mentally checking the words, measuring their softness.

It wasn’t an obsession in the way movies show it,  with crazy eyes and dangerous silence.

This was... rhythm.

I started sitting near the windows because she liked sitting near the windows. I listened to classical fusion because she once said, “I like songs that start slow and then break into something.”

I became fluent in her language.

“You remember too much,” she told me one evening, as we walked back from a seminar.

“Is that a bad thing?”

“No. It’s just... strange. Most people forget even the important stuff. You remember small things.”

“I think the small things are the important stuff,” I replied.

She looked at me then,  the way someone looks when they suddenly realise the person beside them is not temporary.

That look. I’ll never forget that.

My friends teased me. “Yaar, tu pagal ho gaya hai.”

“She’s just a classmate.”

“Find someone who actually likes you back.”

But they didn’t understand.

This wasn’t about being liked back. This wasn’t even about being with her. This was about the feeling. The way she made me feel.

Alive. Awake. Aware.

Like suddenly the world had a centre again, and it was her.

I didn’t follow her around. I didn’t force closeness.

But every moment I spent with her,  or even near her, I preserved it like pressed flowers between pages. I’d open them at night, before sleeping. Replay the conversations.

“Do you ever think about the future?” she once asked.

“All the time,” I said.

“What do you see?”

“You.”

She didn’t respond. Just smiled a soft, sad smile.

I didn’t ask why it was sad. I just held it. Like the rest of her,  gently, without demand.

One morning, I woke up late. Missed the first class.

And I panicked. Not because of attendance. Not because of grades.

Because I hadn’t seen her.

My chest was too tight. The hours too slow.

It hit me how much I had built my day around her. How she was the rhythm underneath everything.

But I didn’t feel ashamed of it.

There was nothing wrong with loving someone so much that they became your measure of time.

Weeks passed. She changed her hairstyle. I noticed. She started sitting farther away in class. I noticed. Her replies to my texts got shorter. I noticed.

But I didn’t stop loving her.

Love, the real kind, doesn’t panic. It aches sometimes, yes. But it doesn’t panic.

Because even when her voice got rarer, even when her attention turned away ,  I still loved her. Not because of what she gave me. But because of what she was.

I saw her one last time before graduation. A function. She was laughing with someone else.

I didn’t interrupt.

I just watched.

She looked the same, yet different. More confident. More distant. Like a flame that had become wind.

She saw me.

We didn’t say anything. But she gave me that smile. Not the sad one. The real one. The one that always made my ribs feel too small for my heart.

People ask me sometimes, “Were you two ever a thing?”

And I always answer honestly.

“No. But I was hers.”

Not in the way stories end. But in the way stories begin.

With a name you never forget. With a laugh, you hear even when the world is silent. With memories that don’t hurt,  they warm you. Still.

It wasn’t madness.

It was meaning.

And I’m still grateful. Still full.

Because in some corner of my life, there will always be a soft glow. A name like a hymn. A time when love wasn’t returned,  but it didn’t need to be.

She once said, “You’re different.”

And I wanted to reply, “You made me that way.”

But I didn’t.

Some things don’t need to be said.

Some love isn’t declared.

It’s remembered.

It’s relived.

It’s an obsession, yes,  but the kind that saves you.