Hardly Together, Never Apart

Picture this.

You’re fifteen.
You’ve just come home from your all-boys school when your father shouts,

“There’s a phone call for you .... "

"It's a girl speaking!”

Your brain stops working.

You don’t know any girls.

You pick up… and there’s a voice.
Warm. Comfortable. Like she already knows you a little.

It’s a prank — a group of girls calling random boys.

But it doesn’t feel random.

We spoke maybe four or five times that year.
Never regularly enough to expect… always enough to hope.

I don’t remember what we talked about.

I remember sitting near the phone in the evenings…
doing homework I had already finished.

A year later, in college, I met her.

No dramatic moment.
Just a girl who didn’t try to be noticed — and somehow always was.

I started dropping her home.
Her father didn’t allow scooters.
I had a scooter.

Love stories often begin with logistics.

One night after a party, I had an accident on the way back.

I was okay.

But the first thought I had was —
I should tell her.

So one day I did.

“I like you.”

She smiled the kindest smile rejection has ever worn.

“I only want to be friends.”

And I said okay…
because sometimes staying matters more than winning.

Months later, around my birthday, standing in the quiet of her house, I asked again.

This time she said yes.

We loved loudly in small ways.

I made heart-shaped chocolates I wasn’t qualified to make.
Gave her thirty roses through her friends so she’d keep getting surprised all day.
Gifted a teddy bear that said I love you when tapped.

Her grandparents kept tapping it and each other at home to repeat it.

I realised love spreads faster than you intend.

Then life did what life does.

Different cities.
Phone calls that slowly turned into arguments.

I thought love meant holding on tighter.

She knew love sometimes means loosening your grip.

And one day she said,
“This isn’t working.”

For years I believed she owed me closure.

I thought one day she would explain things in a way that would finally free me.

Decades later, we spoke honestly.

And I realised —
she wasn’t the unfinished chapter.

My expectation was.

The moment I stopped asking what we could have been
I finally saw what we still were.

Today we’re both married.
We have lives we wouldn’t trade.

But sometimes she calls exactly when the day feels heavier than it should.
Sometimes we sit together and talk about nothing… and leave lighter.

There’s no past to fix.
No future to negotiate.

Just a person who knows the earlier versions of you…
and still likes the current one.

All those years…
I thought the story was about who we would become to each other.

It wasn’t.

It was about who we became because we met.

Some people become your partner.
Some become your past.

And a rare few…

become the person you’re quietly glad exists in the same lifetime as you.

Hardly together.
Never apart.