The night of the breakup didn’t end for Siddharth—it simply bled into the next morning.
When he stepped into his apartment, the world felt unfamiliar. His keys dropped with a clatter that sounded too sharp in the silence. And for the first time in years, he cried.
Not the cinematic kind of tears, but the quiet, aching sort—the ones that feel like they’ve been building for decades, waiting for just the right heartbreak to pour through.
That night, he didn’t sleep.
He stared at the ceiling, replaying every good moment like a slideshow on loop. Her laugh echoing off the platform walls.
The way her fingers fidgeted with her glasses when nerves crept in.
And the softness — barely a breath — in her voice when she said his name.
He remembered it all. Like a song only he knew by heart.
By morning, his eyes burned. But he still opened Instagram.
Typed her name.
Her smile was still there, suspended in pixels—untouched, unchanged, unaware of the wreckage on his side of the screen.
He scrolled too long. Until, one evening, he found himself spiraling. Every story she posted felt like a thread pulling him apart.
So he blocked her.
Not in bitterness.
But because if he didn’t, he’d keep waiting—for a message, for a hint, for something that would never come.
He wanted her. But he needed himself more.
The first week was a blur of broken sleep and breathless hours. He went to work but barely heard anything. At night, the walls of his room felt like they were closing in. He’d text her, type out paragraphs and delete them. He’d imagine what it would’ve been like if she had just said, “Stay.”
She hadn’t.
One day, on the metro ride home, his friends noticed.
“You look like hell,” Rakesh said gently.
Siddharth didn’t pretend.
“I told her how I felt. I gave her everything. And I still lost her.”
They didn’t try to fix it. Just listened. Offered quiet, brotherly comforts. A pat on the shoulder. A beer. Silence.
But no one could take away what hurt.
Eventually, the city itself became unbearable.
Every café had a memory. Every metro ride felt haunted. Every dog on the street reminded him of how she used to pause to pet them. It was too much.
So he asked for a transfer.
Hyderabad.
A new city. A new life.
He broke the news to his parents the same evening he submitted the transfer request.
His mother went quiet on the call.
“A sudden transfer?” she asked. “Why now, kanna?”
He couldn’t tell her everything. Not yet.
“I just need a change, Amma.”
There was a pause. She didn’t press. But she knew.
She always did.
When he arrived in Hyderabad on a drizzly July evening, the sky hung low with clouds, and the air smelled of damp stone and cardamom. The city stretched before him in contrasts—glass buildings in HITEC City gleaming beside timeworn mosques and street vendors flipping dosas on sizzling tavas.
The wide roads of Gachibowli, the tech parks, the dense conversations in a half-mix of Hindi and Telugu—it all felt foreign. But the loneliness was familiar.
He wandered through Jubilee Hills looking for a flat, passed biryani joints with long queues, auto drivers shouting rates, fruit carts loaded with mangoes, papayas, and guavas arranged like offerings to the heat. He eventually found a 1BHK tucked behind a quiet lane near Film Nagar, where kids played cricket with plastic bats and aunties called out to each other across balconies. His room was sparse—just a mattress, a water bottle, a fan that hummed through the night.
But it was away from memory. That was enough.
The first week, his mother called every evening.
“How’s the food? You’re eating, right? You’re not skipping breakfast like in college?”
She tried not to fuss. Failed.
Her voice was the thread that kept him tethered.
Sometimes, she told him what she was cooking back home—“Today I made keerai kootu, you remember? You liked it with ghee rice.” She’d ask if he needed more pickles or if she should send the masala podis.
And she did.
A week later, a small brown carton arrived, taped thoroughly, with his mother’s handwriting in permanent marker. Inside: two jars of thokku, a packet of rasam powder, a stack of neatly folded T-shirts she said looked “too crumpled in your video call,” and a handwritten note with a pressed tulsi leaf taped to the corner.
His father didn’t call. But he did send money into Siddharth’s account. Quietly. Without a message. As if to say, I may not speak much, but I see you.
And once, unexpectedly, a courier with a winter blanket and a pair of socks—“Hyderabad can get chilly,” Amma had whispered conspiratorially, “Your Appa noticed that you didn’t pack your sweater.”
Those touches of home softened the silence.
Work was monotonous but manageable. He spoke only to two colleagues—Aarav and Renu. They didn’t ask much. He appreciated that. They’d grab chai together sometimes, crack tired jokes in the lift, but he never opened up. Not the way he once did.
He wasn't the same Siddharth anymore.
That boy—who once stayed up to plan sudden dates, who typed long texts about poetry, who believed showing up was enough—was gone.
Now, he woke up, went to work, came home. Listened to music. Sometimes took long walks in KBR Park, watching couples laugh on benches, feeling like an outsider in his own skin.
Some nights, her face still visited.
The way she used to lean against the metro wall, brushing her hair back. The voice note where she hummed that Tamil song he liked. The silence on the day he left.
Did I overreact?
Did she love me, just silently?
Did I mistake her stillness for absence?
But each time the spiral began, he returned to the same bitter clarity.
She didn’t ask him to stay.
She let him walk away.
And that, more than anything, was his answer.
It hurt. God, it hurt.
But maybe healing wasn’t about forgetting.
Maybe it was about surviving long enough for the pain to dull, for the memories to soften at the edges, for the voice in his head to say—
"You chose yourself. That is enough."
Some nights, when he sat by the window with a cup of Amma’s homemade filter coffee, the city outside buzzing in a language not his own, he felt the ache pull at him like an old scar.
But he also felt the strength of quiet love—his mother’s gentle checking in, his father’s silent care, the life that hadn't abandoned him even if she did.
And in those moments, beneath the orange glow of Hyderabad streetlamps, Siddharth held onto something that wasn’t grief.
It was grace.
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