The rain had started just before she reached the front gate – a soft, tentative drizzle.
Anika stood there a moment, her suitcase wheels catching in the wet mud, her scarf already damp. The house looked smaller than she remembered. The red brick walls were darker now, softened with moss and long-held silence. Something inside her loosened – not quite relief. Something like home.
“Don’t forget the storeroom,” her mother had said last week, voice thin over the phone. “Your old things are still hoarding dust.”
She hadn’t meant to open that box. Not on the first night.
But the rain kept her in, and the house smelled of damp wood and memories that arrived uninvited. The storeroom door creaked like it had waited for her.
Beneath yellowed sketchbooks and a rusted badminton racket was a shoebox tied with a frayed blue ribbon.
She opened it without thinking.
Inside: folded notes in her childlike scrawl, crayon-smudged pages. On top:
“To Sohail. If I ever forget you, this will remind me.”
Her heart paused in recognition.
The handwriting of a girl who once believed in a forever made of rain puddles, mango seasons, and lazy afternoons with comic books.
Her smile folded itself quietly in her chest, like a letter you don’t know how to end.
He had lived next door once.
And now, apparently, he lived there again. She had seen the signs on her way in – his mother’s wind chime still danced like it used to, and there were muddy footprints leading to the back door, shaped like someone who still walked barefoot in the rain.
She folded the letter back in and closed the box.
The next morning, the rain had cleared, but the smell of it lingered – petrichor soaked into the red bricks, into her bones. She stepped out onto the porch with a cup of tea and found him there.
Not dramatically. Just… there.
Sohail.
Leaning against the fence that separated their gardens, wearing the same crooked half-smile she remembered from their childhood – the kind that said I know you’re watching, and I don’t mind.
His hair was longer now, a little messy. He looked like a man who designed quiet buildings and forgot to eat on time.
“I thought that was your handwriting I saw on the fence,” he said, nodding at the faded chalk doodle she’d made yesterday evening while waiting for the kettle to boil.
“I was just testing the wall’s memory,” she replied.
“Well, it still remembers you,” he said. “Like … most things here.”
They didn’t speak of the letters, not at first.
Instead, they spoke in memories dressed as questions.
“Do you still hate boiled peas?”
“Do you still draw suns in the corner of every page?”
Little things. Things that didn’t admit they had once been everything.
Some days, they just sat silently across the garden – her on the porch swing, him sketching something in his notebook, the air between them filled with the smell of wet soil and the hum of a monsoon not quite done with them yet.
One evening, after a particularly heavy downpour, she left a letter on his doorstep. Just a folded piece of paper with slightly smudged ink.
“I read them all.
And I remembered how I used to wait for you to come back from school just to show you my crooked stars and spelling mistakes.
You never laughed.
You just said, ‘Make space for one more star.’
I think I’ve been making space ever since.”
She didn’t wait for a reply.
But the next day, she found a sketch under her window – charcoal on brown paper.
It was her.
Eight years old. Grinning, gap-toothed, holding up a drawing of a lopsided galaxy.
Next to her stood a boy with muddy feet and a notebook in hand, smiling like he’d just seen something sacred.
At the bottom, in tiny script, he’d written:
“Still making space.”
Her mother’s health slipped between good days and fragile ones. Some nights, Anika would sit by her bedside, reading aloud whatever book she had on hand. Other nights, she would write endlessly, in the same notebook she used when she was ten.
She’d always chased meaning like it was something she had to earn – in city offices, in ambitious degrees, in a love that had ended with a silence too sharp to grieve properly. She hadn’t painted in years. Hadn’t written anything that wasn’t required.
She’d been surviving. That was all.
Sohail never crossed the line between their houses.
Not even when he brought her guavas from the market or left her ginger-laced sweets when she had a cough.
He always stayed on his side.
But the space between them felt like a shared room.
One afternoon, after her mother had fallen asleep, she found herself back in the storeroom.
One last letter had slipped between the floorboards.
“If I forget you…
remind me of the smell of the first rain.
Of how you stood in it barefoot and told me not to be afraid of getting wet.
You said: ‘If something is worth it, let it ruin your shoes.’”
She read it twice.
Then, barefoot, she stepped out into the rain.
He was already outside, notebook in hand, rain tracing lazy rivers down his sleeves.
She didn’t say anything.
Just stood next to him, feet in puddles, the sky rinsing everything clean.
Sohail turned slightly and looked at her.
“Still afraid of getting wet?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Still drawing stars?” she asked.
He pointed at her heart. “You’ve got the last one.”
They didn’t kiss.
They didn’t promise anything.
But when he reached over and gently tucked her hair behind her ear – rain dripping from his fingers – something surged softly in her heart. Something warm, familiar, not quite forgotten. Maybe just sleeping for a long, long time.
The next few days passed like a held breath.
The monsoon had settled over the town like a houseguest with no plans to leave. Rain fell at odd hours, and with each downpour, something in Anika softened. Became less careful.
Her mother was drifting more. Her sentences became shorter, scattered, like leaves floating down a stream. Some days she didn’t remember what month it was. Other days she mistook Anika for someone else entirely.
But there were still flashes.
“You were always running after him,” she said once, out of nowhere. “That boy with the scraped knees. Sohail. The one who built you that silly kite with newspaper and glue.”
Anika had smiled.
“That wasn’t silly. It flew for exactly seventeen seconds.”
“Seventeen seconds of magic for you,” her mother smiled weakly, before her eyes glazed again.
That night, Anika lay on the living room floor, a blanket pulled around her like armor, the ceiling fan spinning stories overhead.
She tried to remember Sohail’s laugh. The soft exhale he made when he read something beautiful or watched her climb trees barefoot and ridiculous.
She hadn’t heard that laugh yet. Not since she came back.
Had he buried it somewhere, the way she had buried her letters, her poems, her reckless heart?
She decided, one evening, to cook. Khichdi, the way her mother made it. With too much ghee and exactly three cloves. The kind Sohail used to steal spoonfuls of from her lunchbox.
She made a little extra. Then stood in her kitchen, debating five minutes before placing the bowl gently on the wall.
She didn’t knock. Didn’t text.
But the next morning, the bowl was gone.
And in its place: a paper crane.
A strange ache bloomed in her chest.
“I remembered. It still tastes like Thursday afternoons and stolen joy.”
That was all the note inside said. But it was enough to carry her through the entire day.
When he asked her, one twilight-soaked evening, if she wanted to take a walk, she didn’t overthink it.
They walked along the narrow road between their two homes, where the bricks met grass and the sky turned honey.
“I kept wondering,” he said, after a long stretch of quiet, “if it would feel the same when you came back.”
“And?” she asked.
“It doesn’t,” he said. “It feels different.”
She braced herself.
“Better,” he added.
They ended up at the old gulmohar tree, now heavier, lower, older – like everything else.
Someone had hung glass bottles from its branches. Wind chimes. Painted stones.
A small bench stood beneath it, peeling paint, crooked legs, but it held their weight.
“I used to think,” he said, “that people change too much to come back. That coming back is a kind of myth we feed ourselves.”
“And now?”
“Now I think we don’t come back as the same person. But maybe we come back to the same feeling.”
Anika didn’t reply. She just reached out and rested her palm beside his on the bench.
They didn’t touch.
But they weren’t apart either.
One morning, she found her mother awake before her – sitting by the window, eyes watery but clear.
“I dreamt of your father,” she said. “He told me it’s almost time.”
Anika sat down beside her, heart folding in.
Her mother looked at her, held her face gently, and said, “Don’t be afraid to to love something again, Anika.”
The day her mother passed, the sky held its breath. Neighbors came and went. Food appeared and disappeared. Words like “peacefully” and “gracefully” were passed around like sugar cubes.
When everyone left, Sohail sat quietly beside her, their backs against the red brick wall, and passed her a small, folded note.
It was one of her own.
“To Future Me,” it read.
“In case you forget – crying doesn’t mean you’re breaking. It means you’re still here.”
The rains returned two days later.
Soft. Relentless. Familiar.
Anika stood barefoot in the garden, letting the sky undo her for a while.
Sohail joined her without a word, umbrella in one hand, thermos in the other.
They stood there, sipping hot chai, the water curling around their toes.
“Did you ever get married?” she asked, voice low.
“No,” he said. “Almost. Once. But I think I was looking for someone who reminded me of… you.”
Her quiet laugh caught in the back of her throat somehow.
“I used to think we were meant to grow old next to each other.”
He smiled. “Maybe we were just meant to grow. Then meet again. Older.”
She left a few weeks later. There were bills to sort. A flat to return to. A job that paid more in numbers than meaning.
Before she left, she gave him the shoebox with the letters.
“All yours,” she said.
“What if I want to reply now?” he asked.
She shrugged. “There’s always a wall between us for that.”
Six weeks passed. And then, a letter, slipped under the door.
No envelope. Just paper and a familiar scrawl.
“Dear Anika,
I don’t have all the words yet. But I’ve been drawing the house I want to build.
It has a porch.
Red bricks.
And a swing for rainy days.
I don’t know where it’ll stand yet.
But I think I’ve finally made that space for you.
Just in case.”
She folded the letter carefully and pressed it to her chest.
Outside, it rained.
That part of herself she had buried so gently, so deeply – it was still alive, after all. Soft. Hopeful. Thawed from a cold place she hadn’t realized had frozen.
Not just longing.
But life.
Words by Manoj Vijayan & Amrin Sathar | Image via pexels.com
