A Love So True

Season 2 : Chapter 19

I want to sincerely apologize for my sudden disappearance and for stopping the updates without any prior notice. I am truly sorry for leaving you all in suspense.
I am finally back with a new chapter! However, because my schedule remains quite demanding, I cannot guarantee a rapid update schedule just yet. Please know that I will do my absolute best to continue the story whenever I can.
Thank you all for your incredible patience and for sticking by me. It means the world to have you here.

Happy Reading ❤️

Driving home after dropping Yash back to his workplace , Nehal couldn't stop thinking about the yellow envelope.

It was raining outside - the type of rain where you can walk outside with no umbrella. 

"Who labeled rain as a bad weather?"

"Can it just be rainy and dark everyday ?"

"Those rainy nights in Chiang mai .... I would just open the window of my bamboo hut , put my head on the sun baked pillow , close my eyes , feel the rain soaked wind on my face and let the rain wash away all the pain of yesterday. There are so many things I want to tell you...yet I don’t know how. Not as a lover, not as a friend, not as a brother. I only know how to be a lyricist: to set my unsung memories to hush and hope you’ll listen. Words fail me, so I let the rain carry the rest. Each drops a syllable, each sighs a line...until the sky reads aloud what my heart cannot say."

While waiting for the red light, he only glanced at the yellow envelope on the passenger seat intermittently but did not pick it up.

Nehal sighed.

The more he tried to walk away from the past, the more it extended its tentacles, wrapping around his limbs and pulling him back into the anticlockwise.

Nehal often felt as though time had folded in on itself, the past and the present pressed together so tightly that he could no longer tell where one ended and the other began. There were days when his body lived in the now, but his heart wandered barefoot through old corridors of memory, brushing against echoes it never quite learned to let go of.

Ishan lived there , quietly, insistently.
Not as a lover anymore, not as a possibility, not even as a regret. And yet, unmistakably, as warmth of nostalgia.

The kind that lingered long after the fire had died, like embers glowing beneath ash.

Ishan has a family now. Children who called him home. A life full and complete, one Nehal would never dare disturb.

And Nehal himself was not alone either.

Yash existed in his present, vivid and breathing, with a gravity that pulled at him whether he allowed it or not.

Still, nostalgia was disobedient. It did not respect logic or time or moral clarity. Ishan had been the first bloom in Nehal’s heart, the first name that taught him what loving someone felt like.

Nehal had almost raised him, guided him, protected him, scolded him, stood between him and the world like a shield.

Nehal knew that ....to Ishan, Nehal had always been the elder, the brother figure, the constant. But Nehal’s heart had betrayed that simplicity. It had loved quietly, deeply, without permission. That love had shaped him, carved him, defined the very grammar of his emotions.

So when Ishan slipped into memory now, it was not longing that hurt , rather it was recognition. The knowledge that a part of Nehal had been written in that chapter, and could never be erased.