I came to Delhi with a plan and a backpack and confidence (maybe). I left home with a rhythm I knew,  classes, routines, the small, reliable loop of days, and then there was Eve, who wrecked every plan by being exactly the sort of person plans were meant to break for.

We were best friends long before Delhi: the kind of people who could sit in silence and not feel uncomfortable, who argued over nothing and patched it up the same day. That history made the three months that followed feel less like an arrival and more like a slow opening. We didn’t invent each other; we noticed more of what was already there.

The days stacked up in little, ridiculous ways. We walked North Campus like it belonged to us ,misti doi on random evenings, chaap when our stubborn appetites demanded it. We rode autos and metros, sometimes sitting too close in the crush, sometimes sprawled across Central Park grass, laughing at the same dumb things. One night, maybe after too little sleep and too many stupid jokes, we took the 5:30AM metro that felt like our private world. Your PG uncle wouldn’t wake up to the water motor. I called you anyway, early and impatient, and you picked up like you’d always be there on the other side of the phone.

At the Yamuna ghat I revealed something ridiculous: paper boats I’d folded the night before. They were small, absurd things,newsprint prayer boats launched into a river that was more foam than clean water. A real motorboat cut through the channel and crushed most of them; one limp boat kept floating. You laughed and called me an idiot, and we sat on the cold steps watching that one stubborn piece of paper hold on. Everything felt fragile and glorious at once.

Chandni Chowk smelled like spice and sweat and stories. I remember sitting on the mandir steps, your back against the stone, my head somehow ending up in your lap. You were tired; you didn’t scold me for dozing. You threaded your fingers through my hair like it was the thing you did when the city was too loud. We took a million photos in and around Jama Masjid,  ridiculous, candid, the kind that you later scroll through and smile at because your face looks the same in all of them: alive.

There were moments that would look small in any scrapbook, but they summed bigger things. You would complain about the heat until we bought a 150-rupee pink fan on the steps outside the Jama Masjid, and you held it up like a trophy. We tried parathe wali gali and regretted it in a way that made us laugh even harder. Lal Quila made us feel small and sentimental and we gave up on entering, choosing instead a simpler kind of bravery: to keep each other’s company outside it. Janpath ended with tarp sheets in the rain, flapping like tired lungs, and you pointing at a pair of jhumkas as if the world could be fixed by small trinkets. I bought a shirt that I could hardly bargain for. 

There were tiny, human things that lodged into me. You never really held my hand,  you would hold my shirt at crossings instead, fingers curled in fabric, a closeness disguised as caution. You always posed the moment I pulled out the camera. Your hair smelled like whatever you had used that day and it felt like home. You laughed in a way that sounded ferocious and ridiculous and, somehow, always made the air better.

That birthday party was a mess of UNO and rooftop piggy-back rides. I princess-carried you for a second, and later I broke down on that very rooftop, one honest, ugly cry about loving you and being loved the wrong way. You hugged me like a friend would, steady and unaware. I cried because you were both the cause of the wound and the only balm I had.

I did stupid things for you.  A handcrafted sunflower, because you gave me one before; a fragile origami sakura folded badly but made with clumsy care; shells from Chandipur that still smell of the sea. I wrapped those things up because sincerity is sometimes the ugliest, bravest packaging. I left the small book of poems about you at your flat and a letter I’d spent nights deciding how to sign. You said you felt indebted, that I’d given too much and you didn’t have half to give back. You said it like a bruise.

I told you, more than once, how I felt. Maybe I did it badly, with jokes, with late-night texts, with a bold “I love you” that landed like a rock in a quiet pond. I’d prepped for a cinematic confession and somehow ended up whispering the truth like it was a bad habit I couldn’t quit. You video-called me when I woke up; we talked; you told me you loved the sunflower and the sakura. I opened the letter you gave me. I read it until my eyes fuzzed and my hands remembered the weight of paper like it was a heartbeat.

I knew, to my bones, what the answer was. I’d seen the way you looked at other people and the way your eyes slid past me when I was trying to catch them. I knew I was not the one you’d choose. That knowledge is a particular kind of slow-burning grief: it doesn’t surprise you so much as settle like dust in your chest.

When the day came near, I wrapped the poems, the starry night poster and a small card saying, “Sorry, I fell”. I left them in your flat with a note that said little, because everything I had to say had already been shouted in ink. 

You looked at me with a softness that was not mine to keep. You called me foolish, in a voice that wavered. I told you then,  I think I have loved you for years, slow and stubborn as a plant pushing through concrete. You listened, or maybe you only heard the syllables. Later you told me you felt indebted to my love. I told you again, quiet this time: you owe me nothing. I was foolish, yes. Foolish enough to keep giving, foolish enough to not hold back.

She left. The train pulled away with the crispness of finality in its clack. The city stayed, patient and indifferent; the streets kept their small music. I kept the souvenirs: the dried sunflower in a little pocket of my bag, the sound of her laugh stored like a song I could hum at odd hours.

I won’t pretend the ache is gone. Maybe someday it will change shape, into a memory that no longer stings so sharply, into a story I can tell with a laugh. Maybe I’ll go back to Delhi and wander the lanes where we walked, not because I want her back but because those places are part of how I learned to love. Maybe I’ll stop looking for a hand that never reached for mine.

For now, I am left with facts and tiny rebellions: the poems on her table, the folded sakura that probably bent at the edges, the shells that still smell like the beach. I gave everything I had. I loved in full. That’s not a failure. It’s a choice. It is mine.

If there’s a last thing to say, it’s this, plain and terrible and true: I loved her with everything I had. I am allowed to be foolish and whole in the same breath. And if love’s final exam is whether you dared to show up with broken paper boats and badly folded origami, then I will take that failing any day.

I’ll always and forever, love you, Eve.