At the station, he tapped a message: "Coming to Coimbatore next week. Want to see the tea shop?" The reply came swiftly, a single laughing emoji and, finally, a yes.

On rainy Thursday, three years later, Ravi opened the file again. He watched Sruthi’s laugh frame by frame, traced the slope of her nose with the pause key, and remembered how precise she’d been when she corrected his Tamil script. He started to work: color-correcting, stitching, smoothing the cuts. Each tweak felt like closing a small distance—not quite the distance of miles, but the more stubborn distance of time.

Then college ended. Jobs and trains and new cities pulled them apart. Messages thinned from daily exchanges to occasional check-ins. The zipped folder stayed; a soft, persistent ache in his documents.