After the devastating loss of their unborn child, Inaya and Ayaz's marriage hangs by a thread.
Grief of loss has turned them into strangers,
Inaya drowning in sorrow, while Ayaz's silence feels like a betrayal.
Is their love broken beyond repair...
Air that day was thick, an unnatural stillness was there. Stillness that made my every breath felt heavy, like living on grief itself. The sun dared not to shine that day, just the gray clouds... mirroring the hollow pain inside me.
They told us, the ritual is simple
name her... wash her... bury her...
A checklist for a life that never lived. Checklist of saying our last goodbyes
There was no prayer, no celebration, for her soul that we are sending back... a way too soon.
In that silence. The name we chose echoed in my mind, but my lips... They refused to let them out, refused to release it into the world. How could I speak a name meant for laughter, for her first steps...
now wrapped in white shrouds?
I watched as they washed her tiny, lifeless body. Her Delicate hands and her delicate skin, that has turned too cold for life.
Each movement felt like a cruel mockery of care... of love....
My heart screamed, but my voice stayed silent. This wasn't supposed to happen. Not like this. Not this dark. My life that felt like a dream come true, has now turned into a nightmare.
After saying our goodbyes. We reached home and it feels like hell now!
The walls seemed to be closing in, trying to suffocate me with those memories of what has happened to us...
what could have been our home is now a 2 bedroom apartment that I hate more than anything.
Each room, once filled with our dreams and our laughter, is now hollow... empity, echoing with our silence.
The crib... still assembled in that corner of our bedroom, feels like a cruel memory of "hope turned to ash". I couldn't look at it, yet I couldn't look away.
Ayaz and I walked through the spaces, avoiding each other... like shadows, avoiding each other's eyes, both drowning in our own oceans of grief.
Every shared eye contact was like the silent accusation. This place, this hell, is filled with the ghost of a future that was murdered on our bedroom's balcony that day.
our room felt like a tomb now... where we now have no form of life and love, heavy with unspoken words. Each breath I took, felt like a struggle... struggle to feel nothing
I watched Ayaz from the corner of my eye, searching for his face... his face for the remnants of the man I knew...the man who had wept beside me just yesterday.
But something had shifted. The raw grief I'd seen in him just yesterday at the hospital had faded into something distant, something cold.
He sat at the edge of the bed, his back to me, staring at nothing but the walls. His shoulders were lean, but there was no sorrow in him... just detachment, as if he had already stepped away from the weight of his loss... OUR LOSS
The silence between us was louder than any loud scream. I waited for him to look at me.. Into my eyes, to say something, anything...
But he wouldn't meet my gaze, not even for a moment, his eyes floating everywhere in the room, on the floor, on the roof and those white walls... avoiding those eyes of mine.
Where was the compassion... the shared agony?
Where was the father who had lost his little girl?
I wanted to reach out...
to shake him...
to demand him to show...
show his feelings.
But I couldn't move. A cruel thought slithered through my mind. Maybe I was imagining it. Maybe the grief of this loss had twisted my perception of thinking, making me see faults in my loved ones, where there were none.
Or maybe he was already gone, leaving me alone in this room full of ghosts.
The suffocating silence in the room clung to me like a shroud. Ayaz sat across from her, distant, A man she knew... now empty.
His eyes, once searching for me.. are now avoid me... empty and detached. The ache in my chest deepened...was it grief that is challenging my perception, or is there something between us that's fractured beyond repair?... Beyond our love?...
Desperation of mine, longing to find the Ayaz I once knew, the one who held my hand through every hard times.
In that desperate search for solace, My mind drifted back...back to the day our story was began, at a wedding
Where the air had the scent of jasmine and an unresolved history.
It was only the second time we had met, and the first one I don't even remember.
Riyaz uncle's daughter's wedding...her father's eldest sibling. Riyaz... suggested the patriarch, who still stood proud, while the middle sibling, Ruksana Ummi, Ayaz's mother and now mine too, lingered on the troubles of the family, wounds tied to my grandmother. She was one character herself too in her days.
Dilor Papa, the youngest, wore the weight of loyalties. My father... Who was once my whole life.
Among the sea of relatives, Ayaz stood out... as always
A quiet enigma that was. Our eyes met across the decorated hall.
Ayaz....
Looked like a picture of unsettling perfection.
His presence was magnetic, yet it repelled me.. and yet I wanted his eyes towards me .
At 24, he carried himself with an aura of maturity that made him seem older, as if life had carved strength and secrets into him far beyond his years.
His face... like it was sculpted with sharp angles, eyes deep like ocean and unreadable, and his hair fell in effortless waves, as if he walked straight out of some glossy wet dream of mine.
It was that very perfection that disgusted me. There was something infuriating about him.
About how flawless he appeared...too polished, too composed, too confident, and too attractive.
He looked like he knew exactly how captivating he was,
An arrogant bastard wrapped in a veneer of grace. His presence seemed to command attention without asking for it, and that silent authority ignited an unspoken resentment in my heart.
Who gave him the right to look so untouchable? To carry himself with such quiet arrogance? My eyes narrowed, her loathing settling deeper, more out of defiance than reason.
He was too perfect, and his perfection...,
was the ugliest thing of all.
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