no loud sounds, she’s mourning someone still alive

listen when grief speaks

vol 1

i mourn you
not the stranger i pass in daylight,
but the boy i once loved in the quiet.

the one who stammered over syllables,
who laughed with the corners of his eyes,
who didn't always know what to say,
but said it anyway—just to reach me.

i mourn the boy
who taught me what lyrics meant
not just in words,
but in the way he looked at me
when the chorus hit.

i mourn the hands that reached for mine
across chipped bakery tables,
the frosting on our lips,
the warmth of two forks,
the shared sweetness
of something so small, yet sacred.

i mourn the boy
who drank from the same glass,
fought the world with me and for me,
as if love was a rebellion
and we were in it together.

i mourn what you’ve taken
not gifts or promises,
but something more brutal:
my belief in soulmates.

i mourn what you’ve become.
the armor. the silence.
the shadow of the person i once knew.

and most of all,
i mourn what i’ve lost
not just you,
but the version of me
that existed
when you still loved me back.

and maybe the cruelest thing of all is knowing
that we can never go back
not because of pride
or the miles between us,
but because you are no longer him
and i am no longer her.

time changes people.
life shapes us in ways
we don’t always notice until
it’s too late to go back.

sometimes it makes us better.
sometimes it leaves us bitter.
and sometimes it just builds walls
so high that neither of us
can see who we were
on the other side of them.

i mourn that too
the quiet, unchangeable truth
that even if we found each other again,
we wouldn’t know how to hold
what once felt effortless.

and so i mourn, every day,
that this is what it has come to.

---

vol 2

i mourn you.
not the you i see now
buttoned-up, sharp-tongued, distant.
i mourn the boy who once got awkward when our knees touched under the table,
who fumbled over his words but meant every one of them.

i mourn the boy who made me listen to songs twice,
once with him,
and once with his meaning stitched into every lyric.
the boy who sat across from me at a tiny bakery table
and grinned with frosting on his lip,
who believed a shared dessert could heal a long week.

i mourn the boy who looked at me like i was a planet,
the only one in his sky,
and not like i was furniture in a room he’s lived in too long.

you’re still here
but god, you’re not the same.
your silence cuts deeper now,
not because you don’t speak,
but because when you do,
your voice doesn’t sound like home anymore.

and maybe it's not your fault.
maybe life really does do this.
it pulls at people like tides,
reshapes them with hands you never see coming.
it turns softness into armor.
tenderness into strategy.

i know.
i know we all change.
and maybe some people are meant to outgrow the version of themselves you once loved.
but still—i mourn.

i mourn not just the boy you were,
but the us we only got to be in that small pocket of time.
because no matter how long i sit beside you now,
i know we can’t go back.
not really.

and every day,
i carry the weight of that quiet funeral
of what never truly ended,
but will never truly return.

---

i couldn’t decide which version i liked more, and i didn’t have the heart to scrap either. so here they are, side by side. these pieces have been sitting with me for a long time now, quietly waiting for a moment to breathe again.

tonight, at 4am, while mana ke hum yaar nahi played softly in the background, something in me stirred that familiar ache, the kind that only old memories or older drafts can bring. it made me want to revisit these, give them shape again, and store them somewhere they won’t get lost.

so this is me doing just that. preserving little fragments of a feeling i once held so close.