July Fourteenth.

Two years ago, on this day, I fell in love with someone.

I'm the kind of person who falls in love rarely. Rarely enough that it feels like opening a Kinder Joy and somehow finding the exact toy you were hoping for. Some miracles do not defy the odds. They simply wait for the one moment when the odds surrender.

That day became something too precious to leave at the mercy of time.

Even though this is my journal, some memories refuse to exist in plain language. Even if the universe's greatest novel could never contain what that day meant to me, why would I attempt to decipher something whose value was never meant to be explained?

So I hid everything inside cryptic sentences, ciphers, and little puzzles. Not because I wanted to forget — but because some memories deserve to be protected rather than displayed.

Because our story began not outside of history, but within it.

Pieces I kept, in the order I kept them. Each one decodes only if you stop and look closely. None of them are for you. All of them are for you.

While I was falling in love, concurrently, I was out there. What began as the student-led Quota Reform Movement grew into the nationwide July Uprising. The movement was growing, the streets were restless, the air carried uncertainty, and history was unfolding in real time.

The July Carnage and the act of loving somehow existed in parallel, each leaving a mark that time refuses to erase.

Our first month together wasn't the ordinary beginning of an ordinary love story.

It was lived against the backdrop of uncertainty, headlines, and history. Every conversation carried the weight of a country in motion and two hearts trying to find stillness within it.