He told me the truth on a Thursday.
Not dramatically. Not with anger or tears. Just facts laid gently on the table, like something already decided long before I ever existed in his life.
"My family would never accept this," he said.
We were sitting on opposite ends of a wooden bench outside the building, the late afternoon light stretching shadows across the ground like fingers reaching for something they couldn't hold. His hands were clasped together, knuckles pale, jaw tight in a way that told me he had rehearsed this. Over and over. In his head. In prayer. In guilt.
"I am expected to marry someone who knows our prayers."
I laughed softly.
Not because it was funny. But because something in me refused to break in front of him. Because crying would have made this real in a way laughter delayed. Because if I laughed, maybe I could pretend it didn't reach inside my chest and tear something loose.
"Oh," I said lightly. "That makes sense."
It didn't.
What I heard instead was the unspoken truth beneath the politeness, beneath the careful wording.
Someone who belongs.
Someone who fits.
Someone who is not me.
My church taught love as sacrifice. From childhood, I was told love meant laying yourself down quietly, carrying your cross without complaint, trusting that suffering was holy if endured long enough. My faith was built on endurance. On staying. On praying even when answers never came.
His mosque taught obedience as survival. I could see it now, clearer than ever. Obedience not as devotion alone, but as protection—against shame, against exile, against becoming a stranger in your own home. Faith as structure. As order. As something that held families together by tightening its grip.
Between us stood God.
Not as mercy.
But as law.
I wanted to ask him why he stayed then. Why he looked at me the way he did if he already knew how this would end. Why he let something grow in the space between us if it was always going to be cut down.
But I didn't ask.
Because the truth was—I stayed too.
"I don't want to hurt you," he continued, eyes fixed somewhere over my shoulder. "I never meant to—"
"I know," I interrupted gently.
And I did. That was the cruelest part. I knew he wasn't trying to destroy me. He wasn't cruel or careless. He was careful. Thoughtful. Bound. He lived inside a system that had been built long before his birth, reinforced by generations of prayer and fear and tradition. Wanting me didn't make him evil. It made him human.
Still, humanity doesn't soften the blow.
I nodded, swallowing around the ache in my throat. "You don't have to explain."
He looked at me then. Really looked. His eyes were dark, heavy with something that looked dangerously close to regret.
"I think about you when I pray," he said quietly.
The words hit harder than any rejection.
I stared at him, stunned. "You shouldn't."
"I know."
That was the problem.
We knew everything we were doing wrong.
And still—we did it.
I walked home that evening under a sky the color of bruises. The streets were loud—vendors calling out, children running barefoot, cars honking impatiently. Life moved on without noticing that something inside me had shifted irreversibly. That I was carrying a grief too quiet to be seen.
At church that Sunday, the hymns tasted bitter in my mouth.
Love bears all things, they sang.
Love endures all things.
I wondered if love ever got tired of enduring.
I knelt when everyone knelt. I bowed my head and closed my eyes. I prayed for clarity. For distance. For relief. I prayed God would take this feeling from me, the way He took sins and sicknesses and storms.
Instead, silence answered.
Silence, and his face.
Religion has teeth.
It bites hardest when you try to love outside its boundaries.
Days passed, heavy and strained. We spoke less. When we did, our words were careful, trimmed of intimacy. The spaces between sentences grew wider, filled with things we were no longer allowed to say. I told myself this was maturity. Obedience. Faith.
It felt like grief.
I caught him watching me sometimes, the same softness in his eyes, now shadowed by restraint. He never crossed the line. Neither did I. But restraint can hurt as much as transgression. Sometimes more.
One afternoon, I asked him something I had been holding back for weeks.
"Do you believe God would punish you," I said, "for loving someone like me?"
He hesitated.
That was my answer.
"I believe God tests us," he said finally. "And sometimes the test is walking away."
I nodded slowly, forcing myself to breathe through the tightness in my chest.
"And if you fail?" I asked.
He looked at me then with something dangerously close to pain. "Then you live with the consequences."
I wondered which consequence frightened him more—losing his family, or losing me.
That night, my mother noticed my silence.
"You've been distant," she said, setting a plate of food in front of me. "Is something troubling your spirit?"
I wanted to tell her everything. About him. About faith turning into a wall. About loving someone who would never be allowed to love me back fully. But I saw her tired eyes, her fragile hope, her devotion built on endurance.
So I shook my head. "Just tired."
Another lie.
Another small betrayal.
I began to understand then: love wasn't the real danger.
Hope was.
Hope that maybe faith could bend.
Hope that maybe families could soften.
Hope that maybe God was bigger than the rules we built around Him.
Hope was the sharpest thing between us.
The next time we met, we didn't sit.
We stood facing each other, close enough that I could smell the faint soap on his clothes, close enough that stepping forward would have ended everything.
"I don't regret knowing you," he said.
"I do," I replied honestly. "Only because it hurts."
A sad smile touched his lips. "Some things are worth the pain."
I wanted to ask him if I was worth defying everything he'd ever been taught.
But I didn't.
Because some questions, once asked, can never be unanswered.
Religion has teeth.
And it was already sinking them into us.