Melody of Us
By Dibyangana, 18, India
Dear V,
don’t go tonight. stay here one more time.
“2002” is playing again. the room’s dark, my cheeks are wet, and every note feels like it’s pressing harder against my ribs. it’s ridiculous how a song can time-travel, how a melody can drag you back to a world that doesn’t exist anymore. back to classrooms that smelled like chalk and rain, to afternoons where laughter came easy and growing up felt like something that would happen gently, someday far away.
class 9, at our after-school tuition class. I said hi, pretending to sound chill, but my voice trembled a little. you looked up, just once, and smiled that small, careless smile that opened something in me I didn’t know was waiting to bloom. maybe the universe saw it and laughed. I can imagine it whispered, “let’s make them feel everything.”
we drifted, yeah. time got greedy. life spun us into its chaos. but then, like some cruel kind of miracle, you came back, and suddenly, the noise made sense again. your laugh stitched colour into days that had turned grey. it was never about the big moments. it was always those quiet ones, when you’d look over and the world forgot to hurt for a second.
you called me Blue.
that one word… it rewired something in me. blue- the colour of oceans that never stop reaching for the shore, of skies seconds before they cry. when you said it, it sounded like you understood the parts of me no one else noticed. even now, when people call my name, it feels wrong unless it’s your voice breaking the silence.
something in the air feels thinner these days, like a page about to turn. school feels too alive for something that’s about to end. the corridors are too bright, the laughter too loud. everyone’s smiling too much, like maybe if we pretend hard enough, time will forget to move. but I feel it, the slow unravelling. the last bell. the final “see you.” the ache beneath all the jokes. I keep trying to take mental pictures: your face mid-laugh, the way your eyes shimmer when you’re pretending you’re fine. but everything’s slipping through my fingers like sand that doesn’t want to stay.
I keep memorizing you in fragments, the warmth in your laugh when it’s real, the way you tilt your head before saying something dumb that still makes sense. and yeah, you read my scribbles when the world got too loud. ink-stained pieces of me, trembling on paper, and you treated them like they mattered. you didn’t just read them, you heard them. the cracks, the silence, the parts I kept hidden. maybe that’s why this hurts so much. because you were the only one who never needed me to explain.
remember when we screamed 2002 till our voices broke? “singing at the top of both our lungs…” we really thought forever was hiding somewhere inside that lyric. now it plays like a ghost, every note mourning something we didn’t know we were losing.
you were my pause. my stillness in the noise. my soft place in a world that kept asking me to harden. you made the chaos beautiful, like a symphony played on broken strings, each note a wound I couldn’t stop loving. I don’t know how to unlove you without tearing myself open. perhaps I never will.
I wish I could press pause for one night more. one more walk. one more laugh. one more silence between us where everything made sense. maybe we’d lie under the sky again, counting stars till dawn forgot to arrive. maybe we’d keep singing until the night ran out of space to hold our voices.
if you ever look up, promise you’ll think of me. because somewhere out there, I’ll be looking too. same sky, same ache, same song looping through the dark.
and if the world ever feels heavy, if you start to fade under it, remember this: there’s someone out there who still carries your laugh like it’s a prayer. someone who still bleeds blue every time 2002 plays.
you were my home, V. and leaving you feels like the universe is splitting at the seams. but I believe the stars will always hold our story, even as we let go.
the song ends.
but I don’t press stop.
I just sit there
hoping maybe if I listen long enough,
you’ll come back with the next chorus.
forever, like it never ended,
your Blue
“Melody of Us” was written in that quiet hour when the world had gone still but my chest hadn’t. It came from the ache of endings—the kind that don’t arrive all at once but slip in softly, note by note. I wrote it with a song looping in the background and a heart full of unsaid goodbyes.
This piece isn’t just about leaving; it’s about remembering. About the people who turn ordinary days into sacred ones, and the way growing up sometimes feels like losing gravity. It’s me trying to freeze time, even for a heartbeat, before everything changes for good.
