For myKhushbu,my wifeyy,my whole home.

My Khushbu,

I know you are angry with me right now, and I am not going to pretend otherwise or tiptoe around it. You have every right to be. I sat here for a long time before I even started writing, because the last thing I want is to hand you a bunch of pretty words to hide behind. So let me just say it plainly first: I was wrong, I hurt you, and I am sorry. Not the quick, throwaway sorry people say to end a fight, but the kind that has kept me awake, staring at my phone, rereading our chats and hating the version of me that said what I said.

The distance between us is hard enough on a normal day. But when we are fighting, it turns into something almost cruel. On a good day I can close my eyes and feel like you are close. When you are upset with me, those same kilometres stretch out like they are mocking me. I cannot reach over and hold your hand. I cannot see your face soften. I cannot pull you into me and let the silence do the apologising that my clumsy words keep failing at. All I have is this little screen, and a heart that feels too big and too heavy for my chest tonight.

So please, before anything else, let me take this on my shoulders where it belongs. I am not writing to explain myself out of it or to make you feel like you overreacted, because you did not. I am writing because I love you, and because loving you means being brave enough to sit in the discomfort of having let you down, and still choosing to reach for you anyway.

Here is something I keep learning about us, over and over. The whole weight of this distance, every mile of it, just disappears the second I hear your voice. You could be in the middle of scolding me and my heart still does that stupid, helpless thing where it settles, because it is you. When you laugh, even a small tired laugh, the room I am sitting in changes. When I picture your smile, that exact one where your eyes go a little narrow and mischief sneaks in, I forget to be sad. That is not a small thing. That is the whole miracle of you. You are not a place I visit. You are the place I come back to. You are home.

I think about our meetings more than I ever tell you. Not in some vague, dreamy way, but in specific, physical detail that I hold onto like they are keeping me alive. I remember the exact weight of you when you hug me, how you kind of collapse into my chest like you finally get to put something down. I remember the warmth of your skin, the way your breathing slows when we are just lying there, the little sigh you make right before you fall asleep on my arm. Those quiet moments, where nothing dramatic is happening and we are just two people existing next to each other in peace, those are the ones I replay the most.

I remember the first time I held you, in July, and how my whole body did not know what to do with that much happiness at once. I remember the taste of our first kiss and how everything I had rehearsed in my head went completely blank. I remember that morning our first real kiss turned into something deeper, and how it did not feel like a beginning so much as a recognition, like some part of me finally exhaled and said, oh, there you are, I have been looking for you.

And then that ridiculous, beautiful three minutes on the Alwar platform. You were on your way to Manali, the train was not going to wait, we both knew it, and we did it anyway. Three minutes. People would laugh at us for that, for the effort of it, for arranging our entire day around an embrace shorter than a song. Let them laugh. I would do it again a hundred times over. Because that is the truth of what you are to me. I will take three minutes with you over three peaceful, comfortable months of anyone else. You are worth every train schedule, every awkward plan, every long night bus, every single mile.

I think about the afternoon you fed me that khichdi you made with your own hands, the vagharela one, sitting so close to me, and I swear I have never tasted anything like it and I do not think I ever will. It was not just food. It was you deciding to take care of me. It was a glimpse of the ordinary life I want with you so badly it aches, the boring beautiful everyday of it, mornings and meals and small routines and you, always you, in the middle of all of it.

That is what makes fighting with you so unbearable. It is not the argument itself. It is that for a few hours I lose access to the one person who makes the world make sense, and I have no way to physically fix it, no way to close the gap, no way to just look at you and let you see how much I mean it. I have replayed our fight so many times, catching all the places I should have listened more and defended myself less, where I let my ego talk when I should have let my love talk. I am learning. Slowly, stubbornly, but I am learning, because you are worth becoming a better man for.

Please do not ever mistake a bad moment for the shape of us. We are so much bigger than any single argument. I know we will fight again someday, that is just what happens when two people care this fiercely and are stuck this far apart. But hear me clearly: there is nothing you could do, no fight ugly enough, no silence long enough, no distance wide enough, that would make me stop choosing you. My commitment to you does not flicker when things get hard. It gets louder. When we are okay, I love you. When we are fighting, I still love you, I am just also scared, and the two feelings get tangled up and come out wrong.

You are my wifeyy. Not a maybe, not a someday, not a nice idea I am trying out. My wife. My partner in the realest sense of that word, the one who gets the tired version of me and the silly version and the scared version and stays. When I imagine my future, there is no scenario in it where you are not standing right next to me. Every plan I make quietly has you folded into it. The home, the mornings, the arguments we will laugh about later, the growing old, the everything. It is all built around you. You are not a chapter of my life. You are the whole spine that holds the book together.

So I am asking you, gently, with my whole heart in my hands: please do not stay far from me tonight, not in the way that counts. Be angry, I deserve some of it. Make me earn my way back, I will. But let me back in. Let me be the one who holds you until this feeling passes, even if for now it has to be through a phone, through this letter, through the promise I keep making and intend to keep for the rest of my life. I miss you in a way that does not have a proper word. Not just missing your face, though God, I miss your face. Missing the peace of you. The safety of you. The us of us.

You are the best thing that has ever happened to a boy who did not know he was waiting for anyone. I am so unbelievably proud to be yours, proud to call myself your husband, proud that out of this whole enormous world you picked me to fight with and forgive and love. Come back to me, my love. I am right here, and I am not going anywhere. I never was.