Irfaan's One Side Love for Aleesha

It was September 2025. The beginning of college. Chennai was my city, my home ground. I had grown up here. I knew its streets, its heat, its rhythm.

But she was new to it. She had come all the way from Andhra Pradesh, stepping into a city she had never lived in before. And on that first day, in that new building full of strangers, she walked in.

Her name was Aleesha.

I didn't know it yet in that moment. But something in me, some part I didn't even know existed, just decided. Quietly. Completely. Without asking permission.

I don't know if she remembers it. I suspect she doesn't.

We were in the corridor, the kind of busy afternoon where everyone is moving and nobody is paying attention. And for one single second, her eyes met mine.

Not a long look. Not a meaningful one. Just an accident.
But it changed something in me that never changed back.

I, Irfaan, went home that evening and couldn't explain to myself what had happened. I just knew I'd carry that moment for a very long time.

I told nobody. Not a single soul.

My friends used to joke around and throw Aleesha's name at me sometimes, laughing, teasing, nudging. What they didn't know was how exactly right they were. They thought it was a game.

For me it was the one thing I held most carefully.

I noticed things about Aleesha that I don't think anyone else paid attention to.

There was this smile she had. Not the one she put on for people. The other one. The one that happened when something caught her off guard and she couldn't help it. When she didn't mean to smile but did anyway.

That was my favourite thing about Aleesha. The smile she didn't know she was giving.

I want to say it was fine. I want to say I handled it gracefully. And maybe, on the surface, I did.

I felt no anger. Truly. What I felt was harder to name. Something like standing at the edge of a door that had just closed, not with a slam, but softly. The kind of quiet close that hurts more.

Like something that could have been mine slipped past before I ever had a chance to reach for it.

There was the canteen. Every day, I would see them there. Aleesha and him, together. Happy in the way that people are when they don't notice anyone else around them.

And I would sit with that. Not making a scene. Not letting it show. Not telling anyone what I was carrying.

Just heartbroken in the most ordinary, invisible way.
The kind nobody around you ever notices.

Months passed. College moved forward the way college does. Assignments, exams, laughter in corridors, evenings that blurred into each other.

And through all of it, I, Irfaan, kept loving Aleesha in silence. Still noticing. Still carrying. Still choosing, every single day, to keep it inside rather than risk changing something that wasn't mine to change.

She is still with him. She doesn't know any of this exists.