The email draft had been open for seventeen minutes.
Meera knew this because the cursor blinked with the kind of patience that felt accusatory—steady, unhurried, unafraid of time. The subject line was empty. The body held only a single word she hadn't meant to type.
Okay.
She deleted it.
The cursor blinked again, as if waiting for better instructions.
She had told herself she wouldn't open the message. Archiving it had felt like a solution yesterday—tidy, decisive. But morning had a way of rearranging certainty. The inbox refreshed, and there it was again, resurrected by habit rather than intent.
Unknown Sender
(1 unread message)
She didn't open it. Instead, she opened a new email and addressed it to herself. A trick she used when thoughts crowded her head—write without sending, confess without consequence.
If I open it, she typed, I don't know who I'll be afterward.
The sentence sat there, naked and honest. She stared at it until the words lost shape.
Her phone buzzed on the desk. A reminder for class. Life, insistent and useful, tugged her back into motion.
The lecture hall smelled like dust and ambition. Students shuffled in, laptops clicking open, voices overlapping. Meera set up her slides and began talking about timing—how photographs weren't stolen moments but negotiated ones.
"You wait," she told them. "You let the subject choose you back."
A student raised a hand. "What if the moment passes?"
"Then it wasn't yours," Meera said, surprising herself with the firmness of it. "Some things ask for patience. Others ask for restraint. Knowing which is the work."
As she spoke, she felt the truth of it settle into her bones. The blinking cursor in her inbox felt less like a threat and more like a test she didn't have to take today.
After class, she lingered in the hallway, answering questions. Rayan leaned against the wall nearby, flipping through a catalog. He waited until the last student left before speaking.
"You seem distracted," he said, not unkindly.
"Do I?" She smiled. "Occupational hazard."
He studied her for a moment, then nodded. "If you need space, say the word. We can push the meeting."
"I don't need space," she said, then paused. "I need… time."
He smiled faintly. "That's a reasonable request."
The ease of it startled her—the way he accepted the boundary without probing. It made the blinking cursor feel louder by comparison, a relic of a language she was learning to unlearn.
Back at the studio, rain traced thin lines down the windows. Meera sat at her desk, reopened the unsent email to herself, and added another line.
I don't owe the past immediacy.
She closed the draft without saving.
Then—slowly, deliberately—she opened the archived message.
The text was short. Unadorned.
I won't ask you to read this. I'm writing it so I don't send it again.
—A.
That was all.
No confession.
No request.
No apology wrapped in explanation.
Her chest tightened, not with panic but with something closer to recognition. This wasn't a door being pushed open. It was a door being acknowledged—and left alone.
She closed the message and archived it again.
This time, the cursor in her inbox went still.
That night, she returned to the email draft addressed to herself. The blinking cursor waited, faithful as ever. She typed two words and saved the file.
Not today.
She shut the laptop, turned off the lights, and stood by the window, watching the city settle. Somewhere, someone was learning how to wait without demanding an answer.
So was she.