When We Were Almost 💔

Some nights return like bruises.

Not wounds—wounds heal.

Bruises fade slowly, silently, refusing to scream.

It was one of those nights when the wind tasted like memory and the silence outside my window reminded me of her—of Nila. The way she would laugh without warning. The way her eyes would hold me prisoner, yet never promise escape.

We were never lovers.

We were never just friends.

We were the ache between the two.

I met her in the in-between of things. Between my first heartbreak and my last belief in love. She walked into my life not like a miracle—but like a storm that knew exactly which walls to tear down.

She wore her hair in a messy pony that made her look like she didn’t care—but I knew she did. She cared too deeply. About sunsets, stray dogs, lost people. But never about herself.

Or me.

Not enough.

And yet—there were nights her fingers found mine under the table at cafés. Mornings she’d lie on my chest, claiming we were “just friends” while her breath mapped poems across my skin.

We’d share beds but never confessions.

We’d kiss like it meant nothing.

We’d part like it meant everything.

“Arjun,” she said once, lying next to me, barely a whisper above the hum of the ceiling fan. “If I ever marry a guy… it would be you.”

I didn’t breathe. Didn’t dare.

Because I knew.

That sentence didn’t end in a promise.

It ended in a maybe.

A maybe I would spend years chasing.

She wasn’t mine. She never claimed to be. But she’d show up in the middle of the night, eyes heavy, voice hoarse.

“Can I sleep here?”

No explanations. No labels.

She’d crawl into my bed like a habit. Sometimes horny, sometimes crying, sometimes just… quiet. And when she curled into my arms, I’d pretend we were something real. Something whole.

But morning always came. And with it, the goodbye. The coldness. The way she’d never kiss me in daylight.

There was love between us.

Unspoken, unnamed, unresolved.

And lust too—hidden in the way her fingers traced my jaw, the way her voice dipped when we fought, the way she’d stand too close but step away just before it meant something.

We were a thousand moments of almost.

A gallery of memories we never took a photo of.

People called us “best friends.”

They never saw the way she looked at me when I wasn’t looking.

They never heard the silence after our laughter ended.

They never knew I memorized the pattern of her breathing at 3 a.m.

They never saw the version of her she gave only to me—the one filled with fire, fear, and fragments of a love she didn’t know how to offer.

Maybe we were just broken people trying to feel whole beside each other.

Maybe we were a lesson.

Maybe we were a love story that never got written.

But this is me, writing it now.

Because someone needs to remember.

Someone needs to say—

We were almost everything.