What We Keep, What We Give
The first time Akash Boro saw Juli Swargiary was on a quiet Tuesday night, the kind of night that made the cursor blink louder than the room. She appeared on his Facebook feed through a friend-of-a-friend tag—laughing, half-turned to the light, a child’s hand peeking into the frame like a small sun. He clicked without thinking, then paused with the sudden ache of recognition for someone he had never met.
Her bio was simple. A few photos of home, river, rice fields after rain, a child’s birthday cake with too many sprinkles. And in that tiny square of text that sits like a gatekeeper to our lives, there it was: married. A mother. A world complete without him.
He could have scrolled on. He didn’t. He saved the photo—no, not to his phone, but inside the tender, hidden place where a face lives even after the window is closed. That night, as thunder thinned into sleep, he said her name once into the dark, feeling its quiet weight. Juli.
Days passed like boats on the Brahmaputra: seen, felt, gone. Akash would write and erase a dozen messages before sending one small, careful hello. “I liked your photo of the paper boats,” he typed. “Your child folds them well.”
Her reply came the next evening, polite as sunlight on a doorstep. “Thank you. She learned from her grandfather. He says boats travel better with wishes inside.” The message had a softness that did not invite more. He respected that. He answered simply, asked about nothing she did not first offer. A rhythm formed—not daily, not eager, but present. Like the way rain checks the window before it falls.
He learned the child’s name—Mita—and her love for mango candies and purple socks. He learned that Juli woke early, that quiet became a skill after marriage, that some days the world felt too noisy for her heart. He learned these things without asking, because she sent them like a person placing bowls on a table; not a feast, not a famine. Enough.
There was a literary fair in the city, all paperbacks and tea steam and dust warmed by bodies. Akash went without knowing why. Maybe he wanted to see if words looked different in a crowd, if longing might thin or thicken among strangers.
He saw her near a stall of poetry. She was not a photograph—of course she wasn’t. She was the sound of someone turning a page without fear of tearing it. She was a blue cotton kurta and a half-smile meant for a child tugging her sleeve. Akash didn’t move closer. He didn’t need to. It was enough to watch her choose a book, to watch her make the small choices that define a day. He stood under a banner that fluttered the way his breath did, and he memorized the slope of her attention.
Later that night, he wrote to her. Not to say he had seen her—he wouldn’t break that boundary. He wrote about a poem he’d read at the fair where a river learns to love the banks that keep it from breaking the town. “I think love is like that sometimes,” he typed, then hovered. He deleted the sentence. He sent only the title of the poem and a line about the cartoon on the last page that made him laugh.
Her reply was a photo of a paper boat floating in a basin. “Mita is testing voyages,” she wrote. “Tonight, all boats survive.”
Deep love is not louder than the world. It is the world, rearranged quietly.
Akash began measuring time by small notifications. A blue circle, a new message. He learned the crack in his own patience and the grace of stepping back from it. Some evenings he would type a paragraph and then cut it until only a handful of words remained, words that asked nothing he had no right to ask.
Once, late, she sent a voice note by accident—just three seconds of a lullaby and the hush of a door closing. He listened to it once, then again, then once more, not for her voice alone, but for the life it held: a child asleep, a home breathing. He did not save the clip. He did not need to. It had already taught him what it came to teach.
One monsoon evening, the city stalled into the wet gold of traffic lights. Juli sent a message that began with “Can I ask you something?” He waited a minute before answering yes, though he had wanted to answer yes to her for months.
“Do you ever feel,” she wrote, “that you are living beside your own life, like a river that runs parallel to the road it wants to reach?”
He stared at the words the way a person stares at a storm they cannot name. He typed and erased and typed again. “Sometimes,” he sent at last. “But then I remember that rivers are not wrong for being rivers. And roads are not wrong for being roads. The map is bigger than what we see.”
There was a long pause. Then: “Thank you.” Then, after another minute, as if a door had opened and she had stepped out just a little: “Mita had a fever last night. Better now. But the night was long.”
Akash sent the number of a neighborhood doctor he trusted. “In case you need it,” he wrote, attaching nothing else, anchoring no expectations. She sent a small folded hands emoji. He smiled at the screen like a fool, a good, harmless fool.
They did not meet. Not then, not soon after. They built a bridge of messages where each plank was light enough to carry and strong enough to step on. He learned to love the restraint in his own chest, the kindness of stopping his hands from saying more. Juli learned that there existed in the world a man who did not take from her the quiet she had made for herself. Often she wrote only about weather, recipes, the way coriander turns a curry into a memory. Sometimes she wrote nothing at all for a week. He did not chase those silences. He let them be, the way you let dusk be dusk.
One afternoon, she sent a photo of Mita holding a red balloon. The child’s grin was a small universe. “She thinks the balloon can take a wish to the sky,” Juli wrote. “She says it will fly above the rain and not get wet.”
Akash replied with a drawing he made on a napkin: a balloon tied to a paper boat, both happily improbable. “This way, the wish can travel land and river,” he wrote. “When one gets tired, the other carries.”
Juli’s response was a single laughing face and, after a minute, “You are kind, Akash.” He looked at that line for a long time, aware of how kindness can become a bridge people cross without noticing the river below. Aware, too, that bridges should be built for crossing, not for claiming the walkers who use them.
There was a festival night when fireworks cracked the sky into petals. Akash stood in a crowd and watched couples lean into each other as if gravity lived between shoulders. He recorded a short clip of the fireworks but never sent it. Instead, he wrote a note in the drafts of a message he would never deliver:
“If you were here, I would stand one step behind you so I could watch the light break in your hair. But you are there, and that is right. I am here, and that is also right. Some loves are lanterns meant to be held without walking closer.”
He pinned the draft to the top of the chat, a small private ritual. Not an offering, not a demand. A truth he could carry without making it someone else’s burden.
Time is a patient teacher. It taught Akash to show up without arrival. It taught Juli to accept gentleness without debt. Seasons turned. Mita learned to read, to bargain for extra minutes at bedtime, to fold boats so crisp they could have cut water with their edges.
One winter morning, Juli sent a message unlike the others. “We are moving,” she wrote. “Not far. A different neighborhood, near the old rain tree. The house is small, but there is light.”
He congratulated her, meant it. She added, “Thank you for the doctor’s number months ago. We needed it again last week. It helped.” Then, unexpectedly, “I’m glad you exist.”
Akash set his phone down and went to the window. There are moments when a person understands the exact size of their life. He thought of all the love stories where someone runs to a station, a port, a gate, breathless and brave. He thought of how many more stories must exist where the running happens inward, where bravery looks like stillness, like tending a flame inside a glass so it won’t go out.
It happened, as such things do, on an ordinary afternoon. He was at a café, steam ribboning up from a clay cup, when he saw a familiar blue kurta in the reflection of the glass. He didn’t turn. He breathed. Then he turned.
Juli stood at the counter with Mita. The child clutched a book of puzzles; Juli scanned the menu like someone translating hunger into language. Their eyes found each other—Akash’s and Juli’s—and for a second the world thinned to a small, truthful thread.
He lifted his hand in a hello that was not a wave, more a permission. She nodded, almost smiled, then guided Mita toward a table near the window. After a minute, the child came over, bold as sunlight. “Are you the paper boat uncle?” she asked.
He laughed softly. “I might be,” he said. “Do you still send wishes?”
“Sometimes,” Mita whispered as if they were conspiring with the wind. “Mama says wishes are shy.”
Juli approached then, and up close she was more and less than everything he had imagined: more human, less myth. They spoke about nothing that could break anything—school supplies, the weather, the best place for jalebis on Sundays. He bought Mita a balloon from a street seller because the color matched a comment from months ago, because some circles deserve to close gently.
When they parted, it was with gratitude, the kind that does not ask to be named. No promises, no plans. Just a shared understanding that sometimes a meeting is enough to confirm the truth of a kindness.
That night, Akash sent one last drawing: a river under a sky of many small lamps. A road ran beside it into a horizon neither owned. In tiny letters, as if he were writing a footnote to the universe, he wrote, “May your light find every corner of your home.”
Juli replied with a photo of Mita holding a paper boat, a balloon string tied to its mast. “Voyages continue,” she wrote. “We are learning to be good sailors.”
He read the message twice, then opened the pinned draft. He didn’t need it anymore. He deleted it, felt the soft click of closure the way you feel the door at your back when you step into morning.
Some loves arrive to be chosen. Some arrive to be honored. This one had come to teach him that longing is not a hunger to be fed but a field to be tended—patiently, carefully—so that when the time comes, something gentle can grow and be released without regret.
Weeks later, when the first rain teased the dust into the air again, Akash stood by the river and folded a single boat. He pressed into it a wish so small it could fit between a heartbeat and a breath: that the world would be kind to the people he loved, even when he watched from the shore. He set the boat down. It wobbled, then steadied, then moved as if the river knew exactly where to take it.
He did not watch it until it vanished. He turned and walked along the road, the map widening inside him, the sky opening into a quiet he could live in. Behind him, the boat sailed without needing him to see it. Ahead, the lamps of evening lit the way home.
—End—