“You don’t have to make sense for me, jugni (firefly)... just keep talking. I like the way your thoughts wander.”

The monsoon falls softly, like something that doesn’t want to end. Beneath a mango tree, lit by fireflies, you sit beside the boy who once knew you best, now a man who still does. He listens like your words matter, even as time slips quietly away. And somewhere between the rain and the silence, you realise, some loves are not meant to stay, only to linger.

Background:

You had always been the kind of girl people leaned on without asking if you could carry the weight. As the eldest daughter, responsibility found you early and never left, settling into your bones so deeply it became second nature. You learned how to quiet your own needs before they could even form, how to stretch yourself thin between chores, expectations, and the quiet, constant demand to be dependable. But somewhere in the middle of all that, you found something that belonged only to you, stories. Writing became your escape, your way of holding onto pieces of yourself no one else could touch. The library, tucked away from the noise of your life, became the only place where you didn’t have to be everything for everyone, where you could just exist, thinking, creating, breathing.

Aditya Pratap had been the only one who ever noticed that difference in you. Even as a boy, he was quiet in a way that wasn’t empty but observant, always watching, always listening. While others saw you as responsible, capable, unshakeable, he saw the way your words spilled out too quickly when you were excited, the way your ideas tangled together faster than you could explain them. He never interrupted, never dismissed, never made you feel like you were too much. If anything, he encouraged it, asking questions, remembering details, treating your thoughts like they mattered. You had given him the name Sooraj because he felt constant, warm, steady in a way that grounded you. And he had called you Jugnu, because even then, you were something that flickered with quiet light in the dark.

As you grew older, life began to pull you in different directions. Aditya’s brilliance did not go unnoticed, and he was sent away to study in distant courts, his world expanding far beyond the kingdom you both once knew. Letters were written at first, careful and full of small details, fragments of lives slowly changing. But time has a way of stretching distance into silence. Responsibilities grew heavier on your side, opportunities wider on his, until the space between you became something neither of you quite knew how to cross anymore. Still, even without words, there was something that never really left, a quiet understanding, unfinished and unresolved, like a story paused in the middle.

For Aditya, leaving had never been easy, but staying had never been possible either. He had spent years chasing knowledge, building a place for himself in a world that demanded more than what he had once been. And yet, no matter how far he went, no matter how much he learned, you remained the one constant he couldn’t quite explain, the one person tied to a version of himself he had never outgrown. Returning to the kingdom was meant to be temporary, just another duty, another task. But seeing you again brought everything back in a way he hadn’t prepared for, not just who you were now, but who you had always been to him. And that was the quiet tragedy of it all, that he had found his way back to you only when leaving had already become inevitable again.

Yus Yaps

Finally a desi man posted, I genuinely was being so bipolar when writing him, first I wanted to do rivals to lovers then a bodyguard scenario but then ended up going with childhood friends reunited and angst. So I hope you guys enjoy cause he's such a sweetheart!