The Last Wish
Sarang
The blanket muffled everything — their voices, the world, even my own breathing.
I pulled it tighter over my head, pressing the fabric against my swollen cheeks. The skin still burned where I had hit myself, a habit I hated and couldn’t stop. From the living room, my parents’ voices crashed into each other like they always did — forty-five years of marriage reduced to this. Two people screaming about how the other had ruined their life.
Forty-five years. And still going.
My elder brother, predictably, had his headphones on. Volume maxed. The universal sign for not my problem. He had perfected that art long before I had learned how to carry all the problems he refused to touch.
I was thirty-five years old.
Closeted gay. Living in Surat with a family who didn’t know — and wouldn’t survive knowing. I had resigned from my call centre job three weeks ago, not out of ambition or some brave new plan, but because my mind had simply handed in its notice before I could. Six years of solving billing complaints for UK broadband customers, absorbing frustration from strangers across time zones, had chipped away at something inside me that I hadn’t even noticed until it was mostly gone.
The pressure to marry had started the moment I turned twenty-five. A decade of it now — relatives at every wedding, every festival, every random Sunday phone call with their voices dipped in sweet concern. Beta, what are you waiting for? We have a lovely girl.
I had my reasons to say No for marriage. The man I had loved who had drained my savings and disappeared. My brother’s marriage — a disaster from the start, his wife eventually leaving with someone who actually showed up for life. My parents, performing togetherness for the neighbours while the walls of our home absorbed every ugly word they had ever said to each other.
And of course — the reason I could never say out loud. I was gay.
Since I was sixteen, this family had quietly, completely, handed me their weight to carry. Grocery runs. Society meetings. My brother’s phone recharges, his food deliveries, his headphones — destroyed every few months through sheer carelessness, always replaced by me-- The youngest, somehow carrying the most.
I had thought resigning would bring silence. Instead, it brought more hours inside this apartment, more of their fighting, more of the headaches that had started arriving like uninvited guests and refused to leave. Anxiety had moved into my chest like a permanent tenant — rapid heartbeat, shortness of breath, trembling hands, vision that blurred at the edges when it got bad enough.
Tonight, it was bad enough.
I lay under the blanket, panting softly in the dark I had made for myself, their argument bleeding through the walls. My chest ached. My body trembled. And somewhere beneath the physical pain was something older and quieter — the exhaustion of a person who had spent their entire life being needed and never once being chosen.
I wish I was born in a family who loved me.
The thought came without effort, like something that had always been waiting.
I wish I was born somewhere I could be accepted for who I am. I wish I knew what happiness felt like. I wish I could die and be reborn — and this time, live for myself.
The moment the words formed, something shifted.
The heaviness left my body all at once, like a tide pulling back. The darkness behind my eyes softened. And somewhere very close — close enough to feel like breath against my ear — a whisper curled through the silence.
“Granted.”
Then nothing.
The first thing I registered was light — white, clinical, humming faintly above me.
A hospital.
I blinked against the brightness and tried to sit up. Hands caught me immediately — steady, careful — guiding me upright before I could fall back. I turned toward them.
The man beside me was not wearing a doctor’s coat. Casuals — fitted, simple. But there was nothing simple about the rest of him. Sharp eyes. Broad shoulders. Forearms laced with veins like he had come straight from a gym session and hadn’t bothered to cool down. He looked at me with an expression caught somewhere between relief and caution.
“Theo.” His accent landed clean and unmistakably British. “Are you feeling alright? Any discomfort?”
Theo?
I stared at his hand — still loosely holding my shoulder — for probably a beat too long. He pulled back immediately, something flickering across his face.
“Sorry.” He stepped back, voice dropping. “I know you don’t like me touching you. I forgot — I’m sorry.”
I hadn’t said a word. I was still processing the accent, the room, the name he had called me that was not mine.
The door opened.
A man in an expensive blazer walked in beside a woman in a silk gown, the kind of couple that made a room rearrange itself around them. Between them, a child — four, maybe five years old — bright-eyed and curious. The doctor near the foot of the bed looked up.
“And you are?”
The couple looked at him, then at me.
“We’re his parents,” the woman said, composed and certain. “We’re Theo Collins’ parents.”
The ringing started behind my eyes before I could make sense of what she had said.
Theo Collins.
I looked down at my hands. They were wrong — thinner, younger, the knuckles unfamiliar. I shoved the blanket aside and stepped toward the mirror mounted on the far wall, legs moving before my brain had caught up with what I was about to see.
The face in the mirror was not mine.
Young. Sharp-jawed. Unfamiliar in every way that mattered.
The ringing swallowed everything. My vision went white at the edges, then collapsed entirely — and I hit the floor.
