The Distance Between Dreams

Days turned into weeks, and the spaces between them widened like unmarked roads.
Anaya buried herself in blueprints, her desk littered with drafts layered over drafts. Every revision demanded by her firm was met, but at a cost her eyes burned from sleepless nights, her shoulders knotted from hours hunched over lines that never seemed perfect enough.
Kabir threw himself into recipes, but his kitchen no longer hummed with joy. His investors’ voices echoed in his mind predictability, scale, profits. He began to measure ingredients with ruthless precision, stripping away the improvisation that once made his pastries sing. Customers still came, but he felt like a ghost in his own cafe.
They exchanged messages at first. Short ones. Busy tonight. Sorry. Next week?
Then the texts grew sparse. Eventually, silence filled the gaps.
When Anaya passed the cafe late one evening, she saw the lights still burning inside. Kabir sat at the counter, notebook open, but his pen unmoving. She wanted to walk in, to sit across from him, to say, I miss you. But her feet stayed frozen to the pavement.
Inside, Kabir lifted his gaze to the window, catching a glimpse of her figure framed by the streetlight. His chest tightened. But he didn’t move either. By the time he blinked, she was gone.
At work, her colleagues praised her dedication. Investors complimented his discipline. From the outside, they were succeeding.
Inside, they were unraveling.
Anaya’s sketches felt empty, as though something vital had been drained from the lines. Kabir’s pastries looked perfect but tasted lifeless to him, hollow in ways customers could never notice.
Each was climbing, yet each step upward seemed to carry them farther from the other.
One night, unable to sleep, Anaya whispered into the darkness, “Kabir.”
Miles away, Kabir closed his notebook with a sigh, whispering the same name.
Neither of them heard the other.