Chapter 1 - Before I Knew What to Call It
I was very young when I first understood that love could be a kind of hunger.
I was still a teenager, but I did not think of love as something childish. I understood the feeling
of it before I understood the language people used for it. I knew that love could make a person
feel seen. I knew it could make ordinary moments feel important. I knew that, when you wanted
something deeply enough, the wanting itself could begin to feel like destiny.
Perhaps that is what happens when you have never truly had something. You learn to
recognize its value long before you learn how to protect yourself from wanting it too much.
Then I saw him.
I did not know his history. I did not know what kind of man he would become, what he wanted
from life, or whether he would ever think of me as anything more than my sister's younger
sibling. I knew none of the things that, in hindsight, I should have known.
I only knew what I felt when I looked at him.
It was not a simple crush. It felt like recognition. As if I had looked at a person and, without
knowing anything about him, somehow seen a shape that matched something I had been
searching for inside myself.
In 2010, after my tenth-board examinations, there was a small happiness in my family. I had
passed my exams with a first division, and everyone was proud. My sister took me to his house.
I remember him talking. I remember myself looking at him instead of listening to what he was
saying. The room was still there, the people were still there, life was still happening around
me—but for those few minutes, my attention had narrowed to one person.
I did not yet know the difference between wanting someone and being meant to have them.
I only knew that I wanted him.
That was the beginning.
