# Drowning in Reverie The evening had turned soft and indifferent, the kind that makes you feel you belong nowhere and everywhere at once. Rina sat by the window, her chin resting on her palm, watching the street lights flicker on one by one, like tired eyes opening reluctantly to the night. She had been sitting there since afternoon, though she couldn't say exactly when afternoon had surrendered to evening. Time had a way of slipping through her fingers these days, the hours melting into each other like watercolors left out in the rain. The tea in her cup had gone cold an hour ago. She didn't bother to drink it. There was something almost meditative about watching the vapor rise and dissipate, rise and dissipate, until nothing remained but a faint ghost of warmth on the rim. Her mother had asked her three times if she wanted dinner. Each time, Rina had smiled and said she wasn't hungry, and her mother had left the room with that particular kind of sigh that mothers perfect over decades—a sigh that holds worry and resignation in equal measure. The truth was, hunger had become a distant thing, like a memory of hunger rather than the real thing. She could eat. Her body could perform the motions. But there was a distance now between her and the world, as though she were watching herself through glass. Outside, a boy on a bicycle sped past, his laughter trailing behind him like something he'd forgotten to collect. Rina's eyes followed him until he turned the corner and vanished. That's how life worked now, she thought. Everything moved past. Everything disappeared around a corner you couldn't follow. She had loved Amal with the kind of love that felt like drowning—inevitable, total, without alternative. He had loved her too, or so he'd said. Or perhaps he'd meant it when he said it. Perhaps intentions were simply things that expired, like milk left on a counter. The last time she'd seen him, he wore a shirt she'd given him. He didn't mention it. She didn't ask him to. They had sat across from each other in a café that suddenly felt too bright, too public, and they'd spoken about practical things: the apartment lease, mutual friends, whether she wanted the books or whether he would keep them. It was, she thought later, the most civilized heartbreak. Which somehow made it worse. Now, three months after, she still found herself reaching for her phone before remembering there was no one to call. Or rather, she could call many people—her mother, her best friend Priya, her brother—but none of them were Amal, and calling anyone else felt like an admission of something she wasn't ready to admit. So she sat by the window instead. She watched the street. She drank cold tea and wondered if this was how one slowly became invisible: not all at once, but gradually, sitting perfectly still while the world rushed past. The evening deepened. Stars pricked through the darkness like small punctures in velvet. Somewhere in the building, someone was cooking—she could smell cardamom and onions, the smell of someone else's home being made. The smell was both comforting and terrible. She thought about calling him. Not to say anything, really. Just to hear him breathing on the other end, to confirm that he still existed somewhere in the world, that their history hadn't been completely erased. But she didn't reach for the phone. Instead, she stayed where she was, suspended in the gathering dark, drowning in thoughts that circled and returned like birds too tired to fly anywhere else. Tomorrow, she told herself, she would get up early. She would eat something. She would respond to the emails piling up in her inbox. She would rejoin the land of the living. But tonight, she would sit here a little longer, watching the street lights and the empty road, and allow herself to sink deeper into the warm, familiar numbness of reverie. It was not happiness. It was not even peace. But it was hers, and for now, that was enough.