Written Into Ashes

There’s a story my siblings know only vaguely. One they used to throw around carelessly like a toy—something they didn’t fully understand, yet found amusing enough to use against me in moments of playful mockery. For years, they teased me about it, laughing as siblings do, oblivious to the fact that behind every joke was a truth I held close to my chest like a trembling secret.

Eventually, that story—my story—made its way to my mother’s ears.

She didn’t take it seriously at first. She chuckled, waved it off as one of those harmless crushes young girls tend to have. But mothers, they notice things. They see the slight pause in your breath when his name is mentioned. The way your eyes shift away, the nervous tug at your sleeve, the silence that settles in your bones.

And so she asked me one day, quite suddenly, if I was serious about him. If what she heard was true. I still remember that moment—the sun casting a golden light into the living room, her hand gently holding mine, her voice hesitant but calm.

I was only sixteen. Still just a child in everyone’s eyes. But in my heart, I had been carrying a love that bloomed when I was fourteen—quiet, tender, and so, so real. A love that had grown inside me like a vine creeping up a wall, slow but strong, twining through everything I thought I knew about myself.

But when she asked me, I couldn’t say yes. I saw the concern in her eyes, the weight she already carried for our family, and I couldn’t bring myself to add to it. So I gave her what she needed to hear.

“No, Ammi,” I said. “I used to like him, not anymore.”

It wasn’t a lie. It was a sacrifice. One I made for her peace of mind. One I made for the honour of my parents, for the image they had of their daughter as someone focused, obedient, and wise beyond her years. In that moment, I buried my love beneath a mountain of silence.

But even mountains can’t contain everything.

Years passed. We grew apart. We stopped speaking altogether. Life happened—school ended, numbers changed, paths diverged. He faded from my everyday life, but never from my inner world. I never told anyone what he meant to me, not even my closest friends. Not even in a diary. I was afraid that naming it would give it power over me, that it would expose a wound I had long pretended didn’t exist.

The world saw me move on. I excelled. I matured. I laughed at the same jokes my siblings told, pretending it had all been a silly childhood crush. But deep down, I never stopped counting the years.

This year, it turned ten.

Ten years since I first looked at him and felt my heart stumble in a way it never had before. Ten years since that strange warmth settled in my chest every time he smiled at me. Ten years since my fourteen-year-old self fell in love for the first time and didn’t even know what to call it.

I was the only one who kept track. The only one who remembered.

Five years ago, we severed all ties. The silence became permanent. Not even accidental greetings or vague online presence. Nothing. And yet, even now, I find myself wondering what I would give for one more moment. Just a second. A single breath of his voice. A glance that could pretend to mean something again.

He died not long after the silence began. Suddenly, unexpectedly. The kind of ending that doesn’t come with preparation. It wasn’t supposed to be the last time I saw him, but it was. And that knowing sits with me even now.

And yet, here I am, at twenty-four, on the threshold of a new chapter.

They say beginnings are quiet. But mine started with thunder.

The day I received the offer to leave Pakistan, Karachi was soaked in rain. The kind of rain that didn’t ask permission. It poured down the windows, filled the cracks in the pavement, and carried with it a sense of ending. I sat cross-legged on my bed, the glow of my laptop the only light in the room. Everything else—me, the walls, the sound of Mishal’s voice echoing from the hallway—was still.

Then came the email.

“Congratulations: You have been selected for the International Fellowship for Emerging South Asian Storytellers.”

My breath caught. I read it again. And again.

Three months in Edinburgh, Scotland. A stipend. Mentorship. A chance to write, uninterrupted, surrounded by a silence that wasn’t heavy with memory.

I need to say yes. Not because I’m being forced into anything, but because something inside me wants to move forward. I’ve carried this secret love for a decade. I’ve lived inside the shadow of a boy who no longer sees me, who no longer exists in this world. It’s time to come out of that darkness.

But before I do, I need to honour the story I’ve never told.

I need someone—anyone—to know that what I felt wasn’t a game. It wasn’t childish, it wasn’t fleeting. It wasn’t something that disappeared like a bubble in the air. It mattered. It changed me. It taught me what it meant to care deeply, to long quietly, to be loyal to someone who may never have realized just how much space they took in another’s heart.

Even now, as I write this, I find it hard to believe I’m letting it go.

Because for ten years, this unspoken love became part of my identity. It was the hidden rhythm of my days. The ache in the songs I replayed too often. The hope in my whispered prayers. The silence in the corners of every celebration. The longing tucked behind every smile. The stories I never finished writing because they all seemed to echo him.

I built a world around a memory. And that world became my shelter. But that shelter, I’ve learned, can become a prison too. A place where growth stands still, where the heart learns to beat only in the past. It’s safe, but it’s suffocating. And I want to breathe.

So I will pack this love away like an old letter—folded carefully, sealed shut, and placed in a box. In that box will go every unsent message, every memory I repeated in my head until it became myth, every version of a future that only I saw. I will lock it. I will take a match to it, not out of hatred, but as an offering.

To the girl I was.

To the love I kept.

To the heart that tried its best to heal in silence.

To the boy who will never return.

Let this be the last time I speak of him. Not because I wish to forget, but because I finally wish to live.

He will always be the boy I loved in secret. But now, I am choosing a life that is mine. A life where love can speak out loud. A life where I no longer measure worth by how much pain I can carry. A life where I don’t write for him, but for me.

And maybe, someday, someone will read this and understand.

That even the quietest loves can echo through decades.

And that sometimes, the strongest love is the one you finally learn to let go of.

I will step forward.

And I will say yes.