Fragments and Fables

The last time I saw him was at the airport.

We stood near the gate, saying almost nothing, both of us caught in a silence too full to break. His hand brushed against mine once, light and uncertain, like a question neither of us dared ask.

We weren’t crying yet. Just standing too close, hearts louder than our words. And then, without warning, he pulled me in.

It wasn’t tentative. It wasn’t dramatic. It was instinct. His arms wrapped around me with a kind of urgency I hadn’t seen in him before, like something in him refused to let me go until the very last second.

My face pressed into his shoulder, and in that moment, everything cracked. I didn’t sob, not yet. But the breaking started quietly, internally, like a fault line shifting beneath the surface. His hold tightened slightly, and I felt the weight of everything we weren’t saying settle between us.

I felt his breath catch against my neck, a tremble he didn’t try to hide. I held him closer, not to change anything, but to honor what we were quietly letting go of. We were still in each other’s arms, but something beneath the surface had already begun to loosen. Like threads coming undone, not from force, but from the quiet understanding that we were no longer holding the same future.

When he finally stepped back, he looked at me for a long moment.
There was a softness in his gaze that hadn’t been there before, a quiet unraveling, like something inside him had come loose the moment he realized I was really going. The emotion sat behind his eyes, tender and exposed, like it had risen without his permission and now had nowhere else to go.

“Take care,” he said.

I nodded. Then I turned and walked away.

I boarded the plane on autopilot. Found my seat. Buckled in. Around me, everything continued as usual. Flight attendants moved down the aisle. Announcements echoed overhead. People settled in with quiet efficiency. But my heart was still at the gate, and I was quietly unraveling.

Just as I reached to silence my phone, it buzzed. It was him.

I answered with shaking fingers.

He didn’t say hello. Just a low, broken sentence that cracked something inside me. “I feel directionless,” he said.

And that was it.

The tears came before I could stop them. I turned toward the window and just cried, not softly but fully. My face folded, my shoulders shook. I tried to be quiet but my body had other plans.

Because I had spent weeks convincing myself this was the right thing. That I had a plan. That I was moving toward a life with structure, clarity, and purpose. But hearing him say he was lost made something collapse in me.

He said he didn’t know what to do next. And I was supposed to be the one who did.
But all I could do was sob.
Not because I had all the answers. But because I didn’t.

I landed in Germany to the sound of thunder. Rain lashed the windows, turning the world outside into a blur. It felt like the sky was crying for both of us. I sat near the gate, still. The distance between us stretched across oceans and time zones. Him in the US, me on my way to India. And somewhere in that in-between, I just dissolved.

I couldn’t cry anymore. The grief had folded itself into my bones, something that just sat with me. I didn’t try to push it away. I didn’t have the strength to. I had left behind a version of me, and I couldn’t quite comprehend who she was.

I was halfway between two lives. One I had just left behind, and one I was supposed to be stepping into. And I didn’t feel at home in either.

I had left someone who said he felt lost.
And I had told myself I wasn’t.
But somewhere between those two lives,
I stopped knowing which one I belonged to.

Author’s Note:
This story is drawn from a real moment in my life. The events took place on October 9, 2014—a day etched into memory not just for what happened, but for everything that was left unsaid.