He wasn’t the kind of man who fell for a face.
Arav was the type who fell for silences — the kind people carry inside them, hidden behind practiced smiles. He observed more than he spoke, cherished things most overlooked — the way rainwater settled on windows, the way books exhaled memory when opened, the way someone paused before saying something that mattered.
And then came Meher.
She arrived into his life like a misplaced line in a poem — unfamiliar, unpredictable, unforgettable. She didn’t walk in; she collided with his world. Loud where he was quiet, restless where he was composed. But somewhere beneath her painted laughter and wine-colored lips, there was a grief — unspoken, unhealed, unclaimed.
They met by chance, or perhaps by design — fate never leaves signatures.
A coffee spilled, a shared table, a disagreement over a line in Sylvia Plath.
And then, without planning, without permission, their conversations stretched — from casual to confessional, from curiosity to comfort.
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Weeks passed. Their lives grew into each other like ivy on old walls — effortlessly, quietly.
But love, real love, doesn’t bloom only in light.
One night, with her eyes a shade darker than usual, Meher whispered a truth she'd rehearsed a hundred times but never dared to say out loud.
“I’ve been with someone before... many times. It wasn't simple. I broke after that. I stopped believing in love, in myself.”
There was no drama in her voice, only a careful tremor, like a wound learning how to breathe in open air.
She looked at him not for forgiveness, but for the certainty of rejection.
She had seen decency disappear when her truth was spoken.
But Arav? He didn’t blink.
He didn’t ask why. He didn’t turn away.
He reached for her hand — not to hold it, but to anchor her.
“Your past isn’t a debt. It’s a journey. And I don’t need to know where you’ve been to walk with you from here.”
That night, something sacred happened. Not sex. Not romance. But acceptance — the rare kind that doesn’t try to cleanse or claim, but simply stays.
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They built a relationship not on fantasies, but on small, deliberate acts of choosing one another.
She still had nights when her demons came back.
He learned to recognize the silence in her texts.
She sometimes recoiled from intimacy.
He held space without questions.
He didn’t fall in love with a perfect woman.
He fell in love with a real one — one who had suffered, scarred, survived, and still somehow carried the warmth of a monsoon afternoon.
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Then, suddenly — she left.
No confrontation. No betrayal in the conventional sense. Just a single message:
“Please don’t hate me. I never knew how to be loved this gently, and I’m afraid I’ll ruin it.”
And she was gone. Like the last page of a book torn out.
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Friends said he was a fool. That he was "too good," that she had "used him," that love shouldn’t be blind.
But Arav only smiled — that quiet, devastating smile of someone who loved without regret.
“You don’t regret giving someone light. Even if they run from it.”
He still kept her favorite poetry book in his shelf — untouched, but not unloved.
He never hated her. He couldn’t.
Because he had loved her with the kind of love that doesn’t keep score. That doesn’t demand to be remembered. That doesn’t die just because it wasn’t returned.
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In the quiet truth of it all..
She had given him a wound, yes — but he had given her something rarer: a love so gentle, so forgiving, so real that even her leaving couldn’t erase it.
And in that, he wasn’t the man she left behind. He was the man who loved anyway.
© Abhishek Pathak
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