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Some girls fall in love at sixteen. Others break hearts, write names in diaries, or cry into pillowcases soaked in midnight heartbreak.
But me?
I just watched from the sidelines—an outsider even in my own story.
My name is Aryana Das. I'm seventeen, live in a humid, sleepy corner of Northeast India, and I attend an all-girls school where the only thing louder than our morning assembly is the drama surrounding everyone's love life. Everyone… except me.
You'd think being surrounded by hundreds of girls—some giggling, some crying, some pretending not to care—would make me feel something. But most days, I felt like a ghost wearing a school uniform. Present, but never noticed.
I wasn't always like this. There was a time I laughed more. Smiled without feeling guilty. Back when life was simple.
My adoptive mother is a nurse. She works twelve-hour shifts at the city hospital and somehow still finds the energy to ask if I ate lunch. She earns about 1.5 lakhs a month. My father—well, the man I thought was my father—is a railway worker. A quiet man who smells of sweat and steel, earning 60,000 a month and never missing my school fees.
We live in a two-bedroom flat, which feels more like one and a half since the second room is mostly occupied by my seven-year-old sister's toys. She's not related to me by blood. None of them are.
But I didn't know that yet.
What I did know was that I was bored. Of everything.
Of the same routine.
Of the same tiled classroom filled with peeling walls and chalk dust.
Of hearing my friends scream over their boyfriends' texts or panic about cheating scandals like they were Shakespearean tragedies.
I didn't have a boyfriend. Never kissed anyone. Never even texted a guy in that way. And strangely, everyone knew that about me—as if it was some social experiment: "Let's watch the girl who's never been in love try to survive high school."
One of my friends, Priya, once told me during lunch break, "You're like… untouched snow. Pretty, but kind of frozen."
I smiled, half flattered, half insulted.
The truth was, I wanted to feel something. Anything. But love wasn't for people like me. My parents were too tired. Our house was too small. I didn't have the freedom to roam around after school or lie to my mom about going to a café to meet some guy with nice eyes. My life wasn't built for romance.
I was built for survival.
Every night after studying, I would lie on my bed, earphones plugged in, trying to make my own fantasy world. Sometimes, I imagined being rich. Not the Instagram-filter kind of rich. But born-into-it, palace-sized-home, silk-pillow rich. Where love would just show up at my door in a tuxedo.
But in reality, my walls were thin, and I could hear my sister crying in the next room because she dropped her toy car. My mom would rush in, exhausted but patient. My dad would be finishing his rice silently, never speaking unless spoken to.
That was my world.
Until the day it broke.
It started small. A misplaced file. A document I shouldn't have seen. I was helping my mom clean out her old drawer when I found it—my adoption papers. My name written in a different handwriting. Two names listed under "biological parents" that I didn't recognize. I froze.
My heart didn't pound.
It didn't ache.
It just… slowed down.
Like the silence before a landslide.
I put it back quietly. Pretended I never saw it. But something inside me had shifted forever.
That night, I couldn't sleep. My entire existence started feeling like someone else's story. I kept wondering: Who am I, really? Why didn't they tell me? Why now?
And then a thought struck me like lightning.
What if the reason I never felt like I belonged… is because I actually didn't?
I woke up the next morning with dark circles under my eyes and an invisible hole in my chest. No one noticed. My sister asked for toast. My mom was off to another long shift. My dad was fixing the ceiling fan with a bent screwdriver.
And I just sat there, silent, pretending my world hadn't just collapsed.
At school, the girls were buzzing about some new scandal—apparently, Riya had been caught kissing her senior boyfriend outside the library. I tried to laugh along. I tried to pretend. But all I could think about was the name on the paper.
Liliana Rosel.
A name I'd never heard. But one I'd never forget.
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To be continued…
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