Chapter 1: The Watch That Still Ticks
I was eleven when I first noticed her, though truth is, I had known her even before school. A junior by a year, but never small in my eyes. Back then, everything about her seemed brighter than the rest of the world—the way her smile arrived before her words, the way innocence clung to her voice. I didn't have a name for what I felt then. I only knew that every morning, every routine, every game in the playground felt incomplete until I had seen her. Childhood is strange like that—you don't call it love, but your chest already beats with its rhythm. Years passed, and the feeling grew like a secret vine wrapping itself around me. By the time I was in ninth, the secret had become too heavy to keep.
Journal - 27th September 2019
Today, I finally told her. I proposed. My voice shook, but the words were real. She didn't run, didn't laugh. She just stood there, quiet. For the first time in a long time, my heart feels like it's ticking louder than the watch on my wrist. We didn't call it love in the way older people do, but something between us began to form. A thread. A secret. Something only the two of us carried.
Days blurred into weeks, until one night I held her hand. Just that—nothing more. Yet it felt heavier than any promise, more fragile than glass.
Journal — 12th December 2019
I held her hand today. Just for a few seconds, but it felt like time stopped. Like the whole world shrank into that single moment of warmth. My chest hasn’t stopped echoing since. Two days later, I brought her a gift. Something small, but wrapped in all the meaning I couldn’t yet say aloud.
Journal — 16th December 2019
I gave her something today. She smiled when she opened it. For a second, I thought maybe—just maybe—the world had turned in my favor. But young love is fragile. Distance grew between us, replies grew shorter, and silence filled the spaces where warmth used to be. I asked her what had changed. She said, “I don’t have time.” And my pride—sharp, stubborn, still too young to bend—spoke for me: “Goodbye.”
That was the last word I gave her. Since that day, we have never met again. And yet she remains, stitched into the small things of my life. When I miss her, I wear the watch she once wrapped around my wrist, its ticking louder in memory than in time. When I miss her, I recall her smile the way one recalls a song hummed off-key, hidden in every wrong note. When I miss her, I feel her absence wrapped around me like a scarf, as if the fabric of those days still remembers her warmth better than I do.
When I miss her, I wonder if love is not measured by presence, but by the objects it leaves behind. Even as the watch ticked on my wrist, I realized the heart doesn’t rest for long. Years later, it would find another rhythm—in the glow of a screen, in words I could barely touch.
