Page 1 of Scars and Crowns

DEPARTURE OF MY HEART

YUVAAN

The station has a way of making every goodbye look ordinary.

People rush past us with overstuffed suitcases, vendors weave through the crowd shouting over one another, a child cries because his balloon has slipped from his hand, and somewhere above it all, a woman on the announcement system repeats the arrival of a delayed train in a voice so practiced it has forgotten what urgency sounds like.

Everything is moving. Everything except me.

I stand rooted to the platform, my hands buried deep inside my pockets, watching the girl in front of me wrestle with the strap of an old canvas duffel bag. The zipper catches halfway. She frowns at it, mutters something under her breath, and gives it another impatient tug.

I've watched those hands do a hundred different things over the years—smudge charcoal across paper, braid flowers into impossible little crowns, steal mangoes from the palace orchard, patch torn clothes because buying new ones wasn't always an option for her.

Today they're trembling. Barely. Just enough for me to notice. She would hate knowing that I noticed.

Anamika has always been like that. Fierce enough to carry the world herself, stubborn enough to refuse help even when the weight is clearly too much.

I almost smile. Almost. Because I know exactly why her fingers won't stay still. This is it. The train waiting beside us isn't just taking her to another city. It's taking her toward the life she's spent years building in scraps.

I've seen those scraps.

Crinkled notebook pages filled with her ambitious goals instead of lecture notes. Business ideas jotted on pages she thought no one noticed. Tiny sketches of storefronts she'd drawn during boring conversations. Lists of people she wanted to learn from. Cities she wanted to see. Dreams she guarded so carefully that she'd only ever let me read them.

She used to sit beneath the neem tree behind the old servants' quarters and tell me, with complete certainty, “One day I'll leave this place.”

Not because she hated it.

Because she refused to let it become the biggest thing that ever happened to her.

And now . . . Now she's actually doing it. A part of me wants to laugh because she did it and I am so proud of her. Another part wants to stop this train with my bare hands. The feeling sits somewhere beneath my ribs, heavy and unfamiliar. It isn't jealousy. It isn't fear either. It's the quiet ache of realizing someone's dream has finally arrived . . . and it doesn't have room for you in it.

"You've disappeared again." Her voice pulls me back before I lose myself completely. I blink. She's looking up at me now, one eyebrow raised, lips curved into the tiniest smile. The station lights paint soft gold across her face, catching loose strands of hair that have escaped her braid.

"You do this," she says, pointing a finger at me. "You go completely silent and then start staring into nothing like you're personally responsible for fixing the country's problems."

A laugh almost escapes me. Almost. Instead, I shrug one shoulder. "I was wondering how long it'd take before you lost your ticket."

"I am perfectly capable of taking care of one ticket."

"Really?"

"Yes."

"You checked your pocket three times in the last five minutes."

"I did not."

She immediately pats her jacket pocket. The rectangular outline of the ticket is still there. Only then does she realize what she's done. "Oh, shut up."

I can't help it. I laugh. It's quiet, but it's real. "There she is," I murmur.

"What?"

"The overconfident liar."

She rolls her eyes dramatically before bumping her shoulder against mine. "I'm not nervous."

"Hm."