The One I Refuse to Name (For Heer) edited

Her son, My husband. One absence.

Author’s note:

I wrote this a few days ago, and it has stayed with me. It felt like giving an insight into a young woman many are misunderstanding. Please remember how young she is and the circumstances of her life.

Gulab, Heer, Nawab. A mother. A daughter in law. A son who is not here.

Read gently, or do not. Some pieces are not meant to be gentle.

Gulab

To see an institution, a fortress that was built as a sort of weave of a woman who is altogether, so confident but challenging, so strong, crumble not once but twice, and at the price of what? Her son’s departure or her own pride?

How does a woman work through this? How do the years and years of foundation, walls that were carefully and constructively placed exactly where she wanted, melt away at the mere existence of a simple 19 year old?

A mother’s heart aches for her son, who has left and would not return, would not even come see her. Her heart breaks. Can he not spare a minute or two?

Where has once gone a boy who ran at my beck and call, now just gone because of this girl, this disease, this despicable, unworthy girl? Where has my son gone? Why will he not return to me?

My heart bleeds. Do they not see how hard it is for me to hold it all in? Do they not see how hard I have worked?

My family. My people. My institution.

Do they see me? Am I seen?

I kept our family together. I kept our home together, our people in place. Our walls were built from the mere calluses of my hands, my teachings, my longings.

But today, my son is not here. My apple of my eye. The mere pride of my heart. The ace of diamonds. The light of my life.

Because of a 19 year old girl.

My husband chose to do what he saw fit for our family and not once did he consult me, not once did he ask or care, “Dear, are you alright?” “Is this right, my love?”

Did he deem me worthy of an opinion on our son’s life, the apple of my eye, my little boy’s whole life burning in front of me, and how helpless I was? What kind of mother am I?

I worry for my reign, my home, my pride. What is often mistaken as my ego is sometimes a reflection of my guard and my iron walls, hiding my inner pain, my inner feelings.

They shall not know my pain. What good would that do even if they knew? What good does that matter when no one, not one person, cares for my son or me?

Where are you, my son? Are you eating well?

I am a mother, am I not? Then why is my son not here today? How have I wronged him? Oh Lord, how have I failed him? I have truly failed. He is the driving force of my soul. There is no stone I would not turn for him, no rock in the world I would not search, nothing would deny me. No one could question me, for I would do anything for my son, my baby, my child.

Anything for him to return, to his safe haven, our home, my world, my heart, our order.

This girl, this mere nineteen year old fool, she has taken him away. How dare she stand where he stood. How dare she walk around with his rights, when those rights are his and his alone.

How dare she use his things when my son is alone out in the cold, alone to fend for himself? How dare she receive the care my own never received from his father?

What does my husband see in her that I do not? How has this girl crept into his heart and overthrown my son? How could she think she is worthy of our household, of my establishment?

Come home, son. I wait for you. My aching heart grows in pain. It weeps the sorrows of a mother who aches and bleeds just to see you again, to hear you again, to hold you in my arms, to smell you, to feel your warmth. Come home, son. I have done everything I could. I am still trying. I am still doing it.

Come home, son. I have done everything I could. I am still trying. I am still doing it.

I will not give up. I would never give up. For you, I would turn the world around. For you, I would fight the world. Come home, son.

Come home and look at what you have done to me.

This mere 19 year old, the one I refuse to name, she is in the way.

She has no right. Absolutely no right to be here.

Heer

Have you felt what it is like to watch the dignified queen of this house, that is Gulab Brar crumble. Have you seen walls fall and break in front of you. Because I have. I have seen it twice.

Once in a room, when you were placed on a bed with your fate unknown. She believed. She did not give up. Your odds were so slim, but she was confident because she had to be. She had to make sure you would come back to her, and you did.

She has learned to wear her loneliness like a shawl.

Daringly and proudly, through her agony and her despair, she fought my entire family for you. She bent and folded her hands together. She was on her knees, on the floor, kneeling before me, for you.

It was always for you. Why will you not see her.

I see her. I saw her pain. Trust me, the guilt I felt that day, I pray no daughter or child ever feels it. I saw a force, an entire establishment (the law of this home), fall to my feet for you. Her heart was wailing, her voice cracking. She promised me anything. She said, Gulab Brar stands with you.

My eyes burned as my heart twisted and my mind spun. What have we done. How could I have been so foolish. Here is a mother, your mother.

I have a mother too, and I have hurt her as well.

See her. Be seen.

This is wrong. It is all very wrong. Wake up, please. Wake up. Your family needs you. I need you. You need to tell the truth. No one stands with me. No one hears me. No one believes me. But you, you have a whole foundation that stands by you and is built for you. A tenacious woman who is fighting me, time, and my conservative, undeserving family for you. So please wake up. I beg of you. Let us end this nightmare. End her nightmare and be done with it. This crawl of anguish, this night terror of a day, will not end if you do not wake up and tell the truth, and fight, for the both of us.

It has been months now since I have lived in your room. I still remember the first day I walked in. She would not even look at me. But her eyes, the pain, that look on her face, I can never unsee it. She did not want me in your room and I did not want your room either, because you did not want me. You ran away and left me here to fend for myself with these vultures, who are ready to peck at me and feed off my innocence.

How much more am I to endure. How much more am I to bear. How much more am I to grow. All at the mere age of nineteen. Will I ever be happy.

All my dreams are gone. My responsibilities. My promises to my crown, the ray of my life, the bane of my existence, the one who taught me to believe despite all pain thrown at us, my mother. I am here in another mother’s house, a mother who has lost her son, at the cost of my mother’s incapability to save me, and her freedom, my freedom. At what price am I here at her house.

She moved with doors inside her, all of them closed. What of my door, the one I bolted from the inside, where I locked my feelings and swallowed the key. Is she seen, am I seen. In this hollow house that once radiated so much love, we now live like strangers to our own hearts.

Everything has turned into echo and obligation. I keep waiting for warmth that does not come back. Every day is a mystery. I never know where you are, or how you are. I see her and something in me snaps. My blood goes feral. Every scheme, every carefully carried out step, is my only fuel, all of it built on the hope of your return. The plots I plan to remove the pawn from our sanctuary. This house used to feel unfinished, but still ours. Now it feels eaten alive. Swallowed whole, past the point of no return.

I live in a servant’s room, for her peace. I try to avoid her. I do not call her with a name that I know would cut deeper. Do I even call her mother. When she is indifferent to me, can I truly blame her.

Her eyes bore holes into mine as a reminder that my brown is not the shade of yours. My smile is not the one she sees smiling back. My face is not the face she wakes up hoping to see. The person I am living and trying to be in this house of hers has no place. The room upstairs is empty. It is waiting for its rightful owner to return, the real person who lived here.

I am told I have no one in this house, and the people I have supporting me are useless. I see courage in those people, but I admire you the most. You are so strong in your faith to get him back, so agile and apt at what you do. The lengths you have gone for him are the lengths I wish my own mother would have gone for herself, my sister, and me.

We are alike, you know. You built walls to hide your pain from seeping through. To you it is weakness. Your family portrait is incomplete, your son who left, your husband who supports me like a dad I never had, and your own daughter in law who is an older sister I never knew I needed. Your anger is known to me, how you hold your incomplete family, your portrait that is just a photo on the wall.

I built walls from the pain I heard through the rust of an iron belt and the shrills of my mother’s screams. Her tears that were sobbed quietly as she slept. My incapability of helping her. The scars are seared into my mind. Bruises live under my skin like memory, branded behind my eyes. Not just a memory, a warning. Not just a warning, a map of my flight. A reminder of my plight.

What is perceived as our weakness is truly our strength. We fight for our family. We want them safe, secured, protected. You want to see your son and wrap your love around him like a shield, like a forcefield. I want to see my mother smile, the kind where sunlight pours through her eyes, the kind that makes her whole face move.

I see your strength and despite everything you do to me, despite your harsh words, your criticism, your antics, all I hear is your plea, come home my son. I see that woman who lay on your bed. I see that woman who craves her son’s return. I see her heart, for in it I see mine. I see how much it means to be loved by a mother who fights the world for you. I see her strength and I wish to God my own had the same to fight her battles. But here I am, my mom’s strength, and your mother’s destruction, in your home where your mother wishes it were you.

Is there a place on this earth where I am wanted. Will I ever be wanted.

So I ask, please come home. Please see your mother.

That grey woman is falling apart without you. I am too.

We need you.

I accept a lot of things, but nothing that would hurt my mother’s survival. I sleep with my heart quavering, worrying for her safety, for the scars from my childhood that are seared into my mind, branded behind my eyes, never healed and never meant to heal. Do you hear me.

Today she has done the worst. She sabotaged my cousin sister, because of me. Please see her. Just when I think she is getting better, that she sees me as a reflection, or a person, or some form of mistake that got caught up in this, she makes me question everything. Why would she do that just to make me leave, knowing well that to fill the emptiness of her son she would burn another mother’s life. She would send me to the wolves to be fed on if it meant quenching her thirst of seeing you. Why will you not make her understand. Why will you not tell her to stop. Please make it stop.

Your mother shakes without you in her ecosystem. You are evolving, but she does not know. She cannot see because you will not let her. She should know the person you are becoming, the man I know you are meant to be. Your house is stagnant from the day you left. Nothing has changed and it will not, because my presence bears a resemblance of what was lost and what could have been if I was not here.

Your hurdles are known to me, but are they known to your own. Does she know why you are away. Her heart is shredding. I see her hollowness. I see her slowly cracking. Please meet her.

In a different world, I wish this were easy. I wish we would talk and I could tell you how much it hurts to not be the one who protects all the time, because you have shown me what it is like to feel protected. My heart moved that day you did, and the times you rushed to help me. I never had anyone do that before. Is this what it feels like to be looked after. To be a child. To be loved. To be cared for.

I wish I could tell you how I feel, but I have no clarity of how I feel myself, except that the day you saved me, for the first time in my life, I felt relieved, and I saw what it was like to have hope.

I see hope every day in her eyes, eyes that roam for you when we eat, eyes that naturally turn to your chair, eyes that glint with sadness when she passes your room. She lives on the brink of your memories, an old sweater of yours. She is craving you. Please meet her. Her hope gives me reason. It serves me a purpose that maybe one day it will be alright. We will be alright. We will, won’t we.

Am I wrong for savouring you. Am I wrong for not telling her I have seen you when she has not.

You have touched me in more ways than I can ever name, and she stands right here, starving for even one embrace from you. You reach for me like it is instinct. She cannot even reach for you. Her hands hover, then fall back to her sides, empty. Not a hug. Not a hand in your hair. Not a palm on your cheek. Nothing. A mother should not have to watch another woman live inside the tenderness she is denied. She should not have to beg for what I receive by simply existing beside you.

Her strength is wearing. Come home.

Please.

I have seen and heard her do things that are mind boggling just for you to come home and see her. Let her smell you and feel your warmth. Let her eyes swell as she looks at how much you have grown without her. Let her touch your hair. Let her touch your face and drink in the fact that you are here, nectar to her starving heart. Let her hug you and comfort her heart, a heart ashen, a heart she has closed off since you left that note, a heart she has hidden. Let her heart beat again for you.

Heer

Today, I saw her break.

Gulab

How could you be here. It was supposed to be him.

Heer

Today, I saw her give up.

Gulab

You win. I have lost, and the saddest thing is not that I have lost a battle. It is that I have lost him from returning to me.

Heer

How do I tell you how much has changed between us.

Gulab

You sit where he was supposed to sit.

Heer

I wish I could tell her how relieved I am. How grateful I am that we were not annulled. That for once, something did not get taken from me. That I am still your wife. That I am still here.

Gulab

This annulment was supposed to return my happiness. My son.

Heer

How do I tell her I want this to work, even when her eyes make me feel like a thief. Even when your absence makes me look guilty.

Gulab

You were meant to be gone. This marriage was meant to be annulled. Oh my agony.

Heer

And I do not know what hurts more. That I am happy. Or that my happiness has her bleeding.

Gulab

I do not want you here. You were supposed to be rid of our lives. My son was supposed to return.

He is my life. I want him to stay. I want to live where he is.

He does not want you in his life. He wants you gone. I want you gone.

Heer

And yet I am still here, in his place.

And I am the only proof he is not coming.

And my face is the reminder that your son is missing.

Heer

Today, I saw a mother surrender. I saw her hope shut its eyes. My heart leapt, not with joy, with horror. What have I done. I am happy we were not annulled, but how did I forget her. She was waiting for you again.

I am warmed by your hands, and she watches with empty arms, craving what she is not allowed to take. You kissed life back into me, while she is denied the simplest mercy, your arms around her. You touch me and I feel chosen. She cannot touch you at all, and that absence eats her alive.

How could I have forgotten about her. My mirror. My reminder of what is real and true.

I watched her come undone. I saw her give in to the idea of your absence. My heart ached as I watched something in her collapse. My mind spiralled when I saw her shoulders finally drop, like she had been carrying years and could not carry them another inch. As the car kept speeding, I watched her hands go still, as if even hope got tired of reaching. The world slowed. I kept my eyes on hers, pleading with words I prayed she would hear without me speaking them. Then she spoke, and her words hurt. They hurt because they were true.

Does anyone know what watching someone want to die feels like. How could someone do that. Why would she do that.

How did I forget she needed to see him today. How foolish was I, to let myself sink into a moment of happiness, when here she stands, a constant reminder of pain, the bearer of it all. Because the seat beside me was supposed to be him.

The roses, the delicate reds, all of it meant for him. I am sure she has cleaned his room a dozen times by now. I am sure she has had the chef prepare a feast. All for the man who will not walk through the door.

Then she lifted her hands from the steering wheel.

She let go.

How has she fallen so far. I knew she was wearing thin, but I forgot. I forgot because it has always been me between both of you. Her pain on one side. My pain on the other. And you, nowhere.

And the worst part is she did not do it because she wanted to die. She did it because she wanted you.

How could I have forgotten about her. How much you mean to her. Today, for the first time, I saw her lose and I was not happy.

I watched her stop fighting. I watched the mother in her go quiet.

Oh, what have we done. How did we do this again. Not again.

I watched her watch you fly away from her in the span of that drive. Mile by mile, I watched you leave her until there was nothing left for her to hold. The road kept taking you further, and she kept losing you. I watched her soul give up in a split second when her hands finally let go. I watched a woman I never thought I would respect reduce to nothing, lifeless, formless, a place where hope does not survive. I watched the beating heart of our home disintegrate, coming apart at the seams. Her eyes, once so bright and so fierce, were now hollow and lost.

She has given up. She gave up. She has quite literally chosen to die without you, because the thought of not having you, of never seeing you again, has pulverised her. It has brought her to her knees. It has made her collapse.

I will not let this happen, not again. I will not let her go in vain. Not without seeing you. Not without being seen. Not without hearing you, and being heard. Not without feeling you close enough to calm the craving in her heart. Not without knowing how much you have grown. Not without letting you witness what she has become without you, how far she has fallen, how badly she has regressed in your absence.

Today I will make you see her. I promised her. I promised a mother, your mother, the way I promised mine. I will reunite you two. This is my promise.

I will undo what I have done wrong. I will make sure this grey woman sees you, and that the loss of light in her life is filled again with the sun that comes from seeing you. I will replace the dullness with a glint. I will replace despair with desire, yearning with craving. This is my promise to the woman whose house I live in, a woman I have learned to respect, a woman I have learned to want to someday accept me. Because I want to know what it feels like to have a mother like her fight for me, to be loved by her in pure sincerity. I want her acceptance the way I want yours.

If she loses, then my mother loses. Hope is lost. She has lost, my mother has lost, and so I have lost.

A mother like her cannot lose because she fights for her children and I need her to remind me of my fight for my mother. This woman whose house I live in, whose home I have come to see as mine even though it truly is not. I have come to understand her, to respect her, but most of all to learn from her. The hope she carries for you is the hope I reflect in me for my mother, for us.

Please come home. So much has changed. Her heart and mine. Us and ours. Nothing is the same. So much has changed.

We crashed. She is okay. I will get her out. She will meet you today. God, you have to be here. I will move mountains to bring you to her. We got out safe.

Your mother fed me water. This haughty woman, this establishment (the pride of this house) I live under, offered me water. She held the bottle to my lips and I drank, and it was not only thirst she quenched. It felt like mercy. It felt like something I was never meant to receive from her. For a moment, I let myself believe she was pretending it was you she was feeding, that her hands were borrowing your shape, that her care was rehearsing for you.

Did you know she fed me first. Like I was her own.

The world is spinning. I cannot tell if I am dreaming, or if the colour of everything has changed. Even yellow feels different, like sunlight that used to burn is now learning how to warm. Why is she not indifferent. Why is she looking at me like I am real. Is she hurt. She did hit her head.

She told them to check me first. What is happening. I do not understand it, but whatever it is, I will take it. If she is offering an inch, I will savour it. Am I wrong again for hoping. Or for believing.

She is treating me differently. Her husband, my father, questioned her. Your father too looks as confused as I feel. The whole house has an air of curiosity, thick with questions. It is as if the rulebook has been rewritten overnight. How has the queen of this house decided to speak to me as if I exist, and without you here to witness it.

I was wrong about her.

Six words, and my mind still will not accept them. My mind is reeling. Is she for real. Is this real. Is any of it even true. Am I dreaming. You have been gone, so why now. What changed.

She said she realised she misjudged me. I felt my cheeks tingle, a small smile trying to creep its way in before I could stop it. The high and mighty woman is accepting me. Or is this her newest plot. How would I know. It is not like I can ask you, can I.

So I keep her at arm’s length. I test the water the way you test a wound, carefully, expecting pain. Days pass. She is still different. She has not ruined my life. No new scheme. No new venom. My mother is safe. So what is this. Have you called her. Did you see her. Did you speak to her. Did you come home without me knowing and soften her in the dark. Did she really invite me to sit and eat with her. Help me God, is any of this real. Am I hallucinating.

I watch her the way I used to watch storms, waiting for the first crack of thunder. But there is only quiet. A quieter version of her. A woman who brings tea without making it feel like a debt. A woman who looks at me and does not look away. A woman who says my name like it belongs in her mouth.

And it terrifies me, how badly I want to believe it.

Because something else is happening too, something I did not know I needed. Your father defended me. He stood between me and the sting of their words like it was his right, like it was his duty. And when he did, my chest warmed in a way I cannot explain. I have never been protected like that in this house. I have never had someone claim me like that, not as a guest, not as a mistake, but as someone worth shielding. For a moment, it felt like I had a father.

And if he can look at me and see his own, then maybe she can too. Maybe this is what it means to finally be held on both sides. A mother and a father, not the ones I was born to, but the ones I have been starving for in this home. Maybe that is why I am letting her kindness reach me. Maybe that is why I am choosing to accept it, even while I am still afraid.

Because if she has truly accepted me, then everything I built to survive her starts to look like a lie. The walls I wore like armour begin to feel heavy. The hate I kept sharp, to protect myself, begins to dull.

I do not know how to live in a world where she is kind.

And yet I am beginning to think she has truly accepted me.

Writer

Has anyone ever felt what it is like to watch a composed, mentally diligent woman, someone so calculated, so dignified, so unwavering, completely break down?

Heer has seen that twice.

Once, when Gulab was caught in the storm of her son’s illness, the feverish state that threatened to consume everything she knew. She saw Gulab slump into surrender, falling to her knees, her pride dissolved in the raw fear of losing someone so close. In that moment, Heer witnessed a side of Gulab she never expected. The vulnerability beneath her cold exterior. She understood, for the first time, how deeply Gulab cared, how her stoicism was armor for a heart that could break.

Heer did not just see it. She felt it. The kind of fear that has no dignity. The kind that drags a mother to the floor and keeps her there, praying with hands that do not know what else to do. It was simple. It was selfless. It was love, the oldest magic in the world.

And then again, in the car, just before the crash.

The woman who had always held everything together, whose gaze was sharp and unwavering, who exuded a quiet authority, she cracked. Heer watched helplessly as the walls Gulab had built around herself crumbled. In that instant, she saw her most vulnerable. The mother. The woman who had given everything for her son. The strength she had always relied on, no longer enough to keep the tears back.

Heer had seen something most never get to witness. A mother’s love so overwhelming, so pure, it stripped away everything that made Gulab the woman she was. Her pride, her composure, her control, they vanished under the weight of that love.

And it shattered Heer.

Because to watch Gulab break was to watch a whole life fall apart in seconds. It was to watch someone who had never allowed softness, who had never allowed weakness, suddenly become only human. Only a mother. Only a woman with empty arms.

What do you do with the sight of a mother unraveling, losing herself just for the chance that her son might return? How do you witness that and not feel the weight of your own presence in it?

A part of Heer felt responsible. As if her existence in this house, eating at this table, breathing in the air that once belonged to a family so whole, was a painful reminder of what had been lost. Gulab’s son had left, but Heer remained. And in that silence, it felt as though she had pushed him away too.

It felt like living inside someone else’s wound.

And still, some part of Heer began to respect this woman. This mother. Not because Gulab was kind. Not because Gulab was gentle. But because Gulab loved with a ferocity Heer could not deny. Because Gulab’s grief did not perform. It bled. It did not ask permission. It took over.

Heer respected her because she could finally see what Gulab had been all along. A mother trying not to die of missing her child.

And the gut of it, the part Heer could not swallow, was this.

Gulab could hate her with her whole chest, and still love her son enough to break in front of her.

Now Gulab was changing.

Not loudly. Not with apologies that filled the room. Not with a dramatic softening that made sense. Gulab was changing the way storms change direction. Quietly. Without warning. Without permission.

Heer noticed it in the smallest things first. A cup placed near her without a slap of sound. A sentence that did not bite. A glance that did not pierce. Gulab speaking to her as if she existed, and that alone felt like the world turning wrong, like something unnatural had happened and no one knew how to name it.

It should have felt like victory.

It did not.

Because Heer had lived too long on the edge of kindness that came with conditions. She had learned that softness can be a trap. That warmth can be bait. That being treated gently can be the calm before a punishment you do not see coming. So when Gulab’s voice lost its sharpness, Heer did not relax. She braced harder. She waited for the real blow.

Days passed.

The blow did not come.

And that is when it became unbearable.

Because cruelty is something you can fight. Cruelty gives you shape. It gives you something to hate, something to survive against. But this new version of Gulab, this quiet version, left Heer with nowhere to put all the anger she had been carrying. It left her holding a weapon with no enemy, and the weight of it began to turn inward.

Heer began to question herself.

Was Gulab always capable of this? Was the hatred just grief wearing a face? Was it never about Heer, not truly, but about the empty chair, the unopened door, the son who would not come home? Was Gulab’s cruelty a language she used because it was the only one she had ever been allowed to speak?

Heer did not want to forgive her.

Heer did not know how.

Forgiveness felt like betrayal. Like erasing every night she swallowed tears, every morning she woke with her stomach tight, every moment she made herself small to survive. Forgiveness felt like telling her own pain it had been dramatic, unnecessary, imagined.

And yet, Gulab had fed her water first.

That moment kept returning like a haunt. Gulab’s hand steady at her mouth. Gulab’s eyes fixed on her, not as an intruder, not as a problem, but as a girl who could have been someone’s daughter. The kind of care that slipped out before pride could stop it. The kind of care that did not ask to be noticed.

Heer did not know what to do with that.

Because if Gulab could offer an inch of tenderness, then maybe Gulab had always had tenderness inside her, buried deep, guarded, starving. And that thought did something dangerous to Heer.

It made her hope.

Hope is a cruel thing to give a girl like Heer.

Hope makes you soften. Hope makes you reach. Hope makes you forget how to survive.

Heer began to feel the shift in the house too. The air was different. People spoke in lower tones. They watched Gulab the way they watched a myth change shape. Even Gulab’s husband seemed cautious, as if he did not trust the softness he was seeing, as if he was waiting for it to disappear.

And Heer, more than anyone, waited.

Because if this was real, then it meant something in Gulab had chosen to live, instead of only missing. It meant Gulab had chosen to see Heer as more than the replacement standing in her son’s place. It meant Gulab had chosen to stop punishing the girl who stayed.

It meant Gulab had chosen to accept.

And Heer did not know how to hold that without breaking.

Because acceptance was everything Heer had wanted, and also everything she had learned not to believe in. Acceptance was the thing she had begged her own father for and never received. Acceptance was the thing she watched other girls carry casually, as if it came free with being loved.

If Gulab accepted her, then Heer would have to admit that she needed it. That she was starving for a mother, and Gulab had the power to feed her.

And the moment Heer admitted that to herself, she hated herself for it. Because how dare she want anything from the woman who wanted her gone. How dare she want to be held by hands that had pushed her away.

And still, the truth sat there, heavy and undeniable.

Heer was beginning to believe Gulab had accepted her. Not because Heer had won, but because Gulab had finally lost enough to see the girl in front of her.

The girl who stayed.

The girl who bled quietly.

The girl who was not trying to replace her son, only trying not to disappear in a house that kept reminding her she did not belong.

And maybe that was the cruelest part of it all.

That the acceptance Heer had wanted did not arrive in joy. It arrived in grief. It arrived in the wreckage of a mother’s longing. It arrived after Gulab had broken twice.

And now Heer had to live with it. To carry it. To decide if she would let it touch her, or if she would keep her walls up and starve, because starving had always felt safer than being fed.

End note:

If you read all of this and you still have someone you can call, if you still have a door you can knock on, do it. Not tomorrow. Not when you feel ready. Do it while you still can.

Now tell me, dearest reader, can you blame the nineteen year old?