Somewhere Between Staying and Leaving

I was living in a new city, though it didn’t feel new anymore. Just unfamiliar in a consistent way. The kind that stops surprising you and just starts wearing you out. The mornings were quiet, not peaceful, just quiet. I had stopped setting alarms. I would wake up to the sound of the milk packet hitting the door. That soft thud, every day at 6:40 AM, had become the most reliable part of my life.

I was brushing my teeth longer these days. Standing in front of the mirror, watching the fog on the glass slowly fade before wiping it clean, only to see a version of myself I still wasn’t sure I liked. Not sad. Just dulled. Like a shirt that had lost colour in too many washes.

Work was… normal. People were polite, deadlines were cruel, and lunch breaks were mostly silent, chewing over rice boxes. I was the new guy, but I didn’t try too hard to fit in. I had started wearing kurta-jeans combinations, not because anyone complimented them, but because they made me feel like I hadn’t completely let go of who I used to be. There was something honest about repeating clothes. Like telling the world, this is who I am, take it or leave it.

It had been months since she left. Or I left. Or maybe we both just stopped showing up. No big fight. Just a slow wearing away, like how tides erase names written in sand. People think that hurts less. It doesn’t. It just leaves more room for overthinking.

There were days I was functioning just fine. Emails, meetings, dinner, laundry. Then out of nowhere, I would hear something, someone saying “yaar” in a way she used to, or I’d see a couple walking too quietly, too comfortably, and it would pull me back. Not to her face or her voice. Just the feeling of being understood without earning it.

One night, I was walking back from work later than usual. The roads were almost empty, yellow streetlights melting into the footpath. I saw a dog sleeping near a chai tapri, and for a second, I paused. Not because of the dog, but because I remembered how she used to feed the strays near her flat every evening. I didn’t cry. I didn’t smile. I just stood still for longer than necessary. That’s what grief becomes, I think, stillness in motion.

Aditya, my flatmate, had started picking up on things. He once asked, "You still thinking about her?" I shook my head, not as a no, but as a delay. “I’m not stuck, yaar,” I said, “I just don’t know where I’m going either.” He nodded, turned back to his laptop. That was enough. Sometimes people don’t need advice. They just need someone to not interrupt.

There was something I couldn’t say to anyone: I had moved on, but I still carried her with me. Not in memories, but in behaviours. I still saved the last bite of food out of habit. Still checked weather updates before stepping out, like I was going to message someone to carry an umbrella. Still looked at earrings at roadside stalls without meaning to. Moving on wasn’t clean. It was cluttered. Some things stayed. And maybe they always would.

One weekend, I visited a bookstore. I wasn’t looking for anything. Just wanted to smell paper and see words that weren’t typed on Slack. I picked a book I wouldn’t usually read. On the last page, someone had scribbled: “To heal is not to forget. It is to hold pain gently, until it softens.” I stood there with the book open, heart heavy, wondering how someone else had written down what I hadn’t even realised I was feeling.

I was learning how to live without her in real time. And some days, I did okay. Other days, I would sit on the window ledge with my legs stretched out, listening to a playlist I swore I had deleted. And I’d think, jaane de naa yaar... kitne dil aur dil se laga ke baithega... waqt hi toh hai, ye saala bhi guzar jaayega. Not as a line to feel better. Just something to hold while the hours passed.

I wasn’t trying to win the move-on phase. I just wanted to last through it.