Beside You

I don’t remember when it became love. I just remember noticing her more than the rest. Noticing, not staring. The way she carried tiredness like an old friend. The way she smiled only when she meant it. The way her fingers curled slightly when she was thinking, like they were holding onto something invisible.

We weren’t close at first. Just in the same space often enough. College library. Group project. A borrowed pen that never came back, and I never asked for it. But I started looking for reasons to sit on her side of the room. Not talk. Just sit. Like something in me wanted to sync with the rhythm she lived in.

I didn’t want grand declarations. I didn’t want to impress her. I just wanted to understand her better. To know what made her stop mid-sentence sometimes. Why she always paused before saying her own name in introductions, like she was still getting used to it.

Maybe that’s what loving her looked like for me. Not roses. Not long confessions. But care. Just… care. Soft, silent, constant.

I started keeping her favourite biscuit in my bag, just in case the canteen ran out. I’d plug her phone into charger when she left it unattended. I once waited outside her classroom for forty minutes just because she’d looked a little off that day and hadn’t said why.

And she never asked me to do any of this. In fact, most of it went unnoticed. But that was fine. I didn’t need credit. I just needed her to know, without me having to say it, that if ever she felt like fading away, she could look beside her.

And I’d be there.

Not to fix everything. Not to ask questions. Just to remind her she wasn’t alone. That there was someone who saw her on the days she didn’t even see herself.

One day, she did. See me, I mean.

She sat beside me during a heavy-rain afternoon, with wet sleeves and that quietly broken look in her eyes. She didn’t say much. Just leaned her head on my shoulder like it belonged there. I didn’t move. Didn’t breathe too loud.

Because in that moment, everything I had ever wanted to say,
“I don’t want to own you, or change you. I just want to be someone you can rest near,” was already said.

She didn’t thank me. I didn’t ask her to.
But she stayed. And that was enough.