No Peeking

The game started innocently enough.

We were in bed on a Saturday morning, the kind where the city hadn't fully woken up yet. Maya had her head on my chest, my fingers tracing lazy circles on her shoulder. The light was soft, golden, filtered through the old curtains of my Chandigarh apartment. Outside, the mist clung to the streets. Inside, there was just us and the quiet comfort of skin against skin.

"Close your eyes," she whispered.

I smiled. "Why?"

"Just do it. Trust me."

There was something playful in her voice, that edge of mischief I'd fallen in love with three months ago when she spilt coffee on my shirt at a bookstore and laughed instead of apologising. I closed my eyes.

I heard her move. Felt the bed shift as she got up. The sound of her bare feet on the floor. The soft rustle of fabric. She was doing something. Planning something. My heart did that stupid thing it does when she's near. That quickening.

"Don't peek," she said from somewhere across the room.

"I won't."

"I mean it. Not even a tiny look."

"I promise."

I heard her rummaging through my closet. The clink of something metallic. Her soft laugh, the kind that sounds like she knows a secret. The bed dipped as she came back. I kept my eyes shut, playing along, feeling like a kid on his birthday.

"Okay," she said. Her voice was close now. Intimate. "Open."

I opened my eyes.

She was straddling me, and she was wearing my old denim jacket over nothing else. Her dark hair fell across one shoulder. Her eyes were bright, challenging, full of that look that made me forget how to form complete sentences. On her wrist, around the old leather bracelet I'd given her, was something new. Something that caught the light.

A key.

"What's this?" I asked, reaching for her wrist.

She pulled away, smiling. A real smile. Not the kind of people who give to strangers. The kind that belongs to one person, and she was giving it to me.

"My apartment key," she said. "I'm moving in. If you want me to."

The world stopped for a second. Actually stopped. Like all the noise outside the window had been muted.

"Maya..."

"No peeking at the future," she interrupted, placing a finger on my lips. "No, trying to see how this ends. We just do this. We just live it. Day by day. No planning. No fear. Just us."

I kissed her finger, then her mouth. She tasted like tea and that honey Chapstick she always wore. Like home, somehow, in a way I didn't understand yet but felt deeply.

For the next six months, it was perfect in that way where you don't realise it's perfect because you're too busy living it. She moved her things in gradually. Her books are mixed with mine on the shelf. Her smell in my pillows. Her laugh bounced off my walls at 2 AM when we'd stay up talking about things that didn't matter, the best way to make chai, whether cats could love, if we'd ever go to Jaipur.

She had one rule. One thing she'd ask me again and again: "No peeking."

"At what?" I'd ask.

"In the future. At where this go? Just stay with me. In this moment. Don't jump ahead."

I didn't understand it fully, but I respected it. I tried not to think about next year or the year after. I tried to stay present. With her. In the now.

But we're human. We plan. We dream. We imagine futures.

One night, I found myself scrolling through Ring websites. Nothing serious. Just looking. A white gold band with small diamonds. She'd said she liked understated things. I imagined proposing to her somewhere quiet. Maybe by the lake in Shimla. Maybe just here, in bed, like this.

The next morning, she was different.

Not cold. Never cold. But distant in a way that felt intentional. She made breakfast but didn't eat. She sat on the couch with her book, but didn't turn the pages. When I tried to touch her, she moved away gently. Not rejecting me. Just absent.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"Nothing," she said. But she wouldn't meet my eyes.

That night, she didn't come to bed. I found her on the balcony, wrapped in my sweater, staring out at the street below. The mist was thick. I could barely see the houses across the way.

"Talk to me," I said.

She was quiet for so long, I thought she wouldn't answer.

"Did you look?" she finally asked.

"Look at what?"

"In the future. Did you let yourself imagine it?"

My chest tightened. I knew I was about to lie, and I also knew she'd know I was lying.

"I... yes. I did. I'm sorry. I was just thinking about;"

"Don't," she said. Not angry. Sad. "Don't tell me. It's too late anyway."

"What do you mean it's too late? Maya, you're scaring me."

She turned to face me, and in the darkness, I couldn't read her expression. But I could feel something shifting. Like a door closing.

"When you looked ahead," she said quietly, "what did you see?"

"I saw us. Together. I saw a future with you. Maya, I love you. I want to marry you. I want;"

She held up her hand. "That's the problem."

"What's the problem? That I love you?"

"No. That you've already decided what this is. What will be. You've written the story, and now you're living it, waiting for me to show up in your version of events instead of being present in this one."

I didn't understand. I still don't, not completely. But I felt something break in me then.

"I'm present," I said. "I'm here. Every day, I'm here."

"Are you?" she asked. "Or are you already somewhere else? Already wondering if I'll say yes. Already planning the wedding. Already thinking about the apartment you'll buy, the kids you'll have, the life you've imagined."

"So what? That's normal. That's what people do when they love each other."

She looked away again, back at the mist.

"Not for me," she whispered. "I can't do this if you're already gone."

The next day, she left.

Not dramatically. No fights, no screaming, no tears, though I cried enough for both of us. She packed her things quietly. Took her books from the shelf. Her toiletries from the bathroom. Her clothes are from my closet. The key she'd given me, she asked for back.

I asked her if we could work through it. Get counselling. Try again.

"It's not about trying again," she said, standing by the door with one suitcase. "It's about understanding. And I don't think you can. I don't think anyone can. They always look ahead. They always imagine the ending. And the moment they do, they stop living the story. They start waiting for it to match their imagination. And when it doesn't, they're disappointed."

"So what? Do we just live moment to moment forever? Never think about the future?"

"I don't know," she said. And she looked so tired. So heartbroken. "I just know that the moment you looked ahead, you stopped being with me. You started being with the idea of me. And it's not the same thing."

She left on a Tuesday afternoon. The apartment felt too big without her. The shelves looked wrong with empty spaces where her books had been. I smelled her on my pillow for two weeks before I washed the sheets.

I tried to move on. Dated other people. They were fine. Nice. But there was always this distance I maintained. Some part of me was always looking ahead, already imagining how it would end, already thinking about escape routes.

It wasn't until a year later, lying in bed at 3 AM, unable to sleep, that I understood what she meant.

I understood that I had killed something beautiful the moment I tried to own it. The moment I tried to see the ending. Because the ending I imagined was never the real ending. Real life doesn't work like that. Real love doesn't work like that. The moment you peek, you break the magic. The moment you decide what the story is, the story stops being what it could have been and starts being only what you thought it would be.

And that's a much smaller thing.

I never saw Maya again. But sometimes, late at night, I think about that morning in bed. The way she smiled. The key on her wrist. The simple, desperate plea: "No peeking."

I understand now that it wasn't about not thinking about the future.

It was about not poisoning the present with it.

It was about staying in the moment so completely that the moment becomes infinite. It was about not writing the ending before you've lived the middle. It was about accepting that the best love stories are the ones you don't plan. The ones that surprise you. The ones that don't match your imagination because reality is always richer, stranger, more complicated than anything you could have invented.

The ones where you finally let someone be exactly who they are, moment by moment, without trying to fit them into the future you've already written.

I think about that game sometimes. "No peeking."

I think she was teaching me something I was too in love to understand.

And by the time I finally got it, she was gone.

Some stories don't have happy endings. Some love stories end because one person can stay in the present and the other can't. Some of the greatest loves of your life are the ones that break you open enough to understand something true, and then they leave you alone with that truth.

I peek now. All the time. At everything. It's a habit I can't break.

But I think if I ever loved someone again, I would try. I would try so hard to stay in that moment with them. To not write the ending. To not imagine the wedding or the apartment or the children or any of it.

I would try to understand what Maya was really asking.

Which was this: Don't love the idea of me. Love me. Just me. Just now. Just this.

And I would try. God, I would try.

But I'm not sure I could.

Some people are born with the gift of presence. Some people understand that the future is a thief that steals your today.

Maya was one of those people.

And I loved her exactly the wrong way. I loved her while looking past her. While already imagining the next chapter. While refusing to accept that some things are only beautiful because they don't last forever.

That their magic is in their impermanence.

That the moment you try to make them permanent, you've already lost them.

"No peeking," she said.

I peeked.

And she was right. By the time I looked back, she was gone.