The mist clung to the hillside like an unfinished thought. From the ridge near Landour, David watched the pine trees blur into the sky. Somewhere ahead, wrapped in a brown jacket and framed by the smokily glow in her deeply mysterious eyes, stood Sabine Cross.
She had always appeared like that—graceful yet unhurried, as though time slowed down slightly in her presence. Her eyes, large and smoke like mountain mist after rain, seemed to hold entire winters inside them. Not sadness, exactly—but something adjacent to it.
“She belongs to no man and no city,” someone had once murmured in a bar in Rishikesh. David hadn’t forgotten that line. It fit Sabin’s personality far too well.
Murakami once wrote in his book, Norwegian woods, “You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.” David wondered what chapters lay behind Sabine’s quietness. She had a way of being completely present and entirely elsewhere at once—an art form only certain people seem to master.
Her presence had the strange effect of turning silence into something rich, like a secret almost shared.
She had a magnetic stillness, like the eye of a storm, and people were drawn to it, though most never realized why.
David never told her what stirred inside him. Not because it was too large—but because it was too delicate. The kind of feeling that couldn’t survive sunlight or scrutiny. He suspected she knew, in the way that some people just know the weather before it arrives. But nothing was ever spoken.Their friendship moved like fog—present, undefined. He feared revealing a secret to her would make it vanish.
Sometimes he left things unsaid in the folds of conversation. A too-careful laugh. Perhaps in a storybook that now lays in her backpack without explanation. “The most secret things are the hardest to say,” lingered in his mind. Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language.” David understood that now.
He would never tell her. But some mornings, like this one, he let the wind carry it.
And hoped the mountains were listening.
Sometimes, the closest we come to telling someone a secret… is simply being there, again and again, until the secret speaks for itself and then letter disappears in the mist like it was never there.
