They had fallen into an unspoken pattern.
Not lovers, not strangers, something in between. A strange, delicate space where words were never quite enough, but silence said too much. Everyone else would have called them friends, but both of them knew better. There was a charge beneath the banter, a secret language in the teasing, a quiet tenderness tucked in every exchange.
They had planned to meet before their holidays, a chance to see each other without the interruptions of the noise. But life intervened, as it often does, and the meeting slipped away.
The night before she left, the girl felt the weight of the unsaid pressing down on her. If she left without hearing his voice, without leaving some trace of herself with him, the absence would be unbearable. So she called.
The boy picked up.
There was laughter in the beginning, as there always was, their conversation folding into easy banter. But beneath her laughter, she tried, gently, carefully, to push at the edges of his guard. To see if he might slip, if he might admit, even in a half-sentence, how much he cared. But he was too careful, too skilled at dancing around the heart of things. He didn’t give her the words she wanted. Instead, he promised: “When I’m back, face to face.”
It wasn’t enough, but she took it.
They left, and in their absence, a peculiar rule wrapped around them: no calls, no messages, no direct contact. For two people who had grown used to sharing most things, jokes, updates, and fragments of their day, the silence was brutal.
And so began a different kind of story, not a single tale, but a series of quiet letters, daily fragments of longing and presence, gathered under the name When You Are Away.
It is here, in those daily entries, that the story of absence and connection continued to unfold. Readers could follow along, not just as spectators, but as witnesses to the fragile, tender thread between two people who had not yet dared to say aloud what their hearts already knew.
Day 1 Here
Written by Abii