# Love Is Not the Life I Live—It Is Dreams The morning light fell slant through the hospital window, the kind of light that makes everything look temporary. Ritu watched it stripe across the white blanket, across her mother's sleeping face, and thought how her entire life had the quality of that light—never quite solid, always on its way to becoming something else. Her mother had stopped speaking three weeks ago. Not because she couldn't, the doctors had assured them, but because she had chosen silence as a new language. Ritu understood this better than anyone. She had been choosing her own languages all her life, none of them spoken. "Has she eaten?" Ritu asked the nurse, though she knew the answer before the nurse shook her head. The hospital smelled of ammonia and the particular kind of sadness that comes from rooms where people wait for their lives to change. Ritu had been waiting so long she could no longer remember what she was waiting for. Once, she thought, it had been love. The ordinary kind—from a man, from a family, from a life that looked like the lives in films. But that waiting had worn thin, frayed at the edges until there was almost nothing left of it. Instead, she had dreams. Every night without fail, Ritu dreamed of a city she had never visited. In these dreams, the streets were narrow and cobbled, lined with shops that sold things you couldn't name in daylight. There was always a café in the corner, always a man sitting at a particular table, always the same expression on his face—not quite waiting, not quite remembering. She would sit across from him and they would never speak, and yet it was the most complete conversation of her life. Her mother stirred. Her hand moved across the blanket, searching. Ritu took that hand. It was small, papery, the hand of someone who had held too little and released too much. Her mother's eyes opened—unfocused, traveling through some interior distance that had nothing to do with the hospital room. "Maa," Ritu said softly. "I'm here." Her mother's lips moved. For a moment Ritu thought she might speak, might break the three-week silence with some revelation, some final truth. But nothing came. Only the lips moving, like someone trying to remember the shape of words in a language they had forgotten. Ritu had never married. This was a fact people brought up the way they brought up weather—something to fill the silence, something that required no real answer. She was thirty-four. She had a job in an insurance office. She went to the cinema alone on Sunday afternoons. In the eyes of her neighbors, her aunts, the marriage broker who still occasionally called, she was a failure. But in her dreams, she was complete. She dreamed of that city so often now that it had become more real than the apartment she lived in, more real than the office with its gray desks and fluorescent lights. In her dreams, she knew the texture of the cobblestones, the way the light fell differently at different hours, the names of the shopkeepers who never quite faced her directly. She knew the man at the café the way she had never known anyone in waking life—not through conversation or touch or accumulated memory, but through something deeper, some recognition that transcended the ordinary measures of knowing. "You should rest," the nurse said. She had returned with fresh water, fresh linens. These small rituals of care, Ritu thought, were all that stood between chaos and order in a place like this. They were the only prayers that worked anymore. After the nurse left, Ritu sat in the vinyl chair beside the bed and watched her mother sleep. She thought about her parents' marriage—forty-three years of it. She had never seen them kiss. She had rarely seen them speak to each other about anything that mattered. And yet there was something between them, some wordless contract that held even now, even as her father sat in the waiting room downstairs, reading the same newspaper he had been reading for two hours, waiting for her mother to wake so he could sit beside her in silence that felt, to Ritu, like the closest thing to love she had ever witnessed. Perhaps love and dreams were not so different. Perhaps they were both the things we invented to survive the unbearable simplicity of being alive. That night, in her small apartment, Ritu went to bed early and entered her city without hesitation. She found the café immediately—it existed in a part of her mind that required no travel, no time. The man was there, as he always was. He looked up as she entered, and his expression contained her entire life: all the longing, all the recognition, all the terrible, perfect knowing that there were some truths that required no words. They sat across from each other while the city hummed outside. People passed the window. The light changed. And Ritu, for the first time in weeks, felt the thing that might have been called happiness—not the bright, brittle kind that comes from circumstance, but something deeper. The kind of happiness that comes from finding yourself in a place you have always belonged. When she woke, dawn was breaking. Her apartment was cold. Her life, in its waking form, was exactly as it had always been. And yet something had shifted. She lay in bed for a long time, holding onto the remnants of the dream, trying to preserve its texture before it dissolved into the ordinary day. Her phone buzzed. Her father. The message was brief: *Come.* At the hospital, they were very gentle about it. Death, in the end, was the only transformation that happened without resistance. Ritu held her mother's hand, still warm, still searching, and understood finally what the silence had been. Not absence. A presence so complete it required no language. Her father stood at the window, looking at nothing in particular. He had aged overnight. At sixty-eight, he suddenly looked ancient, as if he had been holding back time all these years and could no longer manage it. "She was happy sometimes," he said to the window. "In her own way. I knew when she was happy because she would forget to worry. It was like watching a door open." Ritu said nothing. There was nothing to say that would not trivialize the space between them. That night, she dreamed of her mother. They were sitting at the café in the city Ritu had never visited, and her mother was young—the way she looked in photographs from before Ritu was born. She was smiling, but it was not a smile that acknowledged Ritu's presence. It was turned inward, toward something private and luminous. In the dream, Ritu understood that there were many worlds existing simultaneously. This one, where people married and worried and failed to communicate what they most needed to say. And others, infinite others, where the same people lived entirely different lives. In some of them they were happy. In others, they were free. And in a few, perhaps, they were both. When Ritu woke, she lay quietly, cradling this knowledge. She thought of her mother in her new world, the one she had entered without hesitation, without looking back. She thought of her father, left behind, learning to live in a single world instead of two. And she thought of herself, standing in the peculiar grace of the living—still able to choose, still able to dream, still able to slip into the spaces between waking and sleep where the real life finally began. The city was waiting. The man was waiting. And Ritu, at last, was beginning to understand that love—the true kind—was not something you received or earned or found. It was something you recognized when you stopped looking for it. It was the thing you built brick by brick in the quiet hours, the place you returned to night after night until, finally, you could no longer distinguish between the dream and the living. Outside her apartment, the city buzzed with its ordinary sorrows and pleasures. People were waking, beginning their days, moving through their lives with the assumption that this one, this waking one, was the only version that counted. But Ritu knew better now. She rose and made tea and watched the morning light fall across her small kitchen, and felt, for the first time in her waking life, something close to peace. Not happiness. Peace. The kind that comes from surrender. The kind that comes when you finally accept that you are not waiting for your life to begin. It already has. In another city. In another language. In the kind of love that requires no words, no presence, no proof—only faith, and the willingness to close your eyes and let yourself be found.

Seven years ago
I married for love. We eloped. She hadn’t finished her studies yet, and I was in my first year of honours. My father was on his deathbed at the time. Cancer, stage four.

I didn’t listen to anyone’s pleas. I left him at death’s door and went away with her. The old, trusted love bowed to the new love of youth.

I suffered greatly in those days. I thought that one day I would be happy. My relationship meant more to me than the whole world. My husband got a job—first-class position. I thought God had finally looked kindly upon me, that now I would know the happiness money brings. I cannot even imagine now how selfish I had become for the sake of love. Once, this very money became my undoing. When money started flowing into his hands, so began his complete neglect of me.

He would use a fake ID to contact cheap women. I would grow suspicious, but whenever I asked him anything, he would dodge in a hundred different ways. In 2015, I caught him once. He begged for forgiveness, and I gave it to him.

He never once asked after me. But yes, I cannot call him a bad husband, because since he got the job, he never let me lack for anything—saris, bangles, snow cream, powder, all the material comforts of life.

When I went to my father’s house to visit, he never once asked how I was. Since I had married him for love, he thought I had nowhere else to go anyway, nothing to miss, so I had to stay! There was never any real love for me in his heart.

The fault was mine, because I believed in him too easily. And I kept believing in him, again and again!

2010. I didn’t even know how to use Facebook back then. I would just use Messenger to chat. His chat name was ‘Corpse Uncle.’ I found the name very interesting. My girlfriends and I all sent him chat requests together. Mine was accepted. I started talking to him. He was very funny, full of praise for me, and quite well-mannered. One day, in the course of conversation, he told me his mother was suffering from uterine cancer and was being treated at Square Hospital. He would need to take her to India for further treatment. Then he told me his father was no longer alive. He had a younger sister who had also died of cancer. He had no one left in this world. I felt such pity for him. I thought, oh, how helpless he must be! I believed every word he said. He told me he didn’t have the money needed for his mother’s treatment. If I could lend him some money, once his mother recovered, he would repay me.

For his mother’s treatment, I stole two and a half bhori of my mother’s jewelry and gave it to him. Even though I was caught later, I never admitted to the theft. I suffered greatly over this too. I was beaten badly at home, but I never told them about him.

It was during this time that my father’s cancer was diagnosed. Everyone had a solution: marry off the daughter first, then begin treatment. I was my father’s only daughter, with one younger brother. I told him everything. He would reassure me by saying that his mother had the same disease, and she was still alive. It was nothing to worry about! He even said, “Just wait. Give me some time. I’ll marry you, and I’ll convince everyone at home.”

December 2010. No matter how much I told my family that I loved someone and would marry only him, no one listened to me. Instead, hearing such things, everyone rushed even harder to get me married off. When the trouble became unbearable, I couldn’t take it anymore. On the night of the 12th, I swallowed a sheet of sleeping pills. There were only eight instead of ten. Nothing happened to me. Only my parents were left in distress. My mother beat me mercilessly while I was still drowsy from the pills. My father just wept and lamented. I was so drowsy I could barely keep my eyes open, yet I heard everything. I felt such pity for my mother and father then.

I made up my mind. No more. I sent a text to my current fiancé asking to meet. I thought it would be the last time I would see him.

They made me drink lemon juice and I don’t know what else to make me vomit. But nothing really worked. At home, whatever I could find—lemon, ginger, cloves—I consumed it all, but I couldn’t vomit no matter what.

On the morning of December 13th, drowsy and half-asleep, I went to my father’s room and found them sleeping. They had been awake all night because of me. I told my mother I was going to college. She said, “Don’t you dare! You’re forbidden from leaving this house! You have no business going to college anymore!” And with that, she turned over and went back to sleep. I seized the opportunity and slipped out.

I found him standing in front of the college. I told him, “I can’t do this anymore. My family won’t agree. I took sleeping pills, and still they refused to let me marry you. I don’t know what to do.” He said, “I’ve convinced my mother, my sister, and my brother-in-law. They’re ready. Let’s leave for Gazipur right now. We’ll get married there, and then everyone will have to accept it.” My mind wasn’t working at all. Whatever he told me to do, I did it.

He took me first to his mother’s house. His mother works at Dhaka Medical College. My future mother-in-law said to me, “From today on, all your responsibilities are mine. You are my daughter.” Tears of joy came to my eyes. Everything seemed beautiful then. We went to the marriage registrar’s office. We got married. Until that day, most of what I knew about my husband turned out to be lies. I began to understand the truth, slowly, after the wedding. One after another, the realities started coming to light in different ways.

That evening, my mother-in-law called my father. There was something like the smile of victory on her face, and my ailing, helpless father could only listen in silence, saying nothing. Because of me, my father had to endure much of her barbed remarks. After the wedding, they had taken me to her sister’s house in the same neighborhood. That night, my father sent my uncle to fetch me. They humiliated him greatly and threw him out of the house. My husband had even shoved him by the neck! Her sister’s husband had said that if he ever came back, they would hand him over to the police. For some reason, I couldn’t say anything, couldn’t protest even a little.

My father was undergoing chemotherapy at that time. After that incident, he fell into such deep anguish that he suddenly refused to continue the treatment. He kept saying, what use is there in living with this face? My grandmother and uncles called me countless times, urging me to go back, saying that if I returned, my father would accept everything and arrange a proper social ceremony to welcome both of us. I grew irritated and turned off my phone. Later, after much persuasion and pleading at my mother-in-law’s feet with my husband, I returned to my father’s house with him after a week. My husband and I both asked for my parents’ forgiveness.

It was then that my husband told my father that his mother was very ill—that she had been diagnosed with uterine cancer and that they had gone to India, had the surgery, and removed her womb. Hearing this, my father became deeply sorrowful, and a certain sympathy arose in him for my husband’s family.

A few days later, I returned to my in-laws’ house. This time they took me to their own home. A half-built house with two small rooms and a veranda. Food was cooked on a mud stove, and a kerosene burner was used when cooking was needed at night. My husband told me that his mother was being treated at Square Hospital, that it required a lot of money, that he had to run to Dhaka frequently, and so on and so forth. All of this was fabricated lies.

The terrible thing was this: his mother’s cancer—that was the biggest lie told to me and my father! My mother-in-law didn’t have cancer at all. She had said it only to gain my sympathy and extract some money from me! Incredible! How stone-hearted and brutal must a person be to tell such a lie!

Day after day, truth after truth came before me. Even his mother didn’t know about these things, and later when I told her everything, she didn’t believe me. Of course, given the kind of person she was, there was no reason she should have.

But yes, after some time my husband began to love me deeply. He was still a student, and my mother-in-law was the only one earning, so there was much hardship in the household. Yet there was no shortage of love in those days.

I didn’t even have a comb to brush my hair, and in the severe cold there was nothing to rub on my hands and feet. I brought everything from my father’s house—all the little things I needed for myself. My father bought me so much.

My husband’s house had almost nothing to speak of, yet I was happy. Afraid of putting on weight, I wouldn’t eat rice at night, and he’d lovingly feed it to me anyway. He was unemployed, didn’t have to attend college regularly, and stayed home all day. The unemployed have endless time for love. The love of a young, jobless man found in youth is always heavenly! Our days were brimming with affection.

One night, before I was to visit my father’s house, my husband held me tight and said, “Why do you have to go to your father’s place, hmm? Can’t you skip it, darling? When I think of you going there, my chest tightens. What if you don’t come back?” Hearing him, I wept, and I thought to myself: I am the happiest woman in the world. Even if I get nothing else in this life, I’ll have no sorrow.

He lied a lot. We’d quarrel over his various lies from time to time. But I’d make deliberate efforts to appease his anger, accept everything he said. When we fought, he’d never try to make peace with me. There were stretches—three, four days—when we lived under the same roof yet didn’t exchange a single word, and at night he’d turn to the other side of the bed. I couldn’t bear being silent with him; unable to endure it, I’d always be the one to set things right. I never told anyone about his lies; guilt would gnaw at me—that I’d married him of my own will, so now no one would listen to me anyway. They’d blame me, lecture me about right and wrong. What was the point?

Meanwhile, my mind was turbulent with a thousand storms. My father was gravely ill. Father loved me dearly. He suffered the most because of this marriage, and it eats away at me still!

Some time passed. Then I found out that my husband had been in love since childhood—they were even supposed to get married. The girl lived in the house next to ours. We had to pass by her house to come and go, since there was no other way.

Theirs was a deep love, it seemed! That girl from the neighboring house did everything for my husband—washed his clothes, cooked, cleaned the house, everything. I could never quite understand their love. It hurt terribly. Every time I saw that girl, I’d think of their love. But the worst came when I learned he’d married me out of anger with her. Brought me home just to show her. They’d had a fight over something, and he’d made a bet with her and married me to win it. Hearing all this, I felt so small! I felt like his trash bin, his dustbin for filth. In married life, his love was my only anchor to survival. I loved him desperately. Somehow, all his wrongs seemed to dissolve inside me!

His true self began to show itself, bit by bit. He started telling me, “You’re a fakir’s daughter! Why else would you have come to my house empty-handed? What have I gained by marrying you? If I’d married someone of means, at least I would have gotten some land out of it!” My mother-in-law never said anything directly to my face, but she would speak about it loudly enough for me to hear, talking to the neighbors as if I weren’t there. I never acknowledged a word of it—I would just close the door and cry. I had taken nothing from my father because I believed that the education he gave me was enough to sustain me. What would I do with wealth, beds, gold, and jewels? That’s when I understood: men don’t think the way women do. What they want is a beautiful wife, capable, rich, hardworking, a good cook.

Let me mention a few small things in passing. For six or seven months after my marriage, I had to sleep on the floor. The windows of the house had no glass—rainwater would leak in, and the stench from the drains would drift through. I also went hungry many times after the wedding. My husband did nothing—he didn’t even tutor students. All he did was eat, wander about, and sleep. He barely went to classes. He’d wake around one-thirty in the afternoon, have tea, eat lunch, then roll around in bed for a while, and by evening he’d disappear with some unemployed friends of his. He’d come home late. This was his routine almost every day. Meanwhile, I lived like a servant, yet I told myself this was perhaps all I deserved.

Eleven months after my marriage, my father died. I was in my honors first year, taking my final exams. The sky seemed to collapse on my head. The entire world suddenly fell into chaos. There was no one left who loved me. Around the same time, my mother-in-law suddenly fell ill—she developed cataracts, had surgery, one eye improved, but the other was damaged beyond repair. She became very weak, couldn’t move on her own, and did everything in bed while I cleaned up after her. My husband told me that his mother was everything to him, so I made her my priority—and I still do. But through her behavior, she made it painfully clear that in that house I was nothing more than a servant girl. On my first wedding anniversary, I didn’t eat all day. My husband didn’t even wish me, and he wasn’t home the entire day. Later, when I inquired, I found out he’d spent the day drinking Bengali liquor with his friends. Meanwhile, I could barely manage to eat properly myself, and my mother-in-law was telling me to have children! I didn’t take her words to heart. With great difficulty, enduring all the cruelties that came from her mouth, I continued my studies.

My mother-in-law gave my husband fifty taka as pocket money every day. I managed to save that money for my education. I will be forever indebted to my husband for this alone. No matter how much he hurt me, no matter how much he neglected me, no matter how unjustly he treated me, he never stopped me from studying. Later, at my insistence, he found some tutoring work—it brought in very little, but we managed to get by with that. I wanted to tutor students myself, I wanted to work in a garment factory, but he wouldn’t allow it.

My studies were grueling. I’d leave Gazipur at six in the morning. After classes at Eden, by the time I got home it would be half past two, three o’clock. Then I’d cook, eat what little I could manage. After finishing all the housework and bathing, evening would have fallen. My mother-in-law worked, and I lived on her earnings, so I never let her lift a finger. Whatever studying I managed to do happened at night, in whatever scraps of time remained.

I failed a subject in first year. When I retook it, my grade point came to 3.02. Second year I got 2.98. In 2014, my husband got a government job—in the Department of Factories, as a Labour Inspector. That’s when I thought: thank God! Finally, Allah has turned His face toward me! Those first days were quite good. Money started coming into the house. But at the same time, the warmth of affection seemed to slip away somewhere. We hardly talk anymore. He bought a smartphone, a computer came home. When I’d visit my father’s house, he wouldn’t even ask where I was. If I called, he’d talk; if I didn’t, he wouldn’t ring. Everything became so robotic! Wealth grew while tenderness shrank.

I have no Fagun, no Valentine’s Day, no Pahela Boishakh. I didn’t even have a birthday—the rest are light years away! If I fussed too much, he’d take me to the pani puri stand in the neighborhood. Eat some pani puri, drink a cold drink, ride around in a rickshaw with the wind in my hair—that’s it! Then back home, where he’d be glued to his phone and I’d be buried in housework. I started trying to get pregnant. Nothing worked. After seeing a doctor, he said it was hormonal imbalance, but nothing serious. He told us to keep trying.

Then, early in 2015, I found out through his phone—hidden behind a fake account—that he was hiring women for God knows what.

The sky came crashing down on my head. The earth disappeared beneath my feet. I felt so utterly devastated, so helpless. I wept bitterly. I told him, leave me. I won’t live with someone so devoid of character. If need be, I’ll work in someone’s house for a living, but I cannot stay with someone like you.

He cried desperately, begged for forgiveness over and over. Oh, the foolish heart of a woman! I forgave him. For a while after that, he was so attentive to me. Just when I began to think perhaps love was growing in him, he slipped right back into his old ways.

Days pass, and his neglect only deepens. Whatever I say, to everything—no. Since we married, we haven’t gone anywhere together, nowhere except to my father’s house, and even then he never brings a gift, never brings anything at all—comes empty-handed. I asked him, pleaded with him to take me to Cox’s Bazar. Nothing came of it. He’s always too busy, he says, always so occupied!

March 2016

I had just returned from my father’s house after a few days when that night I checked his phone and found intimate chats with a girl on one of his fake accounts—going back to 2014. My head spun. I completely fell apart. When I confronted him about it, he said sorry, it was a mistake, it would never happen again. God’s promise!

To that girl, he had told her I had mental issues. That I was physically disabled. That my temper was hot, my nature coarse. That our relationship had descended into divorce territory. Countless lies like these.

We kept the relationship going just to keep it alive. Without the weight of social responsibility, we would have separated long ago, I’m sure. The social cost of divorce really is steep—otherwise this society would be drowning in divorces. How many couples stay together simply because they have to stay together! When I text him, he never replies. I can’t remember the last time he said “I love you.” Even if it were a lie, I still long to hear it from his lips. I don’t ask for anything else from him—just one “I love you,” even if it’s false, and my whole day becomes beautiful. I can’t remember the last time he kissed me of his own will. The distance only keeps growing.

That time, I told his mother everything. Then he asked his mother for forgiveness. His mother explained so much to me. If you’re going to run a household, women have to be patient, have to accept so many things, getting upset doesn’t help, you have to learn to endure, women have to become like earth itself, and on and on. I accepted it too. I stayed silent.

Gradually, the daily relationship between husband and wife became nothing but obligation. Even his most intimate touch carried no scent of love. I found myself crying out for a little affection from him! There was no love in his care, his glance, his touch—nothing. When I spoke of love, he would only say, what do you want, tell me? I’ll get it for you… Yes, he would get me things, but he could never understand what my heart truly needed. The love between us had vanished entirely.

In September 2016, I learned for the first time in my life that I was going to be a mother. I wept with joy. My husband was truly happy too. In his excitement, he held me and cried. I thought everything had changed.

Oh, how women think one way and men do another! This February, he’s caught again—deep in intimate conversation with that same girl. On Messenger, Viber, IMO, WhatsApp. They’re seeing each other regularly, talking constantly. And now they’re going places together!

I was seven months pregnant then. The mental anguish I suffered—I couldn’t tell a soul. I’ve heard that when a woman is about to become a mother, people love her more, give her more time. In my life, it was the opposite. That day, he touched the baby in my belly and swore to me he would never contact that girl again. I believed him. I thought: how could anyone lie with their hand on their own unborn child? That belief was fixed in me. In the same breath, I told him never to touch me again in his life. That I hated him, and I’d stay with him only for our baby.

He just said, okay.

A few days later was his birthday. Pregnant belly and all, I bought him a cake, cooked all his favorite dishes. I thought if I loved him enough, maybe he’d change.

That month, I went to my father’s house for the delivery. Days later, he came to see me. That day I saw it again on his phone—messages with that girl. This time the conversation revealed they’d gone to Cox’s Bazaar in 2016, then to Saint Martin. The two of them had had quite the time together. They rent cars regularly to go out. They’ve fixed on a place in Uttara where they spend time alone together. They’ve even decided they’re going to marry.

And… it’s not just this girl. He keeps other women on the side too. Day after day, it goes on like this.

I’ve come to loathe myself. So many times I’ve thought of dying. What’s the point of living? Why go on? And a child with a father like this—what will he see in this world? What’s the meaning of any of it?

But that baby—my baby—wouldn’t let me die. I live for him. How true it is: people never lack for reasons to stay alive.

He has for that other girl the kind of restlessness, the kind of madness, of which he has not a trace for me.

As always, he says again: I made a mistake, it won’t happen again. Yet he never once says he loves me. Never asks if he can live without me. Sometimes I think—oh, if just once he’d held my hand and said it… if I could see even a glimmer of love for me in his eyes, I could forgive him everything with a smile.

I can’t tell any of this to my mother, my brother, anyone. Now I’m just thinking: after the baby comes, I’ll throw myself into my studies. I have to do well in my Master’s. I got 3.12 in my honors. I have to keep that first class, no matter what.

I don’t get a single call from him all day. There doesn’t seem to be the slightest remorse in him.

That girl he’s been involved with—or still is—she’s married too. When I think of her, I wonder: how low can a woman sink? How is it even possible?

That afternoon I sat for hours, weeping. Twelve straight hours without eating. When I saw that he wasn’t moving, wasn’t stirring, I finally forced myself to eat. Reading something inspirational about loss on Facebook, I made a quiet resolution: what’s gone is gone, I cannot bring it back. I will live well with what remains. I will not end my life for some worthless man.

The pain—I cannot tell you how unbearable it is. That I once loved him, and it could transform into this? It never occurred to me, not even in my darkest imaginings.

I don’t know what god made women from. We are capable of anything! We know, fully aware, that someone has been touching another woman for months, and still—still we serve him, worry for him, love him, and wait… wait for the day he’ll come right, when everything will heal, when it will all be well again. Whether this is patience or compulsion, only god knows. I’ve come to understand clearly: if I let him go, he would be far better off. But the moment I think this, I think again: yes, he would be better, but then I wouldn’t exist. He is the man I dreamed of so desperately, at such cost. I love him so much. I could give my very life for him, and more. Every day I fall in love with him again, and in every moment I wait—not for much, just for once, just once, that he might fall in love with me. Oh, if only a one-sided devotion could transform the world!

I’ve become good at pretending I’m fine. I couldn’t do it before; now I’ve learned. Through all of this, I let no one see the storm that rages inside me. There’s no question of telling Mother anything. I’ve already caused her such pain—I couldn’t bear to add more to it. And if then, if something like what happened to Father… I cannot think of it anymore.

Yet I still dream. He said he would get better, learn to pray, learn to read the Quran, stop going around with that girl. I don’t believe these things anymore. But I don’t let him know that I don’t believe. I’m preparing myself, quietly, to be well alone. I no longer expect his love, I expect nothing from him at all.

To live without love—god, what suffering it is. I dream now that my child will love me, perhaps. I will love that child madly, shape them in my own image. A human doesn’t live only for themselves; they live for the few people they love; often, for just one person. And sometimes, a person lives only in the dream of being loved by the one they love most.