16 ♥?Manav
After a long, exhausting day—ofmeetings, pretending I was fine, and pushing emotions back like they were pieces of furniture I could simply rearrange—I stepped inside the house.
And everything fell apart.
The second the door clicked shut behind me, it was as if the air had shifted.
The scent hit me first. Faint jasmine. The kind of trace that lingers in fabric long after someone’s gone. Then came the silence—too loud and familiar—pressing against my chest like a forgotten weight.
I didn’t mean to remember. I wasn’t ready to.
But memories don’t wait for permission.
They rushed in like a tide I couldn’t fight—Mom’s laughter echoing down the hallway, her voice calling out my name from the kitchen, her soft humming as she stirred sugar into her tea like it was the most sacred ritual in the world.
I stood in the entryway, motionless, while the past flooded every corner.
Theliving room still had the throw blanket she always claimed but never used. And the photo on the mantel—that one of us on the beach, her arm slung around my shoulders—was slightly tilted, like it was waiting for someone to fix it.
Like she was waiting.
My legs moved on instinct. Through the hall. Into the study.
The door creaked the same way it always had, like the house remembered me even when I tried to forget it.
The room smelled faintly of old pages, dust, and something that still reminded me of her perfume—floral, warm, a little like monsoon mornings.
Mom loved books.
She used to say,“Books can talk—and if you’re quiet enough, they’ll listen too.”
I used to laugh when she said that—call it one of her poetic eccentricities, the kind she used to make the world a little softer.
But now, standing here in the silence, I wasn’t so sure she was wrong.
Because as I ran my fingers along the spine of her favorite hardcovers—some worn at the edges, others marked with folded corners and faint underlines—I could almost hear her voice.
Whispering through the pages.
Smiling in the margins.
“Stories are just people trying to leave pieces of themselves behind,”she once told me, while reading aloud from a novel I pretended not to like.“Sometimes, the right book doesn’t just tell you something. It answers a question you didn’t know you were asking.”
I didn’t know what question I wasasking right now.
But I knew I was desperate for an answer.
The shelves were still organized the way she left them—fiction by color, nonfiction by chaos. A tiny porcelain owl perched between the classics and the cookbooks, wearing a lopsided pair of wire glasses she thought were hilarious.
I sat down on the chair, right where she used to read, and leaned back against the cabinet. My chest ached, not with sharp grief, but with the dull, familiar kind. The ache of absence, the kind you’ve learned to live with. The kind that doesn't scream anymore—just hums.
I picked up a book—her favorite, the spine cracked in half from overuse.
The inside cover still had her handwriting:If you’re reading this, leave your phone somewhere else. The world will still be here when you come back.
I smiled.
A real one.
