The Sorrow Underneath

I always thought the past was a place you could leave behind.

A wound that eventually scar over. A song that fades the moment you stop humming it. I believed, with the particular stubbornness of someone who had survived something, that people could be outgrown the way you outgrow a version of yourself you’re quietly ashamed of ever being.

I was wrong.

Because tonight, the past didn’t stay buried.

It typed my name.

“Naman, please come to the reunion. We miss you. I miss you.”

It was the summer of 2026, our school just turned 25 and they were organising a reunion for every batch. I remember getting an email about it and ignored it and forgotten about it until the message popped up on my screen.

Ishaan.

Of course it was him.

If anyone could send a message so casual as a shrug, warm as a lit matchstick, completely unbothered by the four years of silence between us, it was Ishaan. No preamble. No acknowledgment of the gap. Just please come, like the only thing standing between me and that room was a scheduling conflict.

I stared at the screen until my vision blurred.

Minutes became an hour. Then two. The phone dimmed. I tapped it awake. It dimmed again. I couldn’t look away, and I couldn’t reply, and somewhere in that in-between I started to understand the message wasn’t really from Ishaan.

It was from everything I had run from. Everything I was terrified of returning to.

Four years.

Four years since I last heard any of their voices. Since I walked out of that chapter of my life and quietly, methodically, bricked the door shut behind me. I had told myself it was necessary. Told myself it was clean. It was the kind of ending that hurt less than the alternative.

But the truth, the honest unbearable truth, was way simpler.

She was the reason I stayed away.

Or maybe she was just the most convenient reason I had.

I pressed the back of my head against the wall and stared at the ceiling. The room was dark except for the glow of the phone in my hand. Pale and cold, like moonlight through water. And her face came to me the way it always did.

Uninvited. Effortless. Like she’d never actually left.

I remembered the way she laughed. Fully, recklessly, like joy was something she refused to ration. The way her eyes could find something worth lighting up over in the most ordinary moment: a stray dog sleeping in sunlight, the smell of petrichor, a song she’d heard a hundred times. The way she used to look at me making me feel like I was enough. Like I was, somehow, exactly what she needed.

And then I remembered the last time she looked at me.

Different.

I felt like I was a problem she had tried to love into solution. It was like she had finally done the math and found it didn’t add up. It was like walking away from me was something she had been rehearsing for a while before she finally did it.

Or maybe I left first.

The details had blurred over time, the way all painful things do. The edges soften but the ache stays precise.

I exhaled. Slow, deliberate and dragged a hand down my face.

I hadn’t forgiven her. That much was certain.

But what kept me awake longer, what settled heavier in my chest than any anger ever had, was the fact that I wasn’t sure I had forgiven myself either. For staying too long. For loving her too loudly. For letting it become the kind of thing that leaves marks.

I had not been in a relationship post that. I felt like a part of me still loves that person and it wouldn't be fair to date someone with this hanging at the back of my head.

The reunion was tomorrow.

I could ignore it. Delete the message, block Ishaan’s number, and return to the quiet, organized life I had constructed for myself. A life with no ghosts in it. Safe. Predictable. A little hollow, maybe, but mine.

But the thought crept in before I could stop it.

What if I went? What if I saw her?

And then the one that truly unsettled me. What if it didn’t hurt anymore?

I didn’t know which was worse. The pain of seeing her, or the terrifying possibility of feeling nothing at all.

Before I could overthink myself into paralysis, I typed the words and hit send.

“Fine. I’ll be there.”

The reply came before I’d even set the phone down.

“Knew I could count on you. Details tomorrow.”

I laughed. Dropped the phone onto the mattress beside me and sat with the silence.

Why didn’t he hate me?

That was the question that had no good answer. I disappeared without warning. No explanation, no farewell, just a slow withdrawal, messages left unanswered, calls declined until they stopped coming. I had excised myself from their lives the way you remove a splinter, quick and without ceremony.

And yet Ishaan texted me like I had simply been away on a long trip.

The guilt arrived in waves. Followed by doubt. Followed by something else, something quieter and more dangerous.

Want. I wanted to see them.

Ishaan, who made every room warmer just by walking into it.

Meera, who gave and gave until there was nothing left to give.

Raghav, who burned with a kind of intensity that was beautiful and exhausting in equal measure.

Tanvi, always in motion, always chasing the next horizon.

Arjun, with his plans and his certainty, his need to have everything mapped.

And then there was Pragya.

Pragya, whose name I had not said aloud in four years. Whose memory lived in the strange in-between space of almost and not quite and what if.

The one person I could not think about without feeling something shift in my chest.

I barely slept.By the time evening arrived the next day, I felt like I’d already lived through something.

Still, I sat in the car. Engine running. Hands wrapped around the steering wheel a little too tightly, knuckles pale. I stared through the windshield at nothing in particular for a long moment before I finally let myself drive.

The roads were exactly as I remembered them. Same turns, same tired signals blinking amber in the dusk, same little shops with their hand-painted signs. Familiar in the way only childhood places are.

But I was different. I had to keep reminding myself of that.

Music drifted from the speakers, soft and shapeless. I wasn’t listening to it, not really. Just letting it fill the silence so I didn’t have to.

Pragya used to sing along to whatever was playing. Off-key, always. Completely, cheerfully unaware of it. She used to sing like she was alone in the world and that was its own kind of joy.

I reached over and turned the volume down to nothing.

The venue appeared before I was ready for it. My chest tightened carrying the specific weight of a moment you have been carrying for four years without knowing it. The tip of my fingers felt

I parked farther away than necessary.

Stepped out into the cool evening air and stood there for a moment, letting it settle over me, breathing slowly.

Then I heard him.

“Look who finally made it.”

Ishaan was leaning against the wall near the entrance, one shoulder against the stone, phone in hand, grinning like he hadn’t moved an inch in four years.

I walked toward him. He met me halfway, pulled me into a hug that felt like the most uncomplicated thing in the world.

“You look the same,” he said, stepping back to look at me. “Little more serious, maybe. Definitely less fun.”

“Good to know nothing’s changed,” I said.

He laughed, and for exactly one second, the years collapsed.

“How’s everyone?” I asked, keeping my voice easy.

He studied me the way he always had.

“They’re good,” he said. Then, after a beat: “She’s fine too. Before you ask.”

“I wasn’t going to ask.”

“Right.” The corner of his mouth curved. “Sure.”

We turned toward the entrance. And that’s when it hit me - the thought I had been carefully not thinking since the night before.

What if she moved on?

Four years. It wasn’t a season. It was enough time to become someone new. Enough time to fall in love with someone who deserved it, someone who stayed, someone whose name she didn’t have to remember to stop saying.

The idea lodged itself somewhere beneath my ribs.

I had no right to it. I knew that. I had given up every right the night I stopped answering.

But it stayed anyway.

Ishaan held the door open and looked back at me.

“Ready?”

No.

I nodded.

“Yeah.”

And I stepped back into the life I had convinced myself I no longer needed.

End of Chapter 1