Never – Ending Love

Chapter 1

The Girl Whose Smile I Couldn’t Draw

Some people leave your life without ever truly leaving your heart.

The pencil stopped moving.

I stared at the paper beneath my hand, my fingers resting against the wooden pencil as if they had forgotten what to do next.

There she was.

Her long hair fell naturally around her shoulders. Her clothes were almost finished, and the shadows on her face were finally beginning to look right. Even the smallest details seemed to come together, one careful stroke at a time.

Everything looked fine.

Everything except her smile.

I tilted my head to the left, then to the right.

Too wide.

I erased it.

Too straight.

I erased it again.

The next attempt looked like someone else’s smile entirely.

“Seriously?” I muttered, leaning back in my chair.

Another page lay crumpled beside the desk. There were others near my feet, each carrying a slightly different version of the same face.

Seven or eight sheets.

All because of one smile.

Anyone else might have laughed at how ridiculous it was. I almost laughed at myself, too. I could draw the shape of her face, the fall of her hair, and the quiet expression in her eyes.

But the moment I tried to draw that little curve on her lips, something went wrong.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to draw a smile.

I just couldn’t draw hers.

I looked at the reference photograph beside my sketchbook.

She was looking slightly away from the camera. Her expression was gentle, almost playful, as if someone had said something that caught her by surprise.

And there it was again.

That smile.

The same one I remembered from years ago.

I picked up the pencil and tried once more.

A small curve.

A little shadow beneath the lower lip.

A faint line at the corner.

I stopped.

For a few seconds, I thought I had finally done it.

Then I noticed the difference.

The drawing looked beautiful enough, perhaps. But it didn’t feel like her.

I placed the pencil down.

“Why is it so difficult to draw you?” I whispered.

The room offered no answer.

Only the quiet hum of the fan above me.

I leaned back and closed my eyes, trying to remember the last time I had seen her in person.

Three years ago?

Maybe four.

Time had moved so quickly that the exact number no longer mattered. What mattered was that we had once shared the same college classrooms, the same ordinary days, the same small moments that had seemed unimportant back then.

We had been students in +2, Grade Eleven and Grade Twelve.

Back then, I never imagined that one day I would sit alone in a quiet room, staring at a photograph of her and struggling to draw a smile I had once seen with my own eyes.

I hadn’t known that ordinary memories could become so precious after the people in them were gone from your daily life.

I hadn’t known that a person could remain in your thoughts for so long without being a part of your present.

And I certainly hadn’t known that a simple photograph could bring so many old feelings rushing back.

I opened my eyes and looked at her picture again.

I remembered the college corridors. The classrooms. The familiar noise of students talking between periods.

And her.

I remembered noticing her before I understood why I kept noticing her.

At first, it was nothing I could explain. Maybe it was the way she smiled, or the way a completely ordinary moment seemed different whenever she was nearby.

I didn’t know when admiration became affection.

I only knew that, somewhere along the way, seeing her had become something I quietly looked forward to.

She never belonged to me.

We were classmates, not a couple. We had our own lives, our own friends, and our own paths to follow.

Still, I had developed feelings for her.

And eventually, she found out.

Even now, I could remember the nervousness of that time. I had spent so long wondering what would happen if she knew that, when she finally did, I wasn’t sure where to look.

She smiled shyly.

That was all.

No grand confession. No dramatic promise. No answer that explained everything.

Just a smile.

Perhaps it meant she was embarrassed. Perhaps she didn’t know what to say. I could never be certain what she had felt in that moment.

But I remembered how I felt.

For a brief second, the world seemed softer.

And that small memory stayed with me long after our college days came to an end.

Life continued, as it always does.

People moved forward. Plans changed. Responsibilities arrived. The future demanded attention.

We went our separate ways.

There was no dramatic farewell that I could point to and call the end of everything. We simply stopped being part of each other’s everyday lives.

Days became months.

Months became years.

And somewhere in the middle of all that time, I realised I hadn’t forgotten her.

I had tried to focus on my own future. There were things I wanted to achieve, things I needed to learn, and a life I still had to build for myself.

Yet sometimes, without warning, a memory would return.

A classroom.

A familiar face.

A shy smile.

I would remember her for a moment, then return to whatever I was doing.

I never knew whether she remembered those days in the same way.

Perhaps she had forgotten most of them. Perhaps they were only ordinary memories to her.

She had her own life, after all.

I had no right to expect her to carry the same feelings I did.

And I didn’t want to turn a memory into a chain around either of us.

Still, there were things I had never found the courage to say, and moments I wished I could revisit—not to change her mind about anything, but simply to experience those days once more with the understanding I had now.

Then, recently, I found her photograph again.

I had lost the old one somewhere along the way. I thought I had lost the chance to see that familiar face again, even if only through a picture.

But there she was.

A new photograph.

A familiar smile.

And suddenly, the years between us seemed both enormous and strangely small.

I saved the picture and stared at it longer than I intended.

Then I opened my sketchbook.

I don’t know why I decided to draw her. Maybe I wanted to preserve a memory in a way that a photograph couldn’t give me. Maybe I wanted to see whether my hands could capture what my mind had kept for so long.

Or maybe I simply wanted to try.

I began with her hair.

Then her face.

Then the details of her clothes.

Everything went reasonably well until I reached her smile.

That was where I had spent the last hour.

That was where seven or eight sheets of paper had failed me.

I pulled the sketchbook closer and picked up the pencil again.

This time, I didn’t try to make the smile perfect.

I studied the photograph carefully. I followed the curve of her lips with my eyes, noticed the small differences between the two corners, and drew as lightly as I could.

One stroke.

Then another.

I paused.

The smile was still imperfect.

But for the first time that evening, I didn’t erase it.

I looked at the portrait for a long while.

Perhaps the problem was never that I couldn’t draw her smile.

Perhaps I was trying too hard to put an entire memory into a few lines of graphite.

A drawing could preserve the shape of a face. It could capture the direction of someone’s gaze, the curve of their lips, and the way light rested against their features.

But how could a pencil capture the years between two people?

How could a few lines express a feeling that had survived without promises, without a relationship, and without knowing whether it would ever be returned?

I didn’t have an answer.

So I wrote her name in small letters beneath the portrait.

Then I closed the sketchbook.

Outside, the evening had grown darker. The room was quiet again, and my unfinished drawing rested on the desk beneath the warm light of the lamp.

I knew I couldn’t go back to those college days.

I couldn’t ask time to slow down, and I couldn’t know what the future might bring.

All I could do was continue living my own life, one day at a time.

And perhaps, if our paths ever crossed again, I would show her the portrait.

Not as a confession.

Not as a request for an answer.

Just as a small piece of a memory I had carried for years.

I switched off the lamp.

But before leaving the room, I turned back once more.

The portrait was still there.

The smile wasn’t perfect.

Yet somehow, I found myself smiling at it.

Because for the first time, I understood something I hadn’t understood when I started drawing.

I didn’t need the picture to bring her back.

I only wanted to remember.

And I had finally begun.

End of Chapter 1

Some stories begin when two people meet. Others begin years later, when one of them finally understands what the memory meant.