Prologue
I have a playlist for everything.
There’s one for late nights when the hostel corridor goes quiet and the ceiling fan hums its slow, indifferent song. One for rainy afternoons when I sit by the window with chai I forgot to drink. One for the kind of Tuesday mornings that feel like they were made for someone else’s life — someone prettier, someone luckier, someone who gets chosen.
And then there’s the other one. The one I play when I’m feeling something I don’t have a name for yet. Something that sits right in the middle of hope and foolishness. I call it mylove playlist— even though I have never been in love. Even though love, so far, has looked at me and looked away.
I know what you’re thinking.How can you miss something you’ve never had?
Easily. Quietly. Every single day.
I am Mayuri. I am twenty years old. I am the girl who laughs the loudest in a room and cries the softest at night. I talk too much and feel too deeply and I have loved the idea of love since before I understood what it actually costs. I have had crushes — two of them, both disasters in their own quiet way. One laughed at me in front of everyone. One called me his sister. I smiled through both. I went home and played sad songs, even though nobody had broken my heart yet — not really — because you can’t break what was never given away.
But I kept it anyway. My heart. A little more careful each time. A little more quiet about who I gave it to, even in my daydreams.
Now I am in a new city. A new college. A new corridor that smells like damp cement and someone’s leftover Maggi. I have a small hostel room, a slightly broken cupboard, a roommate who sleeps through alarms, and a playlist for every feeling I haven’t lived yet.
I still believe in love — please don’t take that from me. I believe in it the way I believe in the first rain of June: I can’t predict it, I can’t control it, and I will probably get completely soaked. But when it comes —ifit comes — I want to be someone who didn’t stop believing in it just because it was taking its time.
Because maybe love doesn’t arrive on your timeline. Maybe it doesn’t care about your expectations, or your plans, or the version of it you built in your head at seventeen.
Maybe it arrives exactly when the universe decides. Not a moment sooner. Not a moment later. And maybe — just maybe — that timing is the whole point.
This is not a story about a girl who waited for love. This is a story about what love looked like when it finally stopped waiting for her.
