Muskan to everyone else. Muksan to me.
for you, today
You make ordinary days feel like somewhere I’d happily stay forever — today included.
come back tomorrow — there’ll be another. 🐣
I made you something → month one, kept
bore ho rahi ho? 🍿 theatre khula hai →
bags packed → us, in ahmedabad 🧳
stay up with me? something special lands at midnight 🌙
I’m not very good with words.
I never really have been. I go quiet at exactly the moments I should be saying the most, and the things I feel the strongest are the ones I struggle hardest to get out.
So I made this instead — somewhere I could finally say a few of them. Take your time. There’s no rush, the same way there’s never a rush with you.
thank you — for all of it
It’s a lot, Muksan. More than I let on — and I’m grateful for every bit of it.
my favourite view 🤍
you’re on my mind
When you’re with me, I’m thinking of you. When you’re not, I’m still thinking of you.
You’re in the quiet moments and the loud ones — the ordinary days, and the ones I’ll never forget.
our story
Here’s how it’s actually gone. I’ll keep adding to it, for as long as you’ll let me.
every word of it, true. 🐣
10th grade · Uneed Academy
We think it began here — a tuition where we shared a classroom but never the same batch. Close enough to breathe the same air, never quite close enough to meet. I like believing the thread was already tied, just waiting for us to catch up to it.
11th grade · Silver Bell
Eleventh grade, and there you were — slouched at your desk, bored out of your mind, and somehow the most interesting thing in the room. I had a crush the size of a building. You were lost in your world to notice me, and I was too shy to do anything about it. So nothing happened. Not yet.
Lockdown
When the world shut its doors, I finally found the nerve to message you on Instagram. We talked — our very first conversation — and then it slipped away, the way those things do. Not the end of us. Just not the start of us either.
23rd May · Aroma
Opening day at Aroma, and you walked in. You lit up at some of the staff — old faces from Taco Mexicana, I’d only learn later — and I, brilliantly, took it personally and decided you thought I was a stalker. I was also sure you’d come with your fiancé, so I stood there quietly heartbroken. Then I walked over anyway, just to soften the awkwardness, and we talked like it was the easiest thing in the world.
The message
You’d forgotten my name — so you searched Instagram, found me, and sent a message. Only I’d deleted the app. I reinstalled it the day after we met, for something dull and forgettable, and there you were, waiting in my inbox. I’ve never been so grateful for boring admin work in my life.
27th May · Coco Chico
We met at Coco Chico and found something I hadn’t gone looking for: a real friend in each other. So, of course, we had to do it again.
30th May · Authentica
I cooked for you at Authentica. We hardly touched the food — we just talked, and talked, until my staff started arriving and I had to whisk us off somewhere quieter.
30th May · then, Iscon Club
Iscon Club, two grown adults on the swings like the kids we secretly still are. That’s where I held your hand for the first time. Where we first hugged. Where ‘close’ stopped being a distance and became a feeling.
couldn’t stop smiling
GMIU
Then I got it badly wrong. A friend made a comment about you, and I didn’t stand up for you the way I should have. You heard it. You felt betrayed — and you had every right to. The guilt nearly undid me, so I broke into GMIU, where you teach law, and stood in front of you and apologized with everything I had, eyes stinging. You were graceful enough to forgive me. And then you chose me — and opened your whole world to me.
Ahmedabad
Ahmedabad — our first time away together. We split the best chocochip brownie either of us has ever had, lived like a couple for a few perfect days, and had a blast with your friends. Then I brought you to mine, who adored you almost as quickly as I did.
us ♡
ahmedabad
Home · 18th June
Back home, I met your brother. On the 18th of June, my dad’s birthday, you wished him a happy birthday — and a few days later, you and my mom fell into a conversation of your own. Quietly, one introduction at a time, your world and mine started turning into ours.
Teapost · these days
Some of my favourite hours lately have been the simplest ones — you, me, a game of chess at Teapost, and absolutely nowhere we need to be. These quiet, unremarkable evenings are exactly the ones I was talking about.
you, me & a chessboard 🐣
23rd June · morning
Today I finally said the thing I’d been holding onto: this has been the best month of my life. So I asked you not to let it end — to let this one month stretch all the way out into forever. I gave you a pearl, because that’s what we are: something that was quietly forming for years, under all that time and pressure, until it turned into something beautiful. The necklace came tangled — of course it did, like our thread always has — and you untangled it without thinking twice. Exactly the way you untangled us in the first place: by being the brave one, the one who reached out and sent that first message.
23rd June · evening
And after your shift, you flipped the whole day on its head. Waiting for me at home were two bracelets — and that was only the beginning. Perfumes. A tiny crochet garden of pink and blue tulips. A tulip lamp we get to build together, piece by piece. Here’s the honest part: no one’s really given me things before, so I didn’t know what to do with my hands, or my face, or any of it. I don’t think I’ve ever been so overwhelmed in my life. I’m still not over it.
you crocheted me a garden 🌷
1st July · five o’clock, then five minutes
We’d already met that day — five o’clock, our usual hour — and somehow I walked away missing you anyway. I always do. Then luck dressed itself up as your friend’s birthday: a dinner, a table that wasn’t ready, a little pocket of waiting — and you spent it calling me. So I came. Five minutes. That’s all it was. And those five minutes soothed something in me that whole hours usually can’t. The missing didn’t go anywhere — it never really does — but I’d cross the city for five minutes of you, every time, and call it the best trade I ever made. Some things are too big for words. That was one of them.
hold it — let’s steal five more minutes.
3rd July · her home, then the rain
Five o’clock, our usual hour — except you’d quietly rewritten it: some work at home that only I could help with, you’d told your parents. Just like that, the girl I love built me a front door. I’d only ever known the far edge of your street; that evening I walked past it, into the house that made you. I sat with your parents and we talked — really talked — and when I asked for an evening with you, they said yes. It didn’t feel like permission. It felt like a place at the table. Then the sky joined in, and it rained — the whole world gone soft except you: wipers keeping time, the city melting past the windows, you in the seat beside me, the only thing in focus. We ate somewhere I hardly remember. I was busy memorizing you. Home after ten. Five hours — sixty times our five minutes — and love, terrible at math, counted them anyway: not enough. Never enough. But I drove back through the washed streets holding something new. A future that isn’t a wish anymore — it’s a road. And that night, I could finally see it.
really, really happy
9:11 pm — still not enough
… and a forever I’m already longing for.
25th June · under the moon
us, that night 🤍
I had it planned for the 30th — one month, to the day, since those swings at Iscon. A proper dinner, by the pool, under a full moon. That was going to be the night I told you I loved you.
Then everything moved to the 25th with almost no warning, and I scrambled. The decorations weren’t right. The cake was meant to say forever and ever — it came out ever forever instead. Nothing was going the way I’d pictured it.
“With you, I love the ordinary too.”and just like that, you said
That undid every worry I’d been carrying. So I told you the truth: the timing wasn’t perfect, the place wasn’t, the cake definitely wasn’t — and not one bit of it changed how I felt about you. Then I got down on one knee.
I love you.
— and you said it back.
We spent the rest of that night under the moon, somewhere nowhere near perfect, feeling like everything was — because we had each other. We walked in two people who were dating. We walked out yours, and mine, officially.
this is where our two threads tied into one.
Nothing about that night went to plan — and then, of every song in the world, the one that came on was called Perfect.
our song
This one’s ours. ‘I like me better when I’m with you’ — I never really understood that line until it was about you. I just like who I am when you’re around. That’s the whole thing.
the song that reminds me of you
I can’t quite tell you why this one. I just can’t hear it without thinking of you — which, lately, is most of the time.
the song you played me
And this one’s yours — you put it in my ears one day, and somewhere along the way it stopped being a song and started being you.
the red thread
An old story says the two people meant to find each other are tied together by a single red thread.
It can stretch. It can tangle. But it never breaks. I think ours found us a long time ago.
— tied, they say, by the old man under the moon.
I’ll keep getting better at saying these things out loud. Until I do, please know this much is always, completely true:
I’m grateful for you.
Every single day.
— always yours