Laila.....
They say time moves fast when you're happy.
I wouldn't know.
My time passed slow.
Heavy.
Like walking underwater while trying to smile.
---
I thought I could live without her.
I told myself I had to.
There was a ring on my finger, after all.
A name my parents approved of.
A future already drafted in someone else's handwriting.
---
Amir was kind.
Gentle.
A good man.
But not my home.
I smiled beside him,
but my soul knelt elsewhere.
In the past.
With her.
---
I used to whisper her name in the dark.
Just to feel it again.
> "Tracy."
Like prayer.
Like penance.
Like a thread tied around my lungs.
---
I never told Amir.
I didn't need to.
He could feel it.
Love has a shape.
And I was always missing mine.
---
The wedding was postponed twice.
Excuses.
Illness.
Family reasons.
Then quietly… it was canceled altogether.
No scandal.
No anger.
Just two people who realized one of them had never been there fully.
---
After that, I didn't go home for a long time.
I moved further.
Traveled.
Tried to find pieces of myself in foreign places.
But Tracy was always the country I belonged to.
---
I thought about her on rooftops.
In silent mosques.
At sea.
Her laugh echoed in the places I thought I'd buried her.
---
Years blurred.
I stitched my silence into art.
Poured longing into thread.
Turned pain into something people could hang on walls and call beautiful.
But I never stitched her name.
That was sacred.
---
Then the coughing started.
First soft.
Then sharp.
Hospitals.
Scans.
Whispers in hallways.
> "It's progressed."
"Maybe a year."
"Maybe less."
---
I didn't cry.
Not at first.
I just walked home and stared at my hands —
the same ones that had once touched her face,
brushed hair from her eyes,
held pinkies at chapel stairs.
---
I realized I had one wish left.
Just one.
I wanted to see her.
Even if it was too late.
Even if she didn't love me anymore.
Even if I had to watch her walk away.
---
I submitted to the exhibit on impulse.
Picked the city she lived in without saying it aloud.
Hope is reckless that way.
---
And then I saw her name in the guestbook.
T.Rose
— small, hidden at the bottom of the page,
but I knew that handwriting anywhere.
---
My knees buckled.
Not from illness this time.
From something older.
Something holy.
---
She came.
She saw.
And maybe, just maybe…
she still remembers.
---
Tomorrow, I'll try to find her.
Before my body forgets how to try.
---