By: Samya Jayachandran

Mira always believed she was the best writer in the room. Not in the loud, spotlight-hungry way. She never bragged or waved her stories around like banners. But there was a quiet knowing in her, a hum in her ribs that said, you were built for this. Her metaphors landed like second heartbeats. Her endings didn’t just close, they lingered. Her teachers had said she had a gift. Her mother framed a poem she wrote in seventh grade. Her friends asked her to ghostwrite love confessions and verbal essays. Writing wasn’t something she did. It was the way her soul spoke when it didn’t know how else to exist.

Then came Mr. Halden.

He was the kind of teacher who smelled like old books and sarcasm. Wore the same brown boots every day like they were part of his personality. He handed out poetry packets thick as bricks and flinched at overused metaphors. Mira thought: Finally. A man who’ll understand the art beneath the ink. She turned in her first story with cautious pride, about a girl who melted into a puddle whenever she felt too much. It was strange and sad and full of meaning. A mirror in disguise. He handed it back with: “Nice idea. Push deeper.” No smile. No underlines. No corkboard pin.

She told herself, first assignment. He doesn’t know me yet. But the weeks unfurled like reluctant paper. More stories. More poems. More silence. No red stars, no read-alouds, no nods of quiet understanding. Just neutral ink. Meanwhile, the corkboard blossomed with gold: Hannah. Nivi. Elena. Names embroidered into praise. Their work was quoted, dissected, admired. Mira sat there, clapping with the others, but the claps never reached her palms.

She started reading their stories like sacred texts. Hannah’s writing dripped emotion like honey. Nivi’s glittered with clever sharpness. Elena’s felt like rain on glass. Mira tried to imitate them all, slipping into their styles like ill-fitting shoes. Her voice, once bold and strange and hers, began to falter. She stopped trusting her own rhythm.

Her journal, which was once a chaotic garden of metaphors and moonlit scribbles, turned sparse. She polished every word before it even hit the page. Safe stories. Clean lines. The kind she thought Mr. Halden might finally notice. And then one day, he did.

She wrote a piece so sterile it could’ve been AI-generated. A girl moves to a town. She feels invisible. Nothing original, nothing true. But Mr. Halden smiled when he returned it. “This is more like it.”

And that’s when something small inside her died. She stopped submitting extras. In class, she met word counts and deadlines, but never herself. Her metaphors faded. Her voice dimmed. The corkboard kept blooming, but it was no longer a garden she wanted to grow in. She no longer said she was a writer.

College came and went. She majored in something that sounded employable. Communications, maybe. Or Sociology. She wrote papers. Emails. Maybe a birthday card now and then. But nothing with blood in it. Her old journals slept in a box under her bed, taped shut like something haunted. She couldn’t throw them away. But she couldn’t look either.

Years passed. Then, a message. Her cousin: “Did you write this??” A screenshot. A Tumblr post. A poem:

“i only write in lowercase now. it feels softer. like maybe the words won’t scream when they leave me.”

34,000 notes. Mira stared. She knew that poem. Knew the weight of it in her chest. One of hers, something she had posted anonymously back in the days when she still believed someone might feel what she felt.She clicked through. Crying emojis. Reblogs with captions like  “me” and “this hurt.” People argued over its author, dissected its meaning. Called it beautiful. It was hers.

Not Hannah’s. Not Nivi’s. Not Elena’s.

Hers.

The irony didn’t stab, it seeped. She had been the best. Just not in the way the room had been measuring. She wasn’t made for gold stars or red pens. She was the kind of writer strangers found at 2 a.m. The kind whose words curled up beside you when the world felt too loud. The kind who didn’t write to impress, but to connect.

She never went back to writing. But her words lived on, in grainy screenshots, captions, half-remembered quotes whispered by people who never knew her name but somehow knew her heart. Somewhere, in fragments scattered across the internet, Mira still exists.

Unclaimed.  Uncredited.  Unforgettable. Still the best. Just… different.

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Samya Jayachandran is a school student based in New Delhi. She has lived across Arunachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Delhi. Her writing is informed by these shifting geographies, as well as by vacations spent in her paternal and maternal villages in Kerala and Kalimpong . Her work explores themes of memory, places and cultural identity. Her poem “Who am I?” was published in Zegerist, the online cultural magazine of the Goethe-Institut.