Let me tell you something about unfinished people.
Not unfinished in a broken way. Unfinished in the way that some faces stay with you for no reason. Some name surface at 2am when everything is quiet and you haven’t even been thinking about them. Some people just live in you, rent-free, for years- and you never fully understand why.
This is one of those stories.
Him
Pu was the kind of boy that made everything around him look like a backdrop. Same school. Same corridors. And even as a kid, you just knew— this one’s different. His face looked like someone had taken their time with it. Cherry on top, his father was a politician. He walked through school like the place was slightly too small for him, which it probably was.
But here’s the thing Ki remembered about him. The thing that didn’t match any of that. He was sick.
It was physically visible which made it obvious— he had a hole in his chest. An actual physical condition. And something about that one detail, in the middle of all that effortless everything else, made him human in a way nothing else did. It’s strange what sticks with you about a person. Not the status. Not the face. That. The fragile thing.
Ki filed it away without realising she was filing it away.
She also heard things over the years, the way you hear things about people who exist just outside your reach. Girls from her 11th and 12th standard— genuinely beautiful girls, girls who had no shortage of options— apparently lost their minds over him. And the most popular girl from her circle, the one everyone knew, the one who set the standard wherever she went— she was his girlfriend at some point.
Ki noted that too. Without meaning to.
Her
Ki was never the obvious one in the room. She wasn’t the girl people wrote about or photographed or put on a pedestal. She was something quieter, something no one bothered to read or say something that took longer to read— like a book with an understated cover that ruins you by the last page. She didn’t compete for attention. Didn’t need the room. She moved like someone who had nothing to prove, which, as it turns out, is the most attractive thing a person can do.
Yoga. Not gym. Not hustle. Something slower, more internal— the kind of discipline thats works from the inside out.
She wasn’t trying to be anything. She just was. And that, in a world full of performing, is its own kind of extraordinary.
The First Almost
Years passed. Life happened.
And then one night, in their early-mid twenties, the same city put them in the same club.
They danced.
Not planned. Not romantic. Just two people in the same space with music doing what music does— dissolving the careful distances people keep between themselves. Something moved between them that night. Electric, brief, inconclusive. The kind of thing that feels like the beginning of something when you’re in the middle of it.
He texted her on Facebook messenger after. And Ki— didn’t reply with something flirty or safe. Her first message to him was this— “Do you still have that hole in your chest?”
She had carried that detail for years without knowing it. And here it was. Surfacing. Her way of saying— I remember you. Probably not the version everyone sees. The real one.
He didn’t answer the question. Not directly.
But his profile was right there, and scattered across it were photos. Shirtless. Gym lightning. A chest that had clearly been worked on with serious intention— muscled and sculpted and solid. The boy who had been fragile at the centre had become a man who had armoured himself from the outside in. She looked at those photos longer than she’d ever admit out loud.
So that’s who he became, she thought.
But again— neither of them pushed forward. Maybe she didn’t want to seem too eager. Maybe he didn’t know how to respond to a question that honest. Maybe both of them were just waiting for the other to want it first, and neither one blinked.
It fizzled. Quietly. No drama. No closure.
Just— nothing. The way so many almost-things end.
The Pub
Fast forward. Several years later.
Ki walked into a pub and she was— there’s no other way to say this— that woman that night. The one the room rearranged itself around without being asked. The singers on stage were stealing glances mid-song. The owner who happens to be her friend came to her table personally which he doesn’t normally. Good-looking men, the kind who usually let the world come to them, came to her.
She wasn’t performing any of it. She never performs. She just showed up as herself and apparently that was more than enough.
And Pu was there.
Of all the nights. Of all the pubs.
Here’s the part that makes it strange— they didn’t end up across the room from each other. They ended up at the bar counter. Right to next to each other. His people on his side, her people on hers, and two of them sitting side by side like strangers who had known each other since childhood.
Neither said a word to each other.
The Mirror
The early part of that evening was odd.
Both of them were quiet in a way that had nothing to do with the noise around them. Not peaceful quiet. The other kind— the kind where you’re somewhere between two versions of yourself and haven’t quite landed yet. Both sitting with their own silence. Their own weight.
Ki kept her eyes down. Her drink. The counter. Safe things.
Right in front of them, behind all the bottles and glasses lined up on the shelves, was a mirror. Long and wide, the way bar mirrors always are. And Ki understood, with the sharp awareness of someone pretending very hard not to notice someone— that if she looked straight ahead, she would see him.
Not directly. In the reflection.
Once— just once— her eyes drifted up. Just for a half second. Just to test herself.
She felt it before she saw it. That specific warmth of a gaze that isn’t random. That isn’t general. That is pointed, and quiet, and coming from somewhere intentional.
She thought— she thought— Pu was looking at her through the mirror.
She couldn’t be sure. She didn’t let herself look long enough to be sure.
She dropped her eyes back to the counter. And she did not look up again.
Maybe she imagined it.
Maybe she didn’t.
She chose not to find out.
Drinks continued. The night loosened. Both of them dissolve back into their own circles— his laughter, her conversations, the comfortable noise of a pub doing its job. The strangeness of the counter faded in the background.
And then Ki went into the smoking zone.
Five Seconds
The smoking zone was separated from the main drinking area by a glass partition. Clear, clean, floor-to-ceiling. On one side, the hum and heat of the pub. On the other, a quieter kind of air.
Ki stood on her side. Cigarette, or a moment, or whatever she had come for. And without planning it, without deciding it, her eyes lifted and traveled across the glass. It was the way you look at a candle flame without deciding to— involuntary, pulled, helpless to the thing your eyes finds in a crowded room. Her eyes landed on Pu.
Pu was a few metres away in the drinking area. Surrounded by his friends, drink in hand, head thrown back laughing. Not a polished laugh. A real one— the uninhibited kind that only comes when you’re genuinely at ease. He looked good. Comfortable. Exactly where he was supposed to be.
He hadn’t seen her yet.
So for just a moment she had him without him knowing. And something moved through her— not longing exactly, not sadness exactly— something older than both those words.
“There is something that happens— and if it’s happened to you, you know exactly what this is— when a specific person is looking at you. Not any person. A specific one. It doesn’t feel like other stares. It has different weight. A different temperature. It travels differently.”
And then he felt it too. He turned.
No scanning the room. No searching. He turned and found her immediately— directly, like his body knew the coordinates. His laughter stopped.
Not awkwardly. Not with embarrassment. It just— ended. Mid-sound. Like someone had gently pressed pause. His face didn’t go serious. It went present. Fully, suddenly, completely present in a way faces rarely are in loud rooms full of people.
He looked at her.
She looked at him.
That’s it. That’s all happened. But let me try to make you feel it.
Imagine a pub full of people. Music going. Conversations overlapping. Glasses clinking. Not one single person in that room aware that anything is happening.
And in the middle of all that noise— two people on opposite sides of a glass wall, completely still, completely locked. Not smiling. Not waving. Not making it easy or casual or small. Just— eyes. Holding. Still.
Five seconds maybe. Could've been three. Could've been ten. Time stops working correctly in moments like that and you can never measure it accurately afterward.
But in those seconds — everything that had never been said between them was somehow in the air. Visible, Unspoken. Real…maybe…maybe not.
And then Ki looked away.
She had to. One more second and she wouldn't have been able to. One more second and it would've become something she'd have to make a decision about, right there, in a loud pub, through a wall of glass, and she wasn't ready for that.
So she looked away.
Exhaled.
On the other side of the glass, Pu watched the moment end. He stayed with it — just a beat too long for someone who supposedly barely knew her. Then he turned back to his drink. His friends. His life, exactly where he left it.
They didn't speak that night.
Didn't nod. Didn't acknowledge. Left separately, back into their own worlds, carrying whatever that was.
After
Ki thinks about it.
Not every day. But in the quiet moments — the ones between awake and asleep — it comes back. His laughter stopping. His eyes finding hers without even looking for them. The mirror at the bar counter. The question she may never know the answer to.
She's not on social media. Which means he can't find her. Which means if any part of that night stayed with him — and she suspects, quietly, that it did — it has nowhere to go. No profile to check. No pictures to scroll through. No way to make her ordinary.
She stays, in his memory, exactly as she was through that glass.
And Pu goes back to his life. His world has always been full and loud and generous to him. He has no shortage of anything.
But sometimes — maybe in the middle of a laugh — something surfaces. Not a fantasy. Not a plan. Just a question.
That woman through the glass.
The one who asked about the hole in my chest when we were young.
Why didn't I say something.
What This Is
This isn't a love story. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
It's something more honest. Two people who have circled each other since childhood without ever quite arriving. A sick boy who became a man covered in muscle. A quiet girl who became the woman the room couldn't stop looking at.
A bar mirror. A maybe. A glass wall. Five seconds.
And two people on either side of it, wondering the same thing —
What if there was no glass.
P.S: Some stories don’t need an ending. They just need to be felt.