Day 3
16 July 2025, Wednesday
Jaipur,
11:15 PM
It's Wednesday and this internship is already starting to feel like the longest, shortest thing I've ever done. I woke up with that same nervous energy buzzing under my skin, the kind that makes the coffee taste stronger and the metro ride feel quicker. I wore the blue shirt again because it felt lucky yesterday and I'm not above leaning on small rituals when my head is this full of someone I barely know.
The office had more people today, more tickets flying around, more overlapping voices in stand-up. Aarohi ended up in my sprint group again, which either means the senior is pairing us intentionally or the universe is just giving me a quiet kindness. We spent most of the morning debugging a form validation bug that kept rejecting valid inputs on submit. She took the lead on the frontend side, walking through the React component step by step on the shared screen while I pulled up the backend logs. At one point she paused, scrolled back up, and asked me directly, "Can you confirm if the API is sending the error code in the right format?" She didn't say it to the room—she said it to me, eyes meeting mine for that extra half-second that made everything else blur. I checked, nodded, told her the payload was missing a required field. She gave a quick "Thanks, that explains it," then patched the conditional in under thirty seconds like it was nothing.
That one "Thanks" followed me around the whole afternoon. It wasn't anything grand, but the way she said it—quiet, real, without stretching it out—made it feel like it was just for me. We ended up sitting next to each other for the last couple of hours, shoulders almost touching at the same desk, testing the fix on different viewports. Every time she leaned in to point at my screen I caught that faint citrus scent again, and every accidental brush of arms made me remind myself to breathe normally. I managed to ask her one real question without sounding completely lost: "Do you always spot accessibility issues that fast?" She looked at me for a second, then shrugged and said, "I just try to think like someone who actually has to use the thing. Most people forget that part." Simple. Direct. And it told me more about her than any long talk ever could.
I left the office around six-thirty, caught the metro like usual, stood by the door with earphones in but no music playing. The whole ride back I kept thinking about how she doesn't waste words, how she doesn't shrink herself to make anyone comfortable, how she just exists with this quiet strength that makes everything around her feel clearer. I don't know what to call this yet. It's too soon to name it anything real. But it's something. Something that makes me want to show up tomorrow a little sharper than I was today.
I'm going to keep wearing decent shirts. I'm going to keep asking questions when I have them instead of staying silent. I'm going to keep noticing the small things she does—the way she listens, the way she doesn't apologise for being sure, the way she carries herself like the world hasn't asked her to be smaller. And I'm going to keep writing here so I don't forget how it feels to want to be seen by someone who doesn't even know she's being looked for.
Goodnight, diary.
And goodnight to the girl who's making ordinary days feel like they might matter.