vertigo in your arms.

maybe that is the closest language i have for what loving you felt like: held and destabilised at once. safe enough to surrender, never steady enough to rest.

i keep going crazy trying to understand how someone can feel something so intensely and still possess so little ability to honour it.

i think that has always been the truth i was weakest at accepting.

i mistake the urgency with which someone wants me for evidence of how carefully they will hold me. i see attachment and call it devotion. i hear someone say they cannot bear to lose me and assume they will know what to do when keeping me becomes difficult.

but feeling deeply is not the same as loving deeply.

you taught me that.

i do not believe everything between us was false. sometimes i wish i could. it would be easier to bury a lie than something real that was still not enough.

you were attached to me. i know that. there were moments when the possibility of losing me seemed to awaken something in you. suddenly, you wanted discipline. financial stability. a life you could be proud of. you wanted to become the kind of man who could stand before my family without feeling ashamed of what he had to offer.

you said that without financial stability, you would never even get to have me.

for a while, i believed that meant i existed at the end of all your striving.

i thought you were building a life with a place for me inside it.

but somewhere along the way, the work remained and i disappeared from its purpose.

eventually, there was only what you needed to achieve, what demanded your attention, what you could not afford to be distracted from.

somehow, the future remained urgent even after i became absent from it.

so now i am left with a question i cannot answer:

was i ever truly the destination, or was i only the motivation?

was i the woman you were building a life with, or merely the fear that finally made you get your shit together?

did you love me, or did you love the version of yourself that wanting me forced you to imagine?

perhaps wanting me gave your ambition a face. perhaps i inspired movement in a man who had never pushed himself hard enough before.

but where was i in the life that movement was supposed to create?

briefly, you said stability was how you would get to have me. then you continued chasing it without ever saying i was still what you hoped to find at the end of the tunnel.

why did that die?

did you never want me as deeply as your intensity made it appear?

or did you want me so deeply that you became terrified of promising a future you did not trust yourself to provide?

i have tortured myself with both possibilities.

if you stopped wanting me, i cannot understand how something so intense died so quietly.

if you still wanted me, i cannot understand how fear allowed you to treat me as though you did not.

perhaps you were afraid to make promises you could not keep. perhaps withdrawing felt more honest than continuing to build a future you could not guarantee.

but why did restraint become important only after intimacy had already become attachment?

why did you let me fall for the version of you who spoke with certainty, only to reveal that certainty had never been something you could carry?

why did you create a depth between us, then treat the needs born inside it as pressure?

my need for consistency became an accusation against your worth. reassurance became another demand. my hurt became pressure. instead of allowing me to stand beside you in your uncertainty, you made me the measurement of your inadequacy—then quietly resented me for making you feel measured.

but i never asked you to possess everything.

i asked you not to punish me for what you lacked.

you told me you stopped texting because you did not want to become more attached to me while there were still things you needed to achieve.

as though attachment were a weakness you had to discipline out of yourself.

as though loving me would derail the future you once claimed you were building so that you could have me.

you wanted marriage, but refused to sustain love on the way there. you wanted the destination without surviving the road. you wanted to become worthy of loving me while avoiding the very acts that would have made you worthy.

and where was i supposed to wait while you became him?

was i a reward at the end of your success, expected to remain untouched by your absence until you decided you had earned the right to return?

you protected yourself from wanting me more while leaving me alone inside everything you had already made me feel.

you feared that loving me would cost you your future.

i feared discovering that i had never truly been part of it.

so you saved yourself from the uncertainty of wanting me and sentenced me to the certainty of losing you.

you called it focus. discipline. becoming worthy.

but only one of us was permitted to disappear for self-preservation.

only one of us was left to survive what remained.

what else could i call that but unethical?

i thought love was all the arrow carried.

i did not yet know it had passed through every fear you refused to face before it reached me.

perhaps you genuinely could not balance love, ambition, fear and responsibility. perhaps you could not become the man the relationship required while surviving everything happening inside you.

i have tried to accept that.

people cannot give what they do not have.

but being unable to stay was the first wound.

refusing to leave with tenderness was the second.

you could not show up as my partner. then you did not show up as the person who owed me honesty.

you could not continue loving me properly. then you could not leave me properly either.

when we finally spoke, after months of confusion, i could see that you knew what you had done was fucked.

you understood parts of it.

never its full depth.

you understood enough to explain yourself, but not enough to account for yourself.

you rearranged pieces of the story. you softened decisions into circumstances. you made the memory kinder to the person you still needed to believe you were.

you were overwhelmed.

you needed to focus.

you thought i hated you.

you did not want to disturb me.

you did not know what to say.

each explanation placed another layer between you and the naked truth:

you hurt someone, knew you had hurt her, and still did not return to apologise.

you said you thought i hated you as though my imagined hatred had relieved you of the responsibility to face me.

but believing i hated you should not have made an apology unnecessary.

it should have made you ask what you had done to someone who once loved you so tenderly that hatred now seemed possible.

you did not need to know i would welcome you before giving me the conversation i was owed.

you did not need more proof that i still loved you before saying sorry.

you did not need me to make accountability emotionally safe for you.

“i thought you hated me” was not an explanation.

it was cowardice wearing the face of assumption.

you were afraid i would tell you exactly why i had the right to feel it.

and still,

after everything,

i did not hate you.

that may be the most humiliating truth of all.

some tenderness in me survived you.

i kept searching for the frightened man beneath the cruel decisions. i translated your silence into overwhelm, your avoidance into shame, your neglect into fear. whenever the truth became unbearable, i gave it a gentler name.

perhaps that is what made you so difficult to grieve.

you never remained one thing long enough for me to hate you.

you were tenderness and abandonment. safety and confusion. the man who held my heart carefully and the man who later behaved as though he had never been responsible for it.

whenever i tried to name what you had done, another version of you appeared to defend it:

the ambitious man.

the overwhelmed man.

the frightened man.

the man who thought i hated him.

the man who loved me but could not risk loving me more.

so which one wounded me?

which one do i forgive?

which one was real?

darling, i think you could make the devil cry.

even the devil knows what to do with hatred.

but what would he do with love that feels like shelter before becoming the storm? with hands that learn every soft place while holding you, only to find those same places when they need somewhere to wound?

even evil would flinch at the confusion.

perhaps it would hurt less if you had been heartless from the beginning.

but you had a heart.

you knew mine.

you once handled it tenderly enough to learn exactly where it was soft. then, when protecting it required courage instead of affection, you pierced the places you had taught to trust you most.

you recognised my breaking and watched from a distance that allowed you to believe your hands were clean.

they were not.

i have spent too long giving your choices gentler names.

fear.

overwhelm.

unworthiness.

inability.

but what if you were not simply unable?

you knew honesty was owed and chose silence. you knew an apology was owed and chose the safety of believing i hated you. you knew my heart was in your hands and still decided your discomfort mattered more than how carefully you put it down.

perhaps you could not become the man i needed.

but you could have told the truth.

you could have broken my heart without making me question whether i had imagined the hands that once held it.

you could have failed without abandoning me inside questions only you could answer.

you did not.

perhaps you never meant to release the first arrow.

but you still aimed the second.

that is what enrages me.

real love is not measured by how violently it is felt.

it is measured by how responsibly it is held.

and sometimes leaving someone is not enough.

some part of me believed your understanding would release me. i thought if you could finally stand inside the wound—name it without retreating into your intentions, admit that your hands had made it—something inside me would finally become quiet.

but even in our final conversation, you stood at the edge of my pain and mistook seeing it for understanding it.

you knew enough to know you had hurt me.

you understood enough to defend yourself.

not enough to carry, even briefly, what i had carried alone.

perhaps you never will.

and my freedom cannot remain dependent on the depth of your remorse.

i cannot keep waiting for you to give me the ending you denied me.

so i will release myself.

i may never know whether you wanted me, wanted what i represented, or wanted the man you briefly became while trying to reach me.

but i know where your uncertainty left me:

alone.

carrying the consequences of decisions you made for both of us.

deciphering through my writing a silence you chose because avoidance required less courage than honesty.

i thought the first arrow belonged to cupid.

perhaps it did.

it arrived as tenderness. safety. the promise of a future. i saw love at its tip and willingly stood still long enough to be struck.

i did not know what else it carried.

your fear.

your shame.

your need to become worthy.

your instinct to disappear whenever love demanded more than feeling.

i discovered the poison only after the arrow was already inside me—after i had trusted the wound because i believed love was what had made it.

and by then, pulling it out meant tearing through everything that had grown around it.

that is why this was never only heartbreak.

heartbreak can be accidental.

this was discovering that the same arrow that taught me how deeply i could love had also been carrying what would make that love unbearable.

perhaps you never meant to poison the first arrow.

but everything you refused to face travelled through it anyway.

and after seeing where it landed, you still aimed the second:

silence after intimacy.

distance after devotion.

explanation instead of apology.

you failed to become the man you believed i deserved.

then you failed to honour the woman who had loved you before you became him.

that was the second wound:

realising the arrow had never carried love alone.

that was not love lacking intensity.

that was intensity without responsibility.

feeling without integrity.

failure without tenderness.

that was character.

that was unethical.

Perhaps your sword is still unsheathed. Perhaps your hands are still stained with the work required to become the man Allah intends you to be. Perhaps that is why they have not yet found mine.

I try not to resent the waiting.

I tell myself that castles are not built in a day, and neither are men capable of carrying kingdoms without crushing the women they love beneath them.

Still…

Some nights I stand at the highest balcony of my heart and look toward roads no one has travelled in years.

I imagine the sound of horse hooves long before they exist.

Every passing stranger becomes a possibility.

Every silence becomes another season.

I know it is foolish.

Yet I have always loved impossible things.

Do you know how peculiar it is to ache for someone whose eyes I have never looked into?

To carry homesickness for a place I have never been.

Sometimes I wonder if longing can exist before love itself.

If Allah places a quiet recognition inside two souls long before He allows their paths to cross.

Because there are days when the world feels whole.

And then there are moments that arrive so beautifully, they reveal the shape of someone who isn’t there.

The moon hanging low over sleeping cities.

The scent of old libraries where stories have outlived their authors.

Rain tracing slow paths across stained glass.

The silence that settles after Fajr, when the world still belongs to those who remember Him.

An untouched chair beside mine.

A second cup of tea that never needed pouring.

It is in those ordinary mercies that I notice you most—

not because you were ever there,

but because my heart keeps making room for someone it has never met.

I have mistaken echoes for you before.

Men who admired beauty but feared devotion.

Men who loved possession more than partnership.

Men whose words arrived dressed as promises, only to leave wearing excuses.

For a while, I wondered if perhaps I had imagined you altogether.

If the kind of love I carried belonged only to stories.

But every time I tried to convince myself of that,

my heart refused.

Because none of them ever felt like home.

Each one carried your silhouette poorly.

None of them spoke the language my soul had been waiting to hear.

None of them understood that I was never searching for perfection.

Only peace.

So wherever this letter finds you—

I hope life has been gentle enough to preserve your heart,

and difficult enough to shape it.

If you are wounded—

I hope your wounds soften you.

If you are lonely—

I hope loneliness teaches you gentleness instead of pride.

If you are still fighting—

I pray the war does not convince you that love is another battlefield waiting to betray you.

Please…

Do not arrive victorious over the world if it costs you the tenderness required to love.

Because while life has been shaping you,

it has been shaping me too.

You will find me changed.

Not unrecognisable—

only quieter.

Less eager to chase what was never meant for me.

More willing to trust what Allah has already written.

I have buried versions of myself you will never meet.

The girl who begged to be chosen.

The girl who mistook uncertainty for mystery.

The girl who believed love meant proving her worth.

She rests somewhere behind the woman now writing to you.

I hope when we finally meet, it feels less like an introduction…

and more like returning home after a war neither of us talks about immediately.

I hope your armour is heavy enough to have protected you—

but light enough that you are willing to remove it beside me.

Because I do not want the man the world fears.

I want the man only Allah truly knows.

The one who laughs without caution.

Who cries without shame.

Who lowers his head in sujood before he ever reaches for my hand.

Until then…

I suppose I’ll continue leaving this place in my heart untouched.

Not empty.

Reserved.

Like a room prepared long before the guest arrives.

Some call that hopeless romanticism.

I call it faith.

Because somewhere, if Allah has written you for me,

then every delayed sunrise,

every unanswered prayer that later revealed itself as mercy,

every heartbreak,

every lonely evening spent wondering where you were—

has only been guiding us toward the exact moment our stories were meant to become one.

So wherever you are…

Fight well.

Come back with your heart intact.

I have spent years protecting mine,

so that when you finally arrive,

I can place it in your hands

without fear,

without hesitation,

and without wondering if they are capable of carrying it.

I’ll be here.

I will not search for you.

I will simply become the woman you were always meant to return to.

If our story has already been written,

then one day,

somewhere between your last battle

and my final prayer,

you’ll find your way home.

Until that day…

the roses shall continue to bloom against these old stone walls,

the moon will keep watch over an empty balcony,

and somewhere beyond the horizon,

a knight who does not yet know my name

will unknowingly be riding toward it.

I have always wanted my nikkah to take place at Badshahi Mosque.

Not because it is famous.

Not because it photographs beautifully.

Though it does.

There is something about the place that feels untouched by time.

The red sandstone.

The marble.

The vast courtyards that have carried centuries of footsteps before my own.

As a child, I was fascinated by the Mughal world.

The embroidered silks.

The weight of gold draped across a woman’s wrists.

The poetry hidden inside ordinary conversations.

The way beauty itself seemed to be treated as a language.

Everything felt larger than life.

The architecture.

The romance.

The stories.

I used to think it was the grandeur that captivated me.

Now I think it was the feeling.

The illusion that some things could survive time. That beauty could outlive generations. That love could become history.

Perhaps that is why I kept returning to places like Badshahi Mosque in my imagination.

Not as a monument.

But as a witness. A witness to centuries of human longing.

Families gathered beneath its arches.

Children carried through its courtyards.

The faithful standing shoulder to shoulder in prayer.

And somewhere among them, generations of men and women beginning new chapters of their lives.

A nikkah is a strange thing when you think about it… two temporary people standing before the Eternal. Making promises in a world where nothing stays.

Speaking forever while surrounded by reminders that everything else eventually fades.

Perhaps that is why the mosque feels sacred to me.

Not because of the architecture. But because it has spent centuries watching human beings attempt the impossible. To build permanence inside a temporary world… because every stone seems to carry evidence that people have always wanted the same things.

To love.

To be loved.

To belong somewhere.

As the evening settled across the courtyard, I found myself wondering about all the stories these walls had absorbed.

The prayers.

The promises.

The grief.

The lovers who thought their feelings would outlive time itself, but most of them are forgotten now and few remain.

Like echoes refusing to leave a room.

And among those echoes was a woman.

Not a queen.

Not a saint.

Just a woman whose name survived because a man loved her enough for history to remember.

Hira Bai.

Yet the deeper I wandered into her story, the more uncomfortable it became. History remembers Hira Bai as the woman who captured Aurangzeb’s heart.

The romantic version ends there. History is rarely so kind.

Hira Bai was not simply a beloved woman. She was a concubine. A slave woman exchanged between powerful men.

And suddenly the glamour cracks.

The empire cracks.

The fantasy cracks.

The embroidered silks and marble courtyards remain beautiful, but they no longer feel so innocent.

You are forced to ask questions that romance alone cannot answer… what was love in a world where women could be traded? What did devotion mean within a society built upon hierarchy? How much of what survives as romance is history, and how much of it is our own longing projected backwards onto the past?

Perhaps that is why her story stayed with me. Not because it offered answers, but because it refused to.

Strange, isn’t it?

Empires rise and fall. Kingdoms collapse. Men spend entire lifetimes trying to carve their names into stone. Yet centuries later, we remember them through the people they loved.

Or perhaps through the people they lost.

That may be the strangest thing about history.

Aurangzeb built mosques, commanded armies and ruled an empire stretching across a continent. Yet centuries later, I find myself asking not what he conquered but whom he mourned.

Perhaps that why the mosque stood out to me in silence. Ancient red sandstone carrying the weight of centuries. Its walls had witnessed rulers and beggars, mothers and children, men returning from battle, lovers making promises beneath the evening sky. It had watched generations arrive carrying burdens they believed no one else could understand.

I wondered how many hearts had stood exactly where I stood. How many people had looked toward the heavens believing their grief was unique and thought they would never recover.

And how many eventually did.

The evening wind moved softly through the courtyard.

I imagined speaking to the ghosts of old souls.

“Did you love her?” I asked.

The emperor did not answer.

Instead another question returned to me.

“Would it have changed anything if I did?”

I sat with that for a long time.

Because perhaps humanity’s greatest tragedy has never been the absence of love. It is the presence of it. The unbearable responsibility of being loved and deciding what to do with it.

History remembers Aurangzeb as a man of discipline. Duty. Control. Faith.

A man who understood sacrifice. Yet I wonder whether sacrifice can become its own prison. Whether a person can spend so long proving themselves that they forget how to simply receive what was placed before them.

I imagine Hira Bai sitting beside him. Not as history remembers her. But as a woman.

Entirely herself.

A woman with her own fears, prayers, and dreams of permanence.

A reminder that life was more than conquest and obligation.

A reminder that a heart is not another battlefield to win.

‘’The empire needed me,” he says.

“And did the empire love you back?” she asks.

Silence.

The kind of silence that only exists when the question is too honest.

I think of all the men who build their identities around becoming something.

The son who must prove everyone wrong.

The boy who grows up carrying humiliation like a wound beneath the skin.

The man who promises himself he will never be underestimated again.

And somewhere along the way the mission becomes everything… not because he is cruel or incapable of love. But because he no longer knows who he is without the struggle.

He survives through pursuit, proving and becoming.

Until love arrives.

And suddenly there is nothing left to chase.

Only something to protect.

And perhaps that is far more frightening.

Because success asks for action.

Love asks for vulnerability.

Success allows distance.

Love demands presence.

Success can be measured.

Love cannot.

I wonder if that is why some people run from the very thing they claim to want… because love holds up a mirror and forces them to meet themselves.

To confront every insecurity. Every fear. Every wound. Every belief they built about who they must become before they deserve to be loved.

And so he let her go.

Not because she was unworthy.

Not because she was insufficient.

Not because the feeling was absent.

Those would have been easier wounds to carry.

The crueler truth was that she had arrived at the right time in the wrong heart.

A heart exhausted by survival. One that had spent so many years becoming something that it no longer knew how to simply be.

For a long time she believed she had failed. She believed that if she had been softer, more patient, more understanding, she could have taught him how to stay. And unfortunately this is the lie many loving people tell themselves: enough love can become a bridge over another person’s fears. That enough patience can heal wounds they did not create. That enough understanding can save someone from themselves.

Years later, she would understand differently.

Not only about him, but about herself.

History remembers Hira Bai through Aurangzeb.

That is how history often remembers women.

As daughters.

As wives.

As beloveds.

As reflections of powerful men.

Yet there is something almost rebellious about her story. She was not born into power and still she survived the centuries.

Not in stone.

But in memory.

Not because of what she had, but because of what her presence awakened.

Perhaps that is why I no longer see her as a woman waiting to be chosen. I see her as a woman who remained entirely herself. One whose worth was never dependent upon a man’s ability to carry what she offered.

The wisdom was never:

“He did not love me.”

The wisdom was:

“He loved me with the capacity he had.”

And capacity is not the same thing as desire. That is the distinction that breaks the heart.

A person can desperately want something and still be incapable of sustaining it.

A thirsty man can stand before water and still refuse to drink.

Not because he does not need it.

But because something within him has forgotten how.

For years she mistook his inability for a reflection of her worth. Eventually she realized it was a reflection of his limitations.

Not every loss is a verdict. Not every ending is evidence that love was absent.

Sometimes it is evidence that love arrived before a person knew how to receive it.

The grief softened after that.

Not because the loss became smaller, but because she stopped carrying responsibility for a battle that was never hers to fight.

Some journeys must be walked alone as certain lessons cannot be learned through being loved. They can only be learned through losing what was offered.

Some accounts claim that years later Aurangzeb reflected upon Hira Bai’s death as a mercy from Allah.

That through losing her, he was saved from distractions that might have prevented him from becoming the man history remembers.

Whether he truly said those words hardly matters. What unsettles me is the possibility that he believed them.

Because imagine what it requires to look back upon the very person who made you feel most alive and just conclude that they were standing in the way of who you believed you needed to become.

That is heartbreaking.

Perhaps that is how some hearts cope to survive loss. By convincing themselves that tenderness was weakness. That longing was distraction. That vulnerability was something to outgrow.

A man who spent his entire life becoming someone.

A woman who arrived offering him somewhere to rest.

Neither of them were wrong.

One had learned how to endure. The other had learned how to love.

One knew how to carry burdens. The other knew how to share them.

One had built an identity from sacrifice. The other arrived as proof that he no longer had to sacrifice everything.

And perhaps that was the imbalance.

Not that he chose duty, but that he could no longer recognize the difference between duty and the armor he had worn for so long.

The armor had protected him. Saved him. Then the armor had become him.

And so when love finally arrived asking nothing but honesty, presence, and trust, he mistook it for another threat.

A man can survive inside armor but he cannot be embraced through it. And she could not spend her life loving someone who refused to take it off.

That is tragedy.

Not because they did not love. But because they did with what they knew best.

Because if there had been no love, there would have been no grief.

No wondering or ache that survives long after the ending of a being.

Only indifference.

Instead there remained the quiet sorrow of two people who met at the edge of something beautiful and discovered that wanting a home and knowing how to enter one are not the same thing.

Perhaps that is why I think of the mosque.

Because home was never the palace or the empire or even each other.

Because homes built upon human attachment solely eventually ask human beings to do what only Allah can.

Home was always the place they returned to when their hearts became too heavy to carry alone.

The prayer mat.

The silence before a dua.

The tears no one else witnessed.

The moment a forehead touches the ground and admits what pride never could.

I wonder how many times they stood before Allah asking for mercy upon hearts they could not understand.

How strange that human beings can reveal themselves completely to their Creator, yet struggle to reveal themselves to one another despite being in a sacred bond for the sake of Allah.

Soon, the sky darkened above the mosque and the call to prayer rose into the evening air.

Generations before me had heard the same sound.

Kings.

Lovers.

Widows.

Children.

The faithful.

The broken.

All of them carrying questions.

All of them believing their story was the one that would never heal.

Yet centuries passed.

Empires disappeared.

Names faded.

Graves returned to dust.

And still the call remained.

Sometimes I wonder whether many of the things that break human love belong only to this world.

The fear.

The pride.

The wounds.

The burdens inherited from childhood.

The identities we cling to in order to survive.

The limitations we mistake for ourselves.

Perhaps they are all part of the test.

Perhaps they are all temporary.

I do not know.

Only Allah does.

But I find comfort in believing that whatever is pure survives its earthly form. That every sincere love is known to the One who created it.

No grief is wasted.

I once thought heartbreak was about losing a person. Now I think it is something else entirely.

I think heartbreak is the moment we discover that nothing in this world was designed to stay.

Not beauty.

Not youth.

Not kingdoms.

Not love.

Not even the versions of ourselves we spend years trying to preserve.

Perhaps that is why every grief eventually becomes a spiritual question. Because every loss forces us to ask the same thing:

What actually remains?

Funnily, the answer has never changed.

We had already eaten most of the pizza by then. A movie played somewhere in the background, though I could not tell you what it was about anymore. Funny how grief edits memory. Entire stories disappear while certain fragments survive with impossible precision. I remember the cardboard pizza boxes between us. I remember your hand reaching for another slice. I remember thinking the evening felt ordinary.

Perhaps that is why I never understood death when it first arrived. Nothing about that night looked like loss.

When I think of you now, I do not remember grand moments first. I remember tranquility.

A small nightlamp beside your bed. The soft clicking of that little tasbih counter moving steadily between your fingers, one remembrance after another. Your diary always nearby, pages filled with careful tallies from nights I was too young to understand. At the time it looked like habit to me. Now it feels like devotion made visible. You carried a stillness I rarely encounter in people now. Not silence, but certainty. The kind that settles into a room before words ever do.

The masjid felt like your second home. And on your way back, you always asked me the same question:

“Do you want anything from the store?”

Even before I answered, my mother would call out from somewhere behind us:

“Don’t bother your grandfather.”

And yet you would still look at me.

Just a small glance. A quiet agreement passing between us.

Little girls understand these negotiations instinctively. I already knew my favorite sweets were on their way home.

There are forms of love that never announce themselves loudly. They exist in gestures so small they almost escape memory entirely, until years later you realize they quietly built your understanding of tenderness.

And then there was the wooden comb.

I used to stand behind you brushing your hair with complete seriousness, carefully arranging what little remained as though I had been entrusted with sacred work. Looking back now, I think I was simply inventing another dress-up game for myself. Children love pretending they are needed. But you loved it too. Maybe not because of the styling itself, but because of the gentleness behind it. You would sit there patiently, letting me fuss over strands that barely existed anymore, indulging me with the same softness you carried toward everything else.

I thought I was the one playing.

Now I wonder if perhaps you were simply enjoying being cared for.

Perhaps that is why grief confused me for so long. Nothing about you felt temporary.

Loss did not arrive dramatically. Instead, it settled in rooms that sounded different without you, in absences I could not yet name, in a silence that felt strangely unfamiliar. I carried it for years before realizing grief is not always loud. Sometimes it teaches your body what is missing long before the mind understands why.

And perhaps that is the strange cruelty of growing older.

Now I understand death better.

But I think of you less.

And that feels like another kind of grief entirely.

Sometimes I wonder where you are now. People speak of The Barzakh with certainty and mystery intertwined, a realm between worlds that sits beyond perception yet never entirely beyond imagination. Islam never taught me that death is the end. It taught me transition and ascension. And so I wonder what occupies your soul now. Whether remembrance still surrounds you the way it once surrounded your nights full of dhikr.

You had already survived more than I can comprehend. Three heart attacks. Surgeries. Pain that would have frightened me. And still, you returned to prayer.

Strangely, that is the part that lingers with me most.

Not even your death.

Your prayer.

Because I think about salah differently now. There was something I witnessed in you that I never fully understood as a child, the way your forehead met the ground so willingly, how naturally you lowered yourself toward the earth in submission.

We spend much of our lives resisting fragility. Preserving the body. Beautifying it. Protecting it from age, illness, and decay as though permanence might somehow be negotiated if we are careful enough with our choices. Yet prayer asks for something entirely opposite. It asks us to lower the highest point of ourselves willingly. The forehead, seat of thought, identity, ego, and intention, pressed against the ground.

And strangely, even biology echoes parts of this humility. During prostration, blood flow toward frontal regions of the brain changes through hydrostatic effects created by lowering the head, and some researchers suggest this altered circulation may support calmness and physiological regulation. Science continues exploring these mechanisms, but perhaps faith had already taught us something deeper long before research attempted to explain it visually.

The Prophet ﷺ said:

“The nearest a servant is to his Lord is while he is in prostration, so increase in supplication.”

Perhaps that is why sujood settles us now.

Not because it merely changes the body,

but because it reveals something about the soul performing it.

My grandfather was already practicing surrender long before his body ever had to.

And perhaps that is why these paintings move me so deeply.

We were created from clay, not metaphorically alone, but materially, scripturally, and spiritually. The body returns downward while the soul continues elsewhere. Islam never taught me finality. It taught me return.

Perhaps that is why his prayers moves me more than his absence ever could. Because he understood something I am still trying to learn, that surrender was never humiliation.

It was closeness.

And maybe that is what it means to live on borrowed time. Not to be held forever, but to leave behind a way of facing both life and death with gentleness.

We return to contact with the earth twice: once while still breathing… when devotion lowers us toward it, and once when the body remembers
what it was made from.

From the Author 🤍

I wrote this piece about my paternal grandfather, whose passing was the very first death I experienced as a child. I sat with these words for weeks because I struggled to articulate the depth of his impact on me, not only as a person I loved deeply, but as someone who quietly shaped my understanding of faith, devotion, and what it means to surrender with grace.

This piece became more than a memory of him. It became a reflection on prayer, mortality, and the gentle reality that grief and faith often exist side by side.

For those who practice the Islamic faith, I hope these words offer some comfort afterwards. Death can feel unbearably unfair, yet Islam reminds us that loss is not always an ending, but a transition. And perhaps that is one of the greatest mercies our Creator gives us: the chance to grow, to return to Him better than we were, and to hope for reunion with the ones we loved and lost in this life.

Gotham was never built for soft endings. Perhaps that is why the Catwoman and Batman dynamic always felt strangely familiar to me.

Every meeting between them was fleeting— intense, electric, and often unfolding beneath the darkest skies that were balanced dangerously along the edges of rooftop buildings. There was always something unfinished about them.

Catwoman moved like freedom itself, a black cat draped in confidence, seduction, and survival. Feminine yet untamed, sharp yet magnetic, forever suspended between two instincts: intimacy and escape.

And perhaps that was Batman’s conflict too.

A man cloaked behind duty and shadow, saving an entire city while remaining unreachable to the woman standing closest to him. The mask may have given him the courage to protect Gotham, yet it also became the very thing that distanced him from vulnerability.

That is what makes their relationship so fascinating. On paper, they appear almost perfectly balanced. They had the perfect mix of light and darkness, pursuit and retreat, devotion and rebellion. Yet beneath that chemistry exists a quieter conflict: they fight against the very thing love requires most—

Vulnerability.

Because what happens when two people understand each other deeply, yet still struggle to let themselves be fully known?

But Batman’s mask was never only made of black armour… so maybe it was fear?

And maybe that is why men like him become so difficult to love. Not because they do not feel deeply, but because feeling deeply and allowing oneself to be seen are two entirely different acts.

Perhaps that is why the mask itself becomes larger than Gotham alone. Because masks do not always look like capes and shadows. Sometimes they arrive disguised as movement.

A noise.

As speed.

There is something strangely symbolic about helmets too. A man hidden beneath intricate machinery and motion, anonymous beneath glass and metal, moving through the night where no one can fully reach him. The engine flawlessly becomes louder than his own thoughts. The motion itself becomes refuge. And maybe that is the appeal of both Gotham and the road—there is comfort in movement because stillness asks questions many people are afraid to answer.

Some people wear masks over their faces… others wear them over their own hearts.

And that is why Batman feels safest on rooftops and beneath shadows, because heights, missions, and adrenaline demand presence but never intimacy.

The city knows Batman.

But very few people ever know Bruce.

And maybe that is where Catwoman begins to ache because she does not fall for the hero, she falls for the man beneath him. The version hidden underneath the armour, the duty, the performance of invincibility. Yet, love becomes painful when you can see someone clearly while they remain terrified of being seen themselves. That leaves me wondering something larger about men like Batman—

Is a man’s purpose solely to save the world, to serve some greater mission beyond himself… or does his greatest battle begin the moment he removes the mask and learns how to stay beside the woman who loves him without needing to disappear first?

Maybe that was Batman’s conflict all along. Not confusion about what he wanted, but fear of what remaining would require of him. There are people who genuinely contemplate leaving the lives that are slowly consuming them, yet when their inner world begins unraveling and they return to the very thing that wounds them because it feels more familiar than intimacy ever did. Perhaps danger was never merely excitement, it was refuge. And refuge can become difficult to abandon when you have mistaken survival for identity.

Yet, Catwoman was never entirely innocent of the same conflict either. People often romanticize her softness toward Batman while forgetting she was built from survival. Beneath the seduction and confidence, a woman existed, who was equally fluent in escape. Not cold but cautious. Not incapable of love either but unwilling to surrender herself completely to it. Perhaps that is why Catwoman understands him so intimately. She does not love the mask because she wears one of her own. She recognizes loneliness beneath performance, the exhaustion of constantly just surviving. The instinct of disappearing before being abandoned first.

And maybe, that is their tragedy. Not ever the lack of love, but the painful reality that understanding someone deeply does not always mean you possess the emotional tools or architecture to remain together for a happily ever after. Chemistry can exist beside incompatibility. The art of noticing can exist beside ultimate ruin.

Catwoman eventually walks away, not because she stops loving her Batman, but because love that continually demands removal of her own mask begins fighting against the very self she built to survive. People often speak about Batman’s bold armor while forgetting Selina wears her own. Her confidence, her seduction, her disappearance, her refusal to belong entirely to anyone; these too are forms of protection. That’s their shared tragedy… two people longing for intimacy while remaining fiercely loyal to the identities that once kept them safe. Because somewhere along the way, the mask stops feeling like protection and rather becomes identity itself. This is the greater question Gotham leaves us with: why are we so devoted to our masks… even when love asks for our truest face? Perhaps that’s why she truly left, because she finally realized love alone cannot keep asking her to wait outside a man’s fortress, hoping he will one day emerge unmasked.

From the author 🤍

To everyone who took their time out to read, thank you. Seeing this small corner go from 3 subscribers to now 100+ of you?? 😭 it feels both terrifying and lovely. Catwoman and Batman’s dynamic had been sitting quietly in my head for a while, and tonight at 1am I finally gave in the urge to write it out loud. I hope somewhere within these words you found a feeling/question or a reflection that resonated with your own story 🫶🏼 I would love to interact with you all more in the comments, I’m open to taking this piece a step further with all your thoughts :)

Love is often spoken about as though it is inherently beautiful. People romanticize its softness, its intensity, the way it makes life feel illuminated for a brief period of time. But very few people speak honestly about the violence of it… the way love does not merely leave a person, but rearranges what remains of them afterwards. How something once capable of making you feel profoundly alive can later become the very thing that destabilizes you to the point of deterioration. That is the paradox of love: it is both the blessing and the wound. The same depth that allows another person to touch your soul is also what grants them the unknown capacity to fracture parts of it or even completely.

What shattered me the most was not even the ending itself, but the isolation of carrying it alone. There is something psychologically ferocious about grieving a relationship in silence while the rest of the world continues interacting with you as though nothing inside you has fundamentally collapsed, with no exact blueprint for how to rebuild yourself afterwards. I would sit with family, respond normally, continue routines, go outside, even laugh at times, while internally feeling like I was barely containing something catastrophic. No one around me knew the true extent of it. No one knew how many nights ended with me locked inside a bathroom, covering my mouth with my own hand just to suppress the sound of how hard I was crying. Not delicate tears. The kind that leave your entire body shaking in desperation for the pain to go away. The kind that make you feel almost embarrassed by the depth of your own pain. I had never witnessed a true breaking point within myself before.

And what frightened me most was not even the heartbreak itself, but what it revealed about me. I did not recognize the version of myself that emerged from that grief. The girl who was once filled with light suddenly became emotionally overstimulated and simultaneously numb. There were moments I drove for no reason other than to escape my own mind, and moments where I genuinely thought about crashing. Not necessarily because I wanted to die in some melodramatic way, but because I had become so emotionally fried that I wanted something external to finally mirror the violence I felt internally. That realization horrified me afterwards.

How could another human being reduce me to such mental depletion without ever fully witnessing the aftermath of what they had done?

The odd thing about heartbreak is that people reduce it to sadness and crying, when in reality it is a complete nervous system disturbance. Your appetite changes. Your sleep deteriorates. Your body becomes hypervigilant. Your thoughts become obsessive. Your self-worth quietly begins negotiating with abandonment. You replay conversations trying to locate the exact moment where things shifted… as if understanding it correctly will somehow lessen the grief. But it never does. The mind simply continues excavating for answers inside a place that no longer makes sense to exist within.

And perhaps what terrified me most was realizing that a second heartbreak can wound even deeper than the first. People speak about first love as though it is the one that permanently alters you, but they never mention the danger of loving again after already knowing loss. The first heartbreak teaches you pain exists. The second teaches you that even after surviving it once, you are still capable of handing someone the same vulnerable parts of yourself all over again. But when that love leaves brutally too, it does not merely break your heart but it fractures your trust in your own judgment, your own resilience, your own ability to distinguish real safety from illusion.

It is especially devastating about being wounded through a face that once felt familiar long before the love ever began… a person who had once been a close friend years back when life still felt lighter and untouched by all of this. It is uniquely brutal about watching someone who once knew you gently to become the very source of your uncurable pain. The loss stops being only about the person afterwards. It becomes an utter humiliation of realizing how deeply you believed this time would be different. How foolish of yourself to allow your guarded parts to soften again… only to watch them be mishandled… all over again.

What made it harder was the switch to straight disrespect. There was no final conversation substantial enough to hold the weight of everything that we shared between us. Just anger. Avoidance. Silence. Silence is a slow posion because the mind fills empty voids with its own narratives that lead you to no where. Meanwhile, life appeared to continue normally for him. That sight does something indescribable to a person. Watching someone continue on life unaffected while you are privately unraveling forces of insanity out of yourself into confrontation with your emotional wounds that you tried so hard to fill on your own. You genuinely begin questioning whether the love was ever experienced equally, or whether one person was simply more willing to carry the emotional depth of it.

I think that was the real wound beneath everything else: not merely losing someone, but realizing how much of my emotional stability had become attached to being loved correctly by them. It exposed how fragile self-worth becomes when it relies too heavily on external reassurance. But what was I meant to do? I thought I was going to marry him. I thought I could finally allow someone to provide me emotional safety…not because I desperately needed saving, but because I wanted, for once, to breathe safely inside a future I believed we were building together. Once that reassurance disappears through a simple change of heart or action, you are left alone with yourself. And if you do not already know how to love yourself gently, the silence becomes unbearable.

That is the paradox nobody speaks about. You can intellectually understand healing, attachment styles, nervous system responses, trauma, self-respect, reliance on faith, and emotional regulation, yet you still find yourself collapsing under the weight of your own humanity. Knowledge does not immediately neutralize pain. Sometimes it only gives you more language to describe it.

And despite everything, the most difficult part has been accepting that life continues regardless. Your responsibilities remain. Your family still speaks to you normally. People continue posting, laughing, building futures, making plans. The world does not pause simply because something inside you broke. So eventually you learn how to carry devastation quietly. You learn how to appear functional while grief slowly metabolizes itself inside you over time.

But even now, I think what stays with me most is the discomfort of realizing how deeply I abandoned myself in the process of loving someone else. How much gentleness I extended outward while becoming beyond merciless toward myself in return.

The final tragedy of love is that no amount of pain has ever been enough to make me hate you. Even after everything, some part of me still grieves you with tenderness instead of resentment, and I think that is what destroys me most. Love does not disappear once it reaches a certain depth… it merely changes form. It quiets, conceals itself beneath time, routine, and distance, yet continues existing somewhere within you in the form of lingering memories and emotional imprints that never fully leave. Perhaps that is why love feels both beautiful and catastrophic at once: because once someone has genuinely touched your soul, there is no complete undoing of them while you are still alive. Perhaps true love only ends when one of you does.

Perhaps accepting heartbreak is not about processing grief alone, but about letting go of the version of yourself that still believed the emotions of love could save you. Nothing in this world is stable enough to save you from yourself. That is the harsh reality people seem to forget or avoid confronting. Every action has consequences, and while some things may simply be mistakes, no one truly wants to remain loyal to their principles when emotions become difficult. Every person is selfish in their own ways, often choosing to be stuck in rumination or play the victim as a defense mechanism against accountability.

I chose to rise above that instead. I learned to let go completely. I will gladly become the villain in one’s story if that helps them sleep easier at night. Perhaps maturity eventually forces people to confront the damage they leave behind, or perhaps the greater tragedy is that some never truly do. Either way, I no longer intend on waiting for understanding that may never arrive. There were many opportunities for love to soften pride, yet somehow ego always speaks louder when vulnerability demands accountability.

As fragile as human beings are, why can we not learn to love more openly and choose that as our first instinct instead of allowing fear to overpower our ability to love? Why do we struggle so deeply to fight for the future we once claimed we wanted? I do not even blame humans entirely. There are a million things in this world constantly influencing us, desensitizing us, pulling us away from ourselves. But despite all of that, people still have a choice. A choice to return, to communicate, to choose better.

Some people leave your life so abruptly that your soul continues speaking to them long after your mouth has gone silent. Healing is peculiar in that way. One day you stop searching for their return and begin mourning the time lost spent in waiting at a door that was always open, yet they were never going to walk through it. Eventually, you realise you must be the one to close it and continue your journey through life elsewhere.

Yet grief still finds ways to haunt you quietly. A small gift, a photograph, a random memory appearing without warning… and suddenly you fall back into the void you tried so hard to escape. The frightening thing about love is not simply that it ends, but realising how easily another human being can alter the rhythm of your inner world. Your heart, your mind, your soul all begin battling each other in intertwined ways, each trying to make sense of what remains and what must now be left behind.

We were not always like this.

Before the world,
before bodies—
we were souls
in Alam al-Arwah,
unwounded,
untouched.

A quiet beginning.

Then we were sent down—
into flesh,
into time,
into lives we did not yet understand.

And somewhere along the way
you changed.

But I wonder…

was it the world
that shaped you,

or the way
you chose to survive it?

Because pain can teach
or it can harden.

And not everyone
chooses to soften.

Some become fluent
in their wounds.

They repeat them.
Call it who they are.

And when love arrives—
steady, patient—

they do not recognize it.

Or worse—
they break it.

Not out of cruelty,
but because they do not know
how to hold
what is not chaotic.

So I ask…

what are you really running from?

The world,

or the version of yourself
that waits
in stillness?

Some people
learn to outrun silence—

filling it
noise,
people,
chaos—

anything
but the truth beneath.

And when it rises,
they bury it—

not with answers,
but with blame
that never quite belongs.

A life shaped
not by what happened—

but by what was never faced.

Was it habit?
Impulse?

Or the quiet decision
to remain the same…

because change
demands honesty.

We all feel anger.
Desire.
Ego.

But not all of us
hand it control.

So what makes the difference?

Why do some hearts
learn,

and others
repeat?

You were not born
to break people.

No soul is.

but some
never stay long enough
in the truth
to become different.

Control—
what a tool we believe we possess,
and misuse
as if it were ever ours.

We build certainty
out of fragile thoughts,
projecting onto reality
what we think control looks like.

But Allah holds
what is infinite.
What is true.

So are we ever
in control?

Or is it only
an illusion
we overindulge in
to feel less small?

We are given free will—
and call it control.

Yet even in that,
we fall short.

So we return
to what we resist most—

tawakkul.

Anxiety is loud.

It fights for control,
fills the mind
with endless what ifs,
trying to hold together
what was never ours to hold.

But the soul
already knows.

It trusts
before it understands.

Still—
faith can feel like falling
without seeing the ground.

We are creatures of sight.

Yet the beauty of belief
is not needing to see
what is most divine.

Perhaps if we did,
we would not feel it
the way we do now.

Tawakkul is quiet.
Steady.

It answers:

what if it unfolds
exactly
as it was written for you?

And somewhere between
control
and surrender—

I learn

peace
was never in knowing,
or seeing,
or holding on,

but in letting go—

after tying my camel,
and trusting
the One
who always knew.

I’ve tried to stay quiet

but everything reminds me of you.

How does one prepare

for the beginning of an eternal love

between two souls

only to watch it depart so easily?

Two souls intertwining

yet a simple shift of heart,

or mind,

or circumstance

renders you powerless

because they have already made up their mind

and you must bow

to reality.

Why?

They say if it was meant to be

it would have come easy.

But is love ever that simple?

Love is powerful—

yet somehow

not powerful enough

to sustain something eternal.

I once believed

love makes you both powerless

and powerful at the same time.

You move mountains

for the one you love.

Yet you fall weak

when love cannot overcome

the fear

of facing oneself.

Perhaps it is simply

a matter of capacity.

But how can capacity be the limit

of something as boundless as love?

I was ready to fight the world for you.

I stood willingly at the edge of that war.

But no one tells you

the hardest battles in love

are never against the world—

they are against the love that still lives within you.

Anyone can love

in the good moments.

But when I needed your love most

I found myself fighting

two battles at once—

yours

and mine.

What began

as a quiet desire

became the most heart-wrenching experience

my soul has ever known.

How does another soul

gain such authority

over your consciousness?

That power frightens me now.

Once, nothing else mattered.

All I wanted

was for your soul

to merge with mine.

But perhaps love alone

cannot overcome

the limitations

of the human heart.

Everyone speaks of love differently.

Some measure it by intensity.

Some by consistency.

All I know is this—

I had never felt love like yours.

Your touch alone

could quiet my mind

into a place

I never wanted to leave.

The way you kissed my neck softly,

the way your hand would reach for mine,

guiding me forward

as if our future

was already waiting.

And each time

I fell weak again.

I once saw home in you.

But you never allowed me

to see the foundations.

Perhaps that home

would have been beautiful.

Or perhaps

it was always fragile.

Maybe that is why

you never truly let me enter.

Moving on without closure

forces the soul

to question itself

beyond what it can bear.

The mind searches endlessly

for the moment

everything went wrong.

Time, they say, heals.

But is that all healing is?

Training the body

to slowly forget

the life it once believed

would last forever.

Can time really erase

the love my soul

was ready to give?

They say

it was simply the wrong person.

That one day

someone will love me

the way I deserve.

But then why

did my soul fall

for those eyes?

Those eyes

that once convinced me

we were ready.

How does one move on

from a love this big?

How could the world

separate what once felt

so certain?

How could your wounds

speak louder

than the love

I showed in every detail—

whether loud

or silent?

Perhaps it was capacity

after all.

Because the love I carried

could only be understood

by someone

who truly saw it.

You change

for the one you love.

But no matter how much I tried

I could never make you see

how much love lived inside me.

And still

I tried to give it to you.

But my self-respect

kept interrupting.

Love asks you

to lay down your ego.

Yet self-respect

stands quietly beside you,

reminding you

not to disappear.

So I let go.

Abruptly.

And began gathering

the pieces of myself

that I did not break.

I had to heal again

after believing

I had almost held

my forever.

It reminds me of a truth:

Sometimes something can sit

between your lips

and still

never be meant for you.