Insoluble

The PIN is 1104. I haven't changed it. It works, it's easy to remember, and every time my thumb finds it without thinking I let it. Eleven, zero, four. April eleventh. Half a second. Costs nothing.

That's what I tell myself.

She left on a Thursday. No text, no note, no conversation that started with "we need to talk." Just gone. Suitcase, some books, the charger she always borrowed. She left the blue dupatta. I don't know if she forgot it or left it on purpose and I've stopped trying to figure out which one would hurt less. It's on my bed now. It moved there gradually. I didn't move it. Or maybe I did and don't remember. These days some things just end up where they end up.

For the first month I was functional. Impressively functional. Went to work, replied to emails, laughed at things when laughing was socially required. The grief was clean, present, sharp, manageable. Like a cut you can see. You know where it is. You can keep it from getting infected. Then it stopped being clean.

I started waking up early. Not because of an alarm, because for eight months the first thing I did every morning was text her good morning and my body hadn't gotten the memo that there was no longer anywhere to send it. So I'd wake up at seven, reach for my phone, unlock it, 1104, and then just sit there. Thumb hovering. Khud ko busy rakhta tha. Bahut busy. Itna busy ki busy rehna hi ek kaam ban gaya.

Sahil came over sometime in the second month. We watched something, ordered food, talked about nothing the way you do when the important things are too heavy to carry into someone else's living room. He was leaving when he stopped at the door and looked at the dupatta on the couch. He didn't say anything. I didn't say anything. He texted later, yaar theek hai na tu, and I said yes and sent a meme after to make it feel casual and he reacted with a thumbs up. We haven't really talked since. Not because anything happened. Just the distance that grows when someone sees something you're not ready to explain.

The screensaver was white clouds. Aesthetic, meaningless, set on a boring afternoon months before any of this. Then one evening I looked up from my laptop and for a second, less than a second, she was there. Not in the clouds. Just in the room. The way a person is in a room before you consciously register them. I blinked. Just the screen. I didn't change the screensaver.

Here's the thing about losing it. You don't lose it all at once. That's a dramatic version that doesn't happen to most people. What actually happens is quieter and more embarrassing. You just start making small allowances. You hear her voice in the kitchen and instead of reminding yourself it isn't real you just don't remind yourself. You set two cups out of habit and don't put one back. You have a whole conversation in your head and when it's over you feel better and you think, what's the harm, nobody got hurt, I feel better. Kya hi hoga. That's the phrase. The allowance you make every single time. Kya hi hoga.

She showed up properly on a Tuesday. I was making chai. She was sitting on the counter the way she always did, legs dangling, getting in the way, completely unbothered. I didn't react. I just made two cups. "Tu theek hai?" she asked. "Haan." "Khaana khaaya?" "Haan." She gave me that look, the unconvinced one. I know this look is mine, assembled from memory, running on the fuel of everything I still haven't let go of. I know she isn't here. She left. Thursday. Suitcase. Books. Charger. I handed her the chai anyway.

She never says anything I don't already know. She doesn't offer closure or explain why she left or tell me things are going to be okay. She just exists in my apartment, in my periphery, in the spaces that got too quiet after she filled them for so long. Sometimes I'll be reading and she's just there. Not talking. Just present the way she was present when we'd spend whole Sundays without really speaking, comfortable silence, two people in the same orbit. I haven't told anyone. Not Sahil, not my mother who calls every Sunday, not the colleague who once asked if I was alright and I said yes so quickly it probably answered the opposite question. What would I even say. Dekh yaar, vo hai nahi actually. But also vo hai.

I realized late. There was a night three maybe four months in when I was sitting on the floor for no reason and she was across from me and we were just quiet and I thought, this is fine, this is enough. And then something shifted, some still-functioning part, and I saw it clearly. What this was. What I'd been doing. How far I'd walked in without noticing the door had closed behind me. "Main jaanta hun," I said out loud. She looked at me. "Bas jaanta hun. Itna hi." She nodded like she understood. Of course she understood. She's made of me.

Knowing didn't fix anything. That's the part no one tells you. Knowing just means you watch yourself. You become the audience of your own unraveling, aware, observant, completely unable to stop because stopping would mean the apartment goes quiet again and the mornings go blank again and the chai goes back to one cup. Abhi nahi. Itna nahi kar sakta abhi.

The dupatta still smells like her. I don't smell it on purpose, I want to be clear about that. It's just there and sometimes the smell is just there and she's usually nearby when that happens. Sitting by the window. Or the foot of the bed. Once on the floor next to me when I couldn't sleep. "Tu sone ki koshish kar," she said that night. "Nahi ho raha." "Main hun na." I know what she is. I know she's the part of me that couldn't let go assembled into something that breathes and sits and asks if I've eaten. I know all of this. I have known for a while. And she was there. And I slept.

Some nights I think about what it would take. Put the dupatta away. Change the PIN. Different screensaver. Text Sahil back properly. Go back to one cup. It's not that I can't. It's that the apartment would be exactly what it was the Thursday she left, and I survived that once, barely, by filling it with her anyway. Toh ab kya farak padta hai.

She's at the window right now. Evening light. She liked this time of day. The correction catches every time, liked, past tense, she liked. I don't correct it anymore. Some things dissolve and you can't separate them back out. That's not poetry, that's just chemistry. She's in the PIN, the screensaver, the dupatta, the second cup, the morning. I know she's not here. I know she's right there. Both of those things are true and I have stopped asking which one matters more. The chai is ready. Two cups, no sugar in hers. I carry them both to the window where the evening light is doing that thing she always said she loved. Aaja, I say. She's already there.