The train thundered toward the platform, a blur of steel and light cutting through the night. Wind whipped against my face, the sharp scent of metal and damp concrete filling my lungs. The yellow safety line beneath my feet felt fragile, like a boundary between existence and oblivion.
For a brief, fleeting second, I wondered—if I stepped forward, would anyone notice? Would they call it an accident, a slip of the foot? Or would they whisper about the girl who was always surrounded by boys, the girl who had everything but still wasn't enough?
But then I thought of my mother—of her tired eyes and the quiet strength that kept us afloat. And I thought of Kiaan, his voice steady in my head, telling me that I was more than the ghosts I kept chasing.
The train roared past, shaking the platform beneath me. My breath came sharp and uneven, my pulse loud in my ears. I stepped back.
I wasn't ready to die.
I just didn't know how to live without hurting.
I don't remember what my father looked like.
There are no photographs of him in the house, no old letters tucked into drawers, no lingering scent of aftershave on an abandoned shirt. Just an absence—so vast, so echoing, that I spent my entire life trying to fill it.
As a child, I invented stories. I imagined he was an explorer, lost on some grand adventure. A spy, forced into hiding to protect me. A tragic hero, sacrificing himself to save another. Any story was better than the truth: that he left and never looked back.
I remember the first time I asked my mother about him. I must have been six, maybe seven. She was standing in the kitchen, hands submerged in a sink full of soapy water, steam curling around her face. She froze, just for a moment, before reaching for a dish towel.
"He's gone," she said simply.
Gone.
Not lost. Not taken. Just... gone.
That night, I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to understand how someone could just choose to disappear. I traced the empty space beside my mother at the dining table, in the living room, in every corner of our house. The air itself seemed shaped by his absence, heavy with unspoken things.
By the time I was twelve, I stopped asking.
By the time I was sixteen, I stopped waiting.
But I never stopped searching.
In school, I clung to numbers, formulas, the certainty of equations that always had solutions. If I couldn't make sense of my father's absence, at least I could make sense of a math problem. I became the girl with perfect grades, the student teachers relied on, the one who never failed.
Perfection became my armor.
And yet, the void followed me everywhere.
In seventh grade, I clung to my best friend, Aarav, like a lifeline. His father picked him up from school, ruffled his hair, called him "champ." I soaked up their interactions like sunlight, hoping they would warm the cold spaces inside me. Aarav never questioned it, or maybe he did and just let me stay—a shadow trailing behind him.
By high school, I surrounded myself with boys. Not intentionally at first. I just felt safer with them. They didn't dissect my insecurities in hushed whispers. They didn't make me feel like I was lacking something. They joked, they protected, they stayed.
People talked, of course.
They called me names. Said I was desperate for attention.
But I wasn't collecting lovers. I was collecting fragments of the father I never had.
Six months ago, I met Kiaan.
Not in some cinematic, slow-motion moment, but in a way that felt inevitable—like he had always been meant to appear exactly when I was ready to meet him.
"You can't keep punishing yourself for what he did," he had said once, his fingers brushing mine with the kind of care that made me want to pull away. Or maybe hold on.
I wanted to believe him.
But how do you stop searching for something you've been missing your entire life?
I built my world around filling that void. Excelling at school, working late, chasing achievements like they could anchor me. Surrounding myself with boys, hoping one of them would finally stay, finally make me feel whole.
It didn't work.
And the more I searched for him in others, the more lost I became in myself.
That night, after stepping back from the edge of the platform, I sat on my apartment floor, knees pulled to my chest. My phone lay beside me, screen glowing with old photos—school competitions, college events, late-night work marathons. Moments where I shone, where I was somebody.
Because I wanted to be seen.
Not just noticed, but truly seen.
And yet, no award, no friendship, no borrowed affection ever led me to him.
It never led me to myself, either.
I didn't know who I was without the ache. Without the chase.
And maybe that was the scariest part of all.