We Almost Happened

I met her on a Tuesday that felt like a Sunday.

It was raining—light, persistent, like a whisper that wouldn't go away. The library was almost empty except for a few students and a girl in a red scarf, reading Norwegian Wood by Murakami.

She wasn’t the kind of beautiful that turned heads. She was the kind of beautiful that made people turn pages slower, just to stay in the same room a little longer.

I sat across from her because every other seat was taken. That was the first lie I told myself.

She looked up, smiled, and returned to her book.

We didn’t talk until the second time I saw her.

It was at a coffee shop near campus. She ordered black coffee and hummed to herself while waiting—an old 70s tune I couldn’t place but knew my mother used to sing. I didn’t approach her, but fate, or caffeine, intervened. The barista handed her my cup and my name.

She turned, confused, holding it out to me.

“This you?”

“Yes. But I’ll gladly trade you for your name.”

She laughed. "Nice try."

“Worth a shot.”

“Zara,” she said. “I like your name better.”

That was the beginning.

We became everything friends warned us not to be—too close, too fast, too much. But there’s a kind of love that doesn’t ask for permission. It just happens. It breathes into you slowly, until you’re drowning in it, and smiling while you do.

We walked everywhere. The city became our map of memories. The bookstore on 4th where she bought a poetry collection she never finished. The park bench where we watched a couple get engaged and didn’t say a word. The steps of the museum where she told me she never wanted children, and I said I didn’t know if I did either—but I knew I wanted her.

We kissed first in the rain. Cliché, I know. But it wasn’t like the movies. It was clumsy, our noses bumped, and she laughed halfway through.

“I think I love you,” she whispered.

“I think I do too,” I said, and meant it.

But some stories are written in disappearing ink.

Life crept in like fog—slow at first, then all at once. She got a scholarship abroad. I got a job offer I couldn’t refuse. The kind that came with a paycheck and a cage.

We didn’t say goodbye. Not really. We said, “We’ll figure it out.”

That was another lie.

Months passed. Then a year. Texts turned into emails. Emails turned into silence. I saw her once on Instagram—standing beside a man in Paris, her smile still tilted slightly to the left.

I never asked.

Years went by.

Then, last winter, I saw her again. Not in person—through a window. I was at a bookstore in a different city, waiting out a snowstorm. And there she was, outside, looking at the display window. Alone. No man beside her. No red scarf.

I didn’t run to her. I didn’t tap the glass. I just watched, quietly, until she walked away.

Sometimes, the love of your life doesn’t stay in your life.

Sometimes, they stay in your chest—in every line of a song, in the way you make your coffee, in the scent of a bookstore on a cold day.

She was my almost. My could-have-been. My maybe-if-we-had-more-time.

And in a way, she still is.

I still write her into stories. Sometimes she’s the girl who leaves, sometimes she’s the one who stays. But she always wears a red scarf.

I once read that there are three loves in your life.

The first teaches you what love should feel like.

The second teaches you what love shouldn't be.

And the third… teaches you what love really is.

She was all three.

And I hope, somewhere, I was at least one for her.