The first time Maya saw Arjun, he was sitting alone in the corner of the library, reading a book with such intensity that the world around him seemed to disappear. She was there researching for her thesis on semiotics, bored out of her mind and more interested in people-watching than parsing abstract signs and symbols. Arjun looked like a mystery waiting to be decoded—exactly the kind of distraction she didn’t know she needed.
He noticed her two days later, when she dropped her pencil near his desk. He picked it up and handed it to her without a word, but the smile he gave her lingered in her mind all evening.
Maya wasn’t shy, but Arjun was different. He wasn’t the type of guy you just walked up to. He carried an old-world calm, like a poem written in a forgotten language. Yet, her curiosity won, and one day she found herself asking, “What are you reading?”
He looked up slowly, like she had stirred him from a different world. “Roland Barthes,” he said.
Her heart sank. “Same. For my thesis. I hate him.”
He chuckled, then closed the book gently. “Barthes said, ‘The language of love is a discourse of absence.’ Maybe that’s why you hate it.”
She blinked, unsure how to respond.
“I’m Arjun,” he added, with the same serene smile.
That was the beginning.
They began to meet regularly at the library. Sometimes they studied, sometimes they just sat together in silence, reading their separate books but sharing the same space. Slowly, their words grew deeper, their laughter more frequent. There was something comforting in the pace of their connection—unrushed, sincere, and thoughtful.
Maya would talk about symbols, sarcasm, and how her favorite movie was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Arjun liked classic poetry, soft music, and once confessed that he had written letters to a woman he never sent. Maya teased him about being a romantic trapped in a realist’s shell.
He didn’t deny it.
One rainy evening, as they walked under the same umbrella, their hands touched, paused, then clasped, like it had always been meant to be that way.
By winter, they were inseparable. They read together, cooked together, even fought like two characters from a novel too complex to end simply. Maya was fire—impulsive and brilliant. Arjun was water—steady and profound. Together, they created something elemental.
Maya confessed that she had always been afraid of falling in love because it meant surrendering control. Arjun told her that love wasn’t control, it was rhythm—like a heartbeat, reliable yet mysterious.
She kissed him after that. It was their first kiss, but it felt like a memory.
But love, like language, is full of contradiction.
Arjun got an offer to study in France. A research fellowship. Paris. Semiotics and romance, he joked. He told her about it hesitantly, already knowing the weight it would carry.
Maya smiled tightly. “That’s amazing.”
“You’re not angry?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I’m proud.”
He took her hands. “We can make this work. I’ll write. I’ll call.”
She nodded, but her heart sank with a quiet certainty she didn’t voice.
The day he left, they stood at the airport, holding each other in a silence that spoke more than any poem. She kissed him hard, like she was etching a chapter into both their stories.
“Write me a love letter,” she whispered.
He smiled. “Every day.”
But days became weeks. Letters came, at first, then slowed. Calls were missed. Time zones tangled their voices, and slowly, the rhythm they once shared began to falter.
Maya waited, clung to memories, read the old texts, reread his letters. She told herself love could survive silence. But the absence became louder.
One evening, she received a short email: “I’m sorry. I didn’t know how to say this. I’ve changed. Maybe we both have.”
She didn’t cry. Not then. She walked to the library, sat in their corner, and read Barthes. The words now felt different, sharper.
“The heart is a text,” she murmured. “And some edits are irreversible.”
Years passed.
Maya became a professor. She taught literature and language, and sometimes when her students asked about love, she would smile wistfully and say, “Love is a sentence you never stop writing.”
She kept Arjun’s letters in a box, unopened, but never thrown away. He had once been a paragraph in her life, now a footnote—important, but no longer defining.
Until one day, during a conference in Paris, she wandered into a bookstore to escape the rain. And there he was.
Older. Softer. Still holding a book like it was sacred.
He saw her.
Their eyes met, and time stilled again.
“Maya,” he said, gently.
“Arjun.”
They didn’t rush into a hug or spill emotions. They simply stood there, acknowledging the weight of the years between them.
He smiled, awkward but genuine. “Still reading Barthes?”
She laughed. “Still hating him.”
He smiled. “Some things never change.”
She tilted her head. “Some things do.”
They had coffee. Talked about the in-betweens, the lives they had lived. He had married, divorced, and written a book on semiotics. She had published poetry and adopted a dog.
They didn’t say it out loud, but the love was still there—not burning, not aching—just quietly present, like an old scar that no longer hurt.
That night, she walked by the Seine alone, holding a copy of his book he had signed for her:
"For Maya—
The first language I ever loved."
She smiled, and for the first time in years, whispered, “Love, sed love.”
It meant nothing.
It meant everything.
Write a comment ...