Some stories don’t begin with clarity. They begin with a blur—of rain on glass, of distant laughter, of questions that never knew they were questions. Mine began in that soft murkiness, not with a loud realization, but with the quiet roll of thunder, far away.

I was thirteen. An age when your body grows faster than your heart knows how to follow. An age where silence weighs more than words.

She wasn’t someone the world stopped for. Not someone who turned heads when she walked down the corridor, or whose perfume lingered like a memory. No, Mali was quiet, like freshly turned pages in a library no one visited. She wore her uniform slightly loose, her hair always tied into a precise ponytail, not a strand out of place. But I noticed the way she pressed her thumb into her palm when she was nervous. The way her voice never trembled, yet her fingers did.

It was the second week of school when she came into view—not as a girl, not as someone from the opposite row, but as something else entirely. Something like… light. Soft, unthreatening, unaware of its own glow. Her laugh cut through the rain one day, and I turned to find her crouched under the stairwell with two other girls, her eyes half-mooned in joy. Something inside me shifted. A quiet bloom I didn’t have words for.

From that day, I began writing her name in the margins of my notebook. Not deliberately. Not even consciously. It just... appeared. Sometimes in cursive. Sometimes in bold. Always tucked between equations and essay drafts, like a password only I knew.

Our section had to merge with another due to low enrollment that year, and it turned out she was in the other class. We now shared benches, hallways, and morning assembly lines. I began to observe more than I should have. The way she chewed the back of her pen. The way she nodded a little too early when the teacher asked if everyone understood.

Once, during art class, I sat across from her. She drew flowers with shaky outlines but confident colors. I watched her from the corner of my eye as she smeared yellow paint into the petals with her fingers. It wasn’t the art that caught me—it was her concentration. That soft furrow between her brows, like she was trying to make something perfect in a world that didn’t let her be.

I never spoke to her.

Not really.

A few weeks later, a notice came. The school was over-admitting students for the new year, and a few names were selected to shift into a separate academic hostel on the other side of town starting the following term. My name was on the list. Not hers.

The evening before I left, I watched her from behind the library glass, sitting alone with a copy of some novel I couldn't name. She tucked her legs under the chair, chin balanced on her palm. Outside, the thunder rolled again—not loud, but low. A rumble that shook the air like an old memory returning. I stood there for minutes, trying to memorize everything. Her posture. The way the yellow light haloed her hair. The creak of the ceiling fan above.

I left without goodbye.

Some goodbyes are too loud. Some silences louder.

And that was the first thunder—not the kind that brings rain, but the kind that warns of it. A foretelling of all the storms yet to come.

I did not know it then, but that gentle ache would become the template for all my heartbreaks. That in chasing light, I would begin to discover my shadow.

And somewhere, far off in the folds of time, someone would say: "That boy, he fell in love with the idea of light… before he ever understood his own darkness."

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

This is how it started. With a name in the margin. With a laugh under a stairwell. With the first thunder, long before the rain.

~shivirstoriesep1

(THE DISCOVERY OF THE LIGHT)