When Stars Fell Between Us

In a sleepy village tucked between hills and rivers, where the nights were darker than the dreams of its people, lived a boy who watched the stars.

Zayan had an old telescope, rusted around the edges but still steady in its lens. It had once belonged to his grandfather, who believed the stars had answers to questions no one dared ask.

Zayan didn’t know about answers. But he knew the stars made him feel less alone.

He would spend hours on the rooftop, sketching constellations into his notebook, naming them after things he missed—his mother’s laughter, his father’s stories, and the girl he saw once at the river.

He didn’t know her name, but he remembered the way her scarf danced in the wind, the color of her eyes like dusk meeting midnight.

He called her Vega in his journal—after the brightest star he could find.

He never expected to see her again.

But the world is full of small miracles.

She moved into the house next door the following summer.

Her real name was Anaya.

She liked reading books under trees, always carried a notebook filled with poems, and hated loud places.

She noticed the telescope first.

“You watch the stars?” she asked.

“Every night,” Zayan replied, surprised.

She smiled. “I write about them.”

That night, she climbed the stairs to his rooftop.

And nothing was the same again.

**

They became stargazers together.

He taught her how to find the North Star.

She read him verses about galaxies and gravity and the loneliness of space.

They didn’t speak about love. Not directly.

But it was there—in the way they leaned into silence, the way she traced his name on her wrist with invisible ink, the way he pointed out a constellation and whispered, “That one reminds me of you.”

It wasn’t the kind of love that needed big gestures.

It was the kind that needed only the sky.

**

One night, a meteor shower lit the world on fire.

Anaya whispered, “Do you think stars fall in love?”

Zayan laughed softly. “Only the ones brave enough to burn.”

She looked at him, eyes wide. “Would you burn for something you loved?”

“I already am,” he said.

She didn’t reply.

She just took his hand.

And it was the loudest answer in the universe.

**

But love, like stars, sometimes burns too quickly.

Her father found work in another city. They were leaving in two weeks.

They didn’t talk about it for days. As if silence could stop time.

Then, on their last night, she came to the rooftop with a box.

Inside were all the poems she’d written—about him, about the stars, about the ache of staying and the fear of going.

“I don’t want to forget,” she whispered.

“You won’t,” he promised. “And neither will I.”

They held hands, their fingers wrapped like constellations made of skin and hope.

And then she was gone.

**

Zayan still watched the stars.

But it was never the same.

He kept her poems in the box where he used to keep his star maps. He wrote letters he never sent. He found constellations that didn’t exist and named them after moments—Her Laugh, First Touch, The Goodbye That Broke Me.

But he never stopped believing.

Because Anaya believed in the sky.

And Zayan believed in her.

**

Two years passed.

And then, one night, someone knocked on his rooftop door.

She was holding a telescope.

“This one’s mine,” she said. “But it’s missing a sky.”

He couldn’t speak.

She smiled. “Do you still burn?”

“Every day,” he said.

She stepped forward, pulled a notebook from her bag, and opened it.

The first page read:

"He watched the stars like they held my name.

So I returned—

to the place where I was once made of light."

They looked at each other.

Not as strangers.

Not as the kids they used to be.

But as the ones who had waited. And returned.

And on the rooftop where stars once watched them fall apart, they finally rose again.

Together.