The Stranger I Knew

It was a city of echoes—old walls, older stories, and people too busy to listen. But Vihaan listened. To rustling leaves, to forgotten benches, to songs the wind carried. He was a writer, not by profession but by heart. Every evening, he wandered to the riverbank, hoping the silence would whisper him a story.

That’s when he saw her.

She sat on a moss-covered bench, sketching something in a little brown diary. Her hair was tied loose, like her thoughts, and a red thread bracelet hung from her wrist. A stranger, but familiar. The kind of familiar you don’t understand—you just feel.

He passed her without a word that day. But returned the next. And the next.

Until one day, she looked up and said, 

“You come here often, don’t you?”

“I do,” he replied. “And you?”

“Only when I’m lost,” she smiled. “But maybe I’ve been found now.”

That was the beginning.

They met every evening, sharing pieces of their past like puzzle fragments. She told him about her love for sketching people she never knew. He spoke of dreams that kept him awake more than his reality ever could. They never exchanged last names. Never asked too much. Just enough to fall—not suddenly, but like a feather drifts before it lands.

Vihaan had never believed in destiny. Until her.

Then one day, she didn’t show up.

He waited. One day. Two. A week.

Nothing.

He asked around. No one had seen a girl like her. Not the vendors. Not the tea stall man who always smiled at her. No sketches left behind. No thread bracelet. Just silence.

Months passed. He wrote about her—page after page. The stranger who painted his soul.

One day, while traveling to a nearby town for a literary event, Vihaan visited an old bookshop. The owner, an old man with trembling fingers, handed him a book from a shelf in the back.

“You might like this one,” he said. “It was written by my daughter. She passed a year ago. She used to sit by the river in your city, drawing faces and writing stories about strangers.”

Vihaan opened the book. His own name stared back at him in the first line of a story titled:

“The Boy Who Listened to the Wind.”

His heart froze.

There, on the dedication page, it read:

"To the one I met only in passing, but loved like I’d known forever."

He realized then—he had been her muse, her story. And she… she had always been more than just a stranger.