When Time Stands Still

There are nights when love feels as though the whole world has shifted its weight to make room for it. The air changes, the light bends, even the silence carries a hum. You catch someone’s eyes across a room and the rest of the scene blurs, as though a director has pulled the camera tight on that single glance. A glass clinks, music continues, people laugh, but none of it reaches you. Time slows, folds, holds. That is what it feels like when souls recognise each other.

I think of rain-soaked streets where we ran like children, shoes slipping against cobblestones, our laughter louder than the storm. Every drop of water shimmered beneath the lamps, as though the heavens had decided to drench us in silver. There was no script, no rehearsal, just two people soaked to the skin, alive in the kind of way you never forget. I can still feel the moment, my hand warm in his, my heart wild, the taste of rain on my lips. If cinema ever captured truth, it was there.

There are quieter scenes too, candlelight spilling across a table, shadows flickering against the wall. A glass of wine half-forgotten between us, conversation drifting into the kind that only happens at night, when the world has gone quiet and honesty feels less frightening. The kind of conversation that unravels slowly, delicately, until you look up and realise hours have passed, and you have been changed by nothing more than words and presence. The flicker of the candle, the softness of the gaze, the quiet of the room, and somehow, it feels infinite.

And then there are the silences, the ones that carry more dialogue than language could. A train platform at dusk, cold air circling like ghosts, the sound of arrivals and departures echoing all around. His hand brushing mine, deliberate yet trembling, as though the universe might collapse if our fingers truly intertwined. The train came, the whistle blew, people rushed and scattered, but in that moment, everything else was background noise. It felt like the whole station belonged to us, like every person, every detail, every passing second was only there to frame the pause between two souls.

Love has a way of transforming the simplest gestures into scenes too exquisite to be explained. A stolen glance across a library table, the brush of a shoulder in a crowded street, laughter erupting over nothing at all. They are fragments, but each one burns itself into memory as though it were a scene worth replaying again and again. And perhaps that is the mystery: what others might call ordinary, I can only call holy.

Not every story lasts a lifetime. Some love stories flare like fireworks, brilliant, brief, unforgettable. Some linger like an old record, spinning gently, softly, until the last note fades into silence. And some, the rarest of all, remain steady, steadfast, unchanging. Yet whether love ends in heartbreak or endurance, I cannot call it wasted. Souls do not meet by accident. Even the fleeting loves are scenes worth treasuring.

There is always that one kiss that feels like revelation, that one laugh that fills the air like music, that one look that strips away every layer of defence. Love writes itself in crescendos and silences, in storms and stillness. It is a story without predictable arcs, yet somehow it always feels authored. Perhaps that is why even pain has its beauty, because it proves the encounter was real, the script divinely written, the souls undeniably meant to collide.

I do not know how this story ends. Perhaps it will dissolve into memory, a film reel that flickers until the screen fades black. Or perhaps it will go on, scene after scene, building into the rarest and most extraordinary gift, a soul that stays, not only for a chapter, but for the whole book. That mystery, that unknowing, is part of the beauty.

So I keep falling. Into the rain, into the silence, into the laughter, into the moments that feel more like cinema than life. I fall because to love is to live, and I would rather have a thousand unforgettable scenes than a life devoid of story. Souls do not meet by accident. Every collision is intentional, purposeful, divine. And when they do, the world shifts, the air changes, and suddenly, even if only for a moment, life itself feels like the greatest love story ever told.