The message never got delivered.

I found out later that her phone was crushed in the accident. At the time, I just assumed she hadn’t seen it yet. It was about a cricket match. India had beaten Bangladesh by one run the previous night, in one of those finishes that makes you want to call someone immediately. I waited. I assumed she’d reply when she got around to it.

She never got around to it.

Menaka and I used to ride together. We’d talk sport the way some people talk religion, with conviction and no apology. The previous evening, I had told her I couldn’t join the ride the next morning. I was traveling in a few days (for two months) and (hence) had things to sort. It was a completely ordinary decision. The kind you make a hundred times without thinking, because you assume there will be a next time.

There wasn’t.

Grief has a strange architecture. In the beginning, it’s loud and shapeless. Then it quietly builds walls. I carried guilt for nearly a year, the specific kind that comes from proximity, from being one decision away from having been there. The guilt took more than a year to resolve. The grief took longer, and I’m not sure it ever fully finishes. It just changes texture.

What stayed, what I couldn’t shake, was the message.

Not the sentiment in it. The fact of it. The unread, undelivered, pointless cheerfulness of a cricket update that had nowhere to go. I’ve since seen posts about the loneliness of being left on unread, of a message with no response. I even replied to one recently, saying that what’s scarier than no response is the message not being delivered at all. I said it without fully thinking about where I knew that from. Then I thought about it.

A decade is long enough to see what grief does to the living.

It doesn’t just make you sad. It makes you a different kind of attentive. Not always, not every day, but in small recurring ways. I started noticing the gap between what I thought about people and what I actually said to them. It’s embarrassing, how wide that gap usually is. We run entire inner monologues about the people we care about, and almost none of it reaches them. We think: they know. We think: there’s time. We think: it would be weird to just say it out of nowhere.

And then sometimes there isn’t time, and it wasn’t weird, and they didn’t know.

I’ve written around this loss more than I’ve written about it. A piece on living like tomorrow isn’t guaranteed. An anonymous messaging app, built on the simple premise that people should be able to say the things they’ve been holding, while the person is still around to read it. Ten years of circling the same idea from different angles. It took me this long to write it plainly.

Some losses change what you build. Some change what you say. This one changed both, slowly, imperfectly, in ways I’m still figuring out.

I don’t think about the ride. I’ve made peace with that decision, or something close enough to peace that I can leave it alone. What I think about is the message. The ordinary, throwaway, joyful cricket message that became, without warning, the last thing I ever tried to say to her.

It wasn’t the message I would have chosen, if I’d known.

But maybe that’s the point. We never get to choose the last thing. We only get to choose the things before it, and whether we actually say them, or keep assuming there’s time.

There usually is. Until there isn’t.