Gravity

Silence was the first language I ever learned.

Not the peaceful kind—the kind that hums beneath warm lamps and half-open windows.

No.

The silence in my house carried weight, expectation, and consequence. My father treated quiet as discipline, as though noise itself were a flaw in character. His footsteps moved through the rooms like verdicts: heavy, indisputable, final. He never raised his voice because he never needed to. Disappointment doesn’t have to shout.

My mother, on the other hand, loved in frightened gestures. She hovered outside my door instead of entering. Set my food near me instead of calling me to eat. She was present in the way one holds hot tea—warm, trembling, afraid to spill.

I grew up sensing that affection must be earned, and approval was a myth.

Years later, I would wonder how many versions of myself I had killed to survive that house.

Only when you’re older do you understand what such an upbringing carves into you:

the instinct to observe instead of speak,

to endure instead of express,

to apologize for needing anything at all.

I became proficient in hiding.

And terrible at wanting.

So when someone finally treated me as though I mattered, it hit harder than it should have. Warmth, offered freely, can be venom to someone who has only ever known conditional tenderness.

That someone was Kritika.

We met during lab sessions—second bench from the front. She tied her hair as though she was always in a hurry, strands falling rebelliously across her forehead. She chewed gum like she was saving its sweetness for later. She wasn’t remarkable in a cinematic way. She was warm in an unguarded, everyday way.

She remembered my birthday.

My coffee preference.

The way I tapped my pen when anxious.

How I avoided eye contact when thoughts grew too loud.

Once, I knocked over a reagent bottle and froze, expecting reprimand, the kind that lived in my bones. She simply nudged my shoulder and said, “Relax, Rudr. You act like someone who gets punished for mistakes.”

I didn’t reply.

Her words had wandered into a part of me I didn’t want examined.

For months, she made me feel visible. Not special, not adored—simply seen.

And to someone built from cold rooms, that warmth became dangerous.

Addictive.

So when she began to pull away, I felt it with a sensitivity that bordered on pain.

At first it was subtle: shorter greetings, texts trimmed of their older affection. The warmth in her voice cooled into something polite and distant. She sat farther. Spoke less. Smiled at everyone except me.

It wasn’t cruelty.

It was subtraction.

And subtraction wounds quietly.

The day everything crystallized, winter sun flooded the courtyard too brightly. Students huddled in anxious knots, discussing exams as though panic could be disguised as conversation.

I didn’t see Kritika at first. I heard her laugh—a sound I had once believed belonged partly to me. I walked past without intending to eavesdrop, but truth has sharp edges.

“Why was he even trying?” her friend sneered. “He behaves like a cuck. It’s pathetic.”

Silence followed.

Not defensive silence.

Not shocked silence.

Just nothing.

Kritika didn’t speak.

Didn’t rebuke.

Didn’t even shift uncomfortably.

Her quiet hurt more than the insult.

The girl who once made me feel chosen didn’t think I was worth defending.

I kept walking, each step grounding a revelation I didn’t want:

I was the only one who believed I mattered to her.

And in that hollow moment, something inside me cooled—quietly, permanently.

I had poured warmth into the wrong hands.

And something in the universe, sensing the vacancy inside me, began pulling me toward another orbit.

Toward someone whose warmth was not gentle but consuming.

Not safe but catastrophic.

Anamika.

But she didn’t arrive yet.

This chapter ends with silence—hers, and the one I learned to wear again.