After Midnight

"You must be tired," she said.

I wasn't. My mind was racing at 2 AM, every nerve ending firing. The conversation had taken on that electric quality where everything matters more than it should.

We'd been talking about nothing, her dissertation on urban planning, my half-finished novel that I keep lying about being close to done, and whether Chandigarh actually counts as a planned city or just a grid with pretensions. But underneath the nothing was everything. The way she'd type "haha" instead of sending an emoji. The way she'd wait exactly three minutes before responding, as if she were timing it, or maybe just living her life, and I was the one counting.

I'd told her about the Japanese concept of ma, negative space, the interval between things. "It's not the notes," I'd explained, "it's the silence between them that makes music work."

She'd sent back: "So what are we? Notes or silence?"

That's when my brain short-circuited.

"Come to Chandigarh," I typed before I could think better of it. "We'll play hide and seek in the old sector markets."

What the fuck was I saying? Hide and seek? I'm twenty-seven years old.

But I meant it. I wanted her here, wanted to show her the streets I grew up on, wanted to see if she'd laugh at the absurdity of two adults ducking behind chai stalls and calling it a game. I wanted to know if she was the kind of person who'd say yes to something that stupid and beautiful.

More than that, I wanted to test something. Whether she'd understand that hide and seek wasn't really about hiding. It was about the thrill of being found by someone who actually looked. About making yourself deliberately visible while pretending you weren't. About the chase being more honest than the catch.

My last relationship ended because I couldn't explain this kind of thing. Priya would ask me what I was thinking, and I'd say "nothing" because how do you explain that you're thinking about the quality of afternoon light, or the way her voice changed when she talked to her mother, or whether love was just pattern recognition dressed up as fate? She called me distant. She wasn't wrong.

"You should sleep," she replied.

Translation: This conversation is getting too intense, and I need an exit.

I get it. I'd been circling something all night without saying it directly. Dancing around the fact that I wanted more than I should want from someone I barely know. She could feel it. Of course, she could feel it.

"Maybe someday you'll find both," she'd said earlier, when I'd complained about never meeting anyone who was both sharp enough to spar with and soft enough to sink into.

The problem is, I think I already have. And she just told me to go to bed.

Here's what I didn't say: I've been looking for both my entire adult life. My parents have both. My grandfather had it with my grandmother until she died; he still sets out two chai cups every morning, fills both, and drinks both.

But everyone I meet is either all softness with no spine, or all edges with no give. The soft ones bored me within weeks. The sharp ones cut me, and I spend months bleeding out, wondering if pain is just the price of not being bored.

She's different. She'll spend twenty minutes explaining Le Corbusier's failures in Chandigarh's design, then send me a photo of a stray dog she's named Gerald. She quotes Barthes and watches terrible reality TV. She has opinions about everything and holds none of them so tightly that she can't laugh at herself.

Three weeks ago, she sent me a voice note at 4 a.m. She couldn't sleep, she said, and wanted to know if I thought people were lonelier now than before or just more aware of it. Her voice was rough with insomnia. I listened to it six times.

I haven't told her that. I haven't told her a lot of things.

"Good night," I sent back.

My phone screen went dark. Outside, a dog barked, maybe Gerald's Chandigarh cousin. A motorcycle revved somewhere in the distance. The ceiling fan made its rhythmic click with every rotation, the same click it's made since I was twelve years old and couldn't sleep because I'd just learned what entropy meant and couldn't stop thinking about heat death and the universe's long fade to nothing.

I thought about texting her again. Something light, a meme maybe, to reset the tone. But that felt like cowardice. Like taking back something true because it made someone uncomfortable.

I didn't sleep for another two hours.

Instead, I lay there running scenarios. What if she did come to Chandigarh? What if we played that stupid game and she actually hid and I actually looked, and when I found her behind the water tank in Sector 17, we'd both be laughing, breathless, and the distance between us would collapse into something simple and real?

Or worse, what if it didn't? What if the fantasy was better than the finding? What if I've built her up so much in my head that the real version, standing in front of me in daylight, would just be another person I'd eventually find a reason to leave?

When I finally did sleep, I dreamed about markets and streetlights and a game where the rules kept changing, where finding someone meant losing them, and where she was always just around the next corner, laughing at how seriously I was taking it all.

In the dream, I never caught her. But I never stopped looking either.

I woke up at 7 AM to a text from her, sent an hour earlier: "If I come to Chandigarh, I'm hiding in the Rock Garden. You'll never find me there."

My heart did something stupid and hopeful in my chest.

I typed back: "Challenge accepted."

Then I deleted it. Typed: "Bold of you to assume I'd look."

Deleted that too.

Finally sent: "The Rock Garden is cheating. That place is a labyrinth."

She replied instantly: "Scared?"

No. Terrified. But not of the game.

"Never," I sent back.

And just like that, we were playing again.