Lonely Passenger
“Did you reach home?” she asked.
My car took the last right, towards the 1st main road of my block. Street painted with the warm lights yet it felt cold.
“If you have, I’ll hang up.”
I looked at the apartment building in front of me. My engine was still running. The dashboard cast a quiet amber glow over my hands. The entrance, to my building, was twenty metres away. Home might as well have been somewhere else, in another city.
“Time for a detour,” I said.
She laughed. Not loudly. The kind of laugh that exists only because someone has known you long enough to recognize when you’re being ridiculous.
“Seriously. Tell me.”
“Yeah,” I said after a pause. “Just reached.”
The words settled between us like coins dropped into deep water.
I let out a long sigh. It escaped before I could decide whether to keep it.
“Okay,” she said softly. “Goodbye.”
“Yeah… goodbye. Take care. Dhyan rakho apna.”
The line went dead.
Silence has strange physics. It doesn’t arrive all at once. First, a voice disappears. Then the expectation of another sentence. Finally, the awareness that there will be neither. A second later, CarPlay woke up from where it had been interrupted.
The opening guitar drifted into the cabin. So… so you think you can tell…
Pink Floyd — “Wish You Were Here.”
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I smiled.
Not because coincidence means anything. The universe, as far as I can tell, is too indifferent to leave little notes folded into songs. Yet every now and then it behaves like an old librarian who quietly places the right book into the wrong hands.
I wondered if this was one of those moments.
Or maybe I simply wanted it to be.
The infotainment system displayed the album art. Without thinking too much about it, I took a photograph.
For a while I stared at the picture before pressing Send.
No caption.
The song had already said too much.
The message flew away into that invisible place where words become waiting.
I stayed in the driver’s seat long after the final chorus dissolved. The guitar seemed less like music and more like weather moving through an empty valley. Every note lingered for a fraction longer than it should have, as if reluctant to leave. Then the last chord faded.
The cabin became impossibly still.
Outside, the world continued with its ordinary obligations. Security guard, next door, seated on his chair staring into oblivion. A dog walked by.
Inside the car, I remained suspended between a disconnected phone call and an unread message.
Loneliness, I realized, isn’t always an empty room.
Sometimes it’s a passenger who knows every road you’ve taken, says nothing the entire journey, and still manages to make you feel understood.
I switched off the ignition.
The music had gone.
The silence stayed.
