You Weren't Supposed to Meet Them This Early

 

There's a specific kind of unfairness nobody warns you about... meeting the right person at the wrong time. Meeting them at 19, at 21, still half-formed, still broke, still becoming... and losing them before you ever got the chance to be the version of yourself they deserved. When you lose the love of your life at 40 you lose a person. When you lose them at 20 you lose a person

and a future... the apartment you'd already furnished in your head, the airport pickups, the growing old, all of it collapsing at once while everyone around you says the same useless things. You're young. There are other people. You'll forget. You won't. Because you're not mourning a person. You're mourning a whole life that never got permission to exist... and you're doing it quietly, at dinner tables, in lectures, on auto rides at night with Dooriyan on loop like Mohit Chauhan personally read your chats before recording it. That song wasn't sad before them. Nothing was this sad before them. Now the whole world is just a collection of things that remind you.

 

 

 

And here's the part nobody admits... you never actually leave. You just relocate. From their life to their activity tab. Checking every repost like it's a message in a bottle. Reading their likes like tea leaves... did they mean something by that reel about missing someone, or is the algorithm just cruel to everyone equally. A new follow appears on their list and your stomach drops before your brain even processes the name... you've opened that stranger's profile, done the full background check, closed it, hated yourself, opened it again. You know their posting patterns better than your own syllabus. Online at 1:47am. Story at 9am. Active on the app but not texting you... which is somehow worse than silence, because silence you could romanticise. This is just proof. Proof that they're fine. Proof that the world kept spinning for them while yours is still stuck on the day it ended. You've drafted the reply seventeen times. Deleted it seventeen times. Your notes app has aged you. There's a paragraph in there so honest you'll never send it and so heavy you'll never delete it... so it just sits there, a monument to everything you didn't say when saying it still mattered.

 

 

Our parents lost people and the person was gone. A few photographs, a landline that stopped ringing, an absence that was at least clean. We don't get clean absences. We get the archive. The chat scrollable back to the first "hey." The shared playlist still poisoning your Wrapped like a ghost with admin access. The memories tab resurfacing them on a random Tuesday at 11pm

like your own phone has a vendetta against your healing. Digital grief is grief without a burial... the person leaves your life but never leaves your phone, so you keep visiting the grave every three hours and calling it "just checking my feed." And here's the ugliest truth, the one you won't say out loud even to yourself... you're not healing. You're performing. Every story you post has an audience of one. Every song you share is a flare shot into the dark, hoping that one specific person sees it and decodes it... that the repost was for them, that the 2am online status was an open door, that you're still here, still theirs, still waiting in a queue they closed months ago. You dress well now hoping they'll see it secondhand through a mutual's story. You got your life together out of spite and heartbreak in equal measure... and you'd trade all of it, the glow-up, the growth, the "you seem happier," for one text that says I saw everything. I noticed. I never stopped. It's not coming. You know it's not coming. But you'll check anyway... tonight, tomorrow, on their birthday, on yours.

 

 

 

Crumbs. That's what love became.

 

 

-Devangshu Purohit