The notebook still lay open, and the ink was barely dry when he leaned back in his chair. Outside, the dusk deepened into a gentle shade of blue, soft as silence.
He hadn’t moved much since the morning. But now, something within him stirred — not grief, not longing — just a gentle tug, like a forgotten melody humming under the skin.
And with that, it came.
The memory.
Not like a train crashing through the station. No.
It arrived like music through a wall — muffled, half-lost — and then clearer, brighter, until the room around him seemed to melt away.
It was the final night of the college fest — their last one.
They were no longer juniors who sneaked behind the stalls for free food or skipped events to roam aimlessly in the rain. They were final years. Kings of their crumbling court.
He had a half-lit joint in one hand and a bottle of cheap rum in the other. Both had been passed around like secrets. The grass was dry under their feet and the ground was still vibrating from the bass of the open-air stage, though they had long drifted from the main crowd and into their own pocket of madness near the old peepal tree.
He remembered how Po was trying to give a speech to the pigeons.
“To all beings feathered and free,” Po had slurred, raising his plastic cup to the dark, “we offer peace and peanuts.”
Someone — probably Jay— had burst out laughing so hard he fell on his own shoelace and almost dislocated his sense of direction. That became a running joke that night: “Jay’s fallen into the Bermuda lace again!”
But the true highlight came when Diane— wild-eyed and full of chaotic poetry — jumped on top of a stone bench and declared herself the Goddess of Irrelevance.
“I am the sovereign of nonsense!” she yelled, arms flung to the sky. “I demand spontaneous poetry, and it must involve pickles, time travel, and heartbreak.”
And like puppets summoned by absurdity, they responded.
He, with his crooked half-smile and the smoke slowly unfurling from his lips, raised a finger and crooned:
“In a jar of mango lies my soul,
once kissed by a girl who stole my roll,
I chased her through time in my underpants,
only to find… she preferred pickled romance.”
The group exploded.
He had laughed so hard that night — actual tears, nose running, stomach cramping, can’t-breathe kind of laughter. That raw, physical, euphoric ache.
He hadn’t laughed like that since.
Not once.
They danced too, later.
Like idiots. No structure, no care. Someone had dragged a portable speaker into the lawn and played a mishmash of old retro songs, indie rock, and absurd remixes no sober soul would dare move to.
He remembered spinning, arms out like a broken helicopter, his ponytail whipping behind him. Sweat poured, shirts clung to bodies, and the world — for just those few hours — forgot what sorrow meant.
Even the stars felt like spectators then.
Even the moon felt drunk.
He had collapsed onto the grass at the end of it, exhausted and grinning like a boy who had stolen the whole sky.
He could still hear the song in his head. Something stupid. Something loud. Something they sang along with while pointing at nothing in particular.
And then there was quiet. Not sadness. Just the kind of silence that follows joy when it has said all it needed to.
He returned from the memory slowly, like waking from a nap you didn’t mean to take.
Back to the room. The chair. The open notebook.
But now, his lips curled.
A smile.
Not wistful. Not melancholic. But real.
Not because he wanted to go back. Not because he wished those days had never ended.
But because they happened.
And they happened to him.
That joy. That recklessness. That laughter that bent the world at its knees.
It was still his.
Not lost. Not gone.
Just safely tucked inside.
And though the mirror showed a man older, grayer, quieter — somewhere beneath the bones, that boy was still laughing.
Still dancing.
Still telling ridiculous poems under the peepal tree.