Twin Flame

His room was empty. Bhavya stood at the doorway, the silence hitting her like a truth she'd tried hard to deny. "Of all the things I imagined... this, I wasn't prepared for," she thought.

What hurt more than his absence was the weight of all the conversations that never happened. The words she swallowed. The glances that lingered too long. The hope that always overstayed its welcome.

She turned away, slow and reluctant, like leaving meant accepting the end. Her thoughts wandered to a day that hadn't arrived yet — the day she'd see him again. Maybe he'll smile, she mused. That would be enough. In her wildest dreams, he'd say her name. Ask her how she's been. But dreams are gentle liars, and she had learned not to trust them.

As she walked past the corridor, something caught her eye — a nameplate.

Mr. Deepak, Manager.

The letters were too familiar, too loud for her comfort. That name had once been an anchor, quietly tying her to this place, urging her to linger just a little longer. And now, it would be just another name she passed by. Another fleeting footnote in a story that never got written.

Their lives couldn't have been more different. Deepak — younger, a board member, born under a zodiac sign that was astrologically all wrong for her. Their aptitudes clashed, their rhythms rarely aligned. And yet, Bhavya called him her twin flame.

It was a strange kind of harmony — where the contrasts didn't divide, but deepened the bond. In the end, it wasn't compatibility that wrote their story, but memories — vivid and lasting — stitched together by the simple curve of his smile. Perhaps no one had ever smiled at her the way he did. With so much knowing. So much quiet intensity.

Back in the feeder cab, Bhavya leaned her head against the window, letting the hum of the city blur into background noise. Her mind drifted to the first time she saw him. That corridor, bathed in morning light. He wore a light blue shirt. She was in a lavender saree, walking slowly, eyes cast sideways.

Somewhere behind her, she felt footsteps. A presence. But she brushed it off — she was never one to notice who looked at her. Still, something tugged at her attention. Instinct, maybe.

Then their eyes met. A quiet, electric pause. She knew — he'd been watching her for a while. That moment, suspended in the silence of that hallway, became a memory she'd hold onto forever.

First look.

First day.

And unknowingly, the beginning of everything.

The cab rolled to a stop at her gate in barely ten minutes, jolting Bhavya out of her drifting dreams. With a reluctant sigh, she stepped out, her heart lingering somewhere between reality and imagination. In a secret, foolish corner of her mind, she wished for something utterly impossible — to see Deepak waiting for her, leaning casually against his famous car, the one with that fancy number she could never forget.

A soft, wistful smile played on her lips. Silly girl, she thought. That's never going to happen.

The evening air was thick with a loneliness she couldn't quite shake as she walked into her empty house. She tossed her bag aside and reached for her phone — a ritual born from hope, from habit. As her fingers slid across the screen, a reckless thought seized her.

What if I just text him?

"No," she whispered aloud, battling herself. You're always the one who texts first. Always the one who cares too much. But Bhavya knew herself too well — knew the aching impatience that clawed at her when it came to Deepak. Before she could talk herself out of it, her fingers were already typing, heart pounding in defiance of her better judgment:

"Dear Deepak, I wished to see you, but you had already left the office."

A breath hitched in her throat as she hit send. The moment the message was gone, a wave of guilt crashed over her, heavier than she expected. You shouldn't have done that, her mind scolded. You should have let it be. But it was too late.

Now, all she could do was wait.

She stared at the screen, willing the little blue ticks to appear, craving even the smallest sign that he had read her message, that somewhere, in some corner of his mind, she mattered. Seconds dragged into minutes. Minutes stretched into something heavier, lonelier.

Nothing.

Bhavya clutched her phone tighter, the silence louder than any answer she could have received.

A moment later, the weight of reality pressed down on her, sharp and unforgiving. Doubts curled around her heart like creeping vines, tightening with every passing second.

Is it right to feel this way? she asked herself. To harbor such emotions when you're already married, when you have a child waiting for you in the next room?

The guilt seeped in quietly, a slow, suffocating tide. She wasn't foolish enough to mistake her feelings for a harmless crush. No, it was something far deeper, something that lived in the spaces between her heartbeat — raw, consuming, undeniable.

It wasn't the thrill of forbidden excitement. It wasn't the loneliness of a fading marriage seeking an escape. It was something more dangerous: the feeling that, in another life, in another story, this young man could have been her whole world.

But life was not a story where she could simply rewrite the characters. Bhavya closed her eyes for a long moment, feeling the war raging inside her — between the woman she was, and the woman she longed, just for a fleeting second, to be.

About the Author:

Dr. Devika S received her PhD from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham and her post-graduation from The English and Foreign Languages University (formerly CIEFL). Her areas of interest include Travel Literature, East-West Encounter, Comparative Philosophy, World Literatures, Comparative Literature, Comparative Religions, Translation Studies, and Women's Studies. She is also a language trainer, academician, and writer, and has conducted language training programs for more than 500 trainees, including students and language teachers across Kerala. She currently teaches at SCMS Cochin School of Business, Ernakulam.