For the Woman Who Became Someone Else’s Forever
It did not even take a year
for autumn to return
to the place where ours refused to become a spring.
Where you left me
with a pocket full of tomorrows
and hands still learning
the shape of your absence,
another man will kneel
and ask forever
from the same sky
that once heard my silent prayers.
I imagine the earth remembering us.
Perhaps it will not tell him
how many dreams were buried there.
Perhaps mercy
is also a form of forgetting.
I am happy for you.
Do not mistake these tears for envy.
Everything I ever asked of Allah
was that your heart would one day
know peace,
know safety,
know a home that would never leave.
I only did not know
that heaven would answer my prayer
with another man’s name.
They tell us to be careful
what we ask of God.
No one tells us
that sometimes He grants the prayer
while removing the one
who whispered it.
So I have learned acceptance.
Not because the ache has ended,
but because love,
if it is worthy of its own name,
cannot become a prison.
Still…
What terrible mirror did I become,
that your heart
opened so fearlessly
to another sunrise?
How heavy was my shadow,
that another’s light
felt like dawn?
These are questions
I release into the wind.
You were never meant
to belong to sorrow.
You were always meant
to become someone’s missing half,
the verse
that completed another soul.
He is, perhaps,
the luckiest man beneath this sky.
May Allah place mercy between your hands,
patience in your trials,
and laughter in your home.
May every prayer you whisper
find its answer.
And if there remains
one prayer for me,
let it be this:
that when my name
passes through your memory,
it arrives gently,
like a bird that knows
it is no longer building its nest there.
In another life,
I will come looking for you
before time learns
how to separate us.
But in this one,
forever
has already chosen its address.
So go,
without carrying the weight
of what became of me.
I will carry enough
for us both.
Fi Amanillah, meri jaan.
There are farewells
the tongue can pronounce,
and there are loves
that never learn
the language of goodbye.
