Love has a way of weaving its magic, doesn’t it? One moment, you’re living life as usual; the next, you’re walking hand in hand with someone who feels like poetry personified. That’s how I found myself at a quaint hill station, cradled between icy hill caps and endless meadows, where the sky flirted with the horizon and the air carried whispers of unspoken love.
She was with me.
We began our mornings on a hilltop, watching the sun rise slowly, as if it too was reluctant to leave the embrace of the horizon. The golden light caressed her face, highlighting the curve of her smile—a smile that held something more beautiful than the stars. Her laughter melted the frost under our feet, turning every breath into a shared secret. “Dekho na,” she whispered, pointing to the sunlight dancing on the icy peaks, “it’s like the mountains are wearing jewels.”
I nodded, unable to tear my gaze away from her. How could I, when she was the poetry the sunrise tried to write?
Afternoons were a symphony of footsteps through pine forests. The sunlight filtered through the trees, painting the ground in dapples of gold and green. She ran ahead, her hair trailing like a comet, and turned back with eyes that held the promise of a thousand untold stories. We found a meadow where the grass swayed like it was humming an old love song. Lying there, with the sky stretching endlessly above us, she traced constellations with her fingers, and I traced her silhouette with my eyes.
Evenings were our favorite—the sunsets. The sky would burst into hues of orange, pink, and crimson, as if it too was in love and couldn’t contain its joy. “Every sunset is a love letter,” she said, resting her head on my shoulder. “The sun writes it, and the night carries it away.”
I smiled at her words, feeling a warmth in my chest that even the chill of the approaching night couldn’t touch.
But as the stars began to light up the velvet sky, the enchantment started to unravel. I reached out to hold her hand, only to grasp the emptiness of the cold mountain air. Her hair—that I had watched flutter in the wind—were nowhere to be found.
And then it hit me. She wasn’t there. She had never been there.
The girl who had turned the icy peaks into a canvas of jewels, who had made the pine forests sing, who had given meaning to the sunsets, was nothing but a fragment of my imagination. She was the ghost of a past love, a love so deep that its shadow still walked beside me.
Her smile, the one I had carried in my heart for years, was the real poetry—a memory that could outshine the stars.
As I stood alone on that hilltop under a canopy of stars, I realized that love is not always about the person standing next to you. Sometimes, it’s about the pieces of them you carry within you—in your dreams, in your thoughts, in the way you see the world. Love, I learned, is the sunrise and the sunset within you.
The hills whispered their goodbyes as I began my descent, but I wasn’t sad. After all, her presence—real or imagined—had turned an ordinary hill station into a dream.
