Aneesha often found herself speaking into the quiet. On winter nights, when the wind slipped through her curtains and wrapped around her like memory, she would whisper into the dark:
"Hey... do you remember how we met?"
There was no one to answer. Only silence. And yet, she remembered his voice well enough to imagine.
Sarfaraz had sent her a friend request oncewithout a word, without context. She had ignored it for months. And then, one evening, on a whim she could never explain, she clicked "accept."
That was the beginning.
"You posted a photo," he'd once told her. "The one where you weren't looking at the camera. You looked like time would stop if you smiled at it."
Aneesha had laughed at that then. She remembered blushing behind her screen. He had a way of noticing things nobody else did.
Soon their days filled with laughter and long chats. They discovered they worked for the same company, in different officesa strange coincidence that felt, at the time, like fate quietly stitching them together.
Their first meeting was at Shahbagh. He was waiting beside his dusty motorbike, a little nervous, a little too happy to hide it. Aneesha had worn her blue shawl, the one she still kept tucked away in a drawer. They spent that day walking through the campus, talking for hours at TSC as if they'd known each other all their lives.
They met again. And again. His world unfolded slowly: a paint-splattered room lined with movie posters, half-finished sketches, and thoughts scrawled on the walls. "I should've painted you on one of them," he'd once said. "Then maybe you'd never leave."
She was falling for him. Silently, without ceremony. It showed in the way she laughed at his terrible jokes, in how she instinctively knew when he was having a bad day.
But neither said the word.
Then came her illnessan unexpected storm. The tests, the hospitals, the uncertainty. Through it all, Sarfaraz stayed. He held her hand when it trembled, brought her food she couldn't eat, and made her laugh when she wanted to cry.
And then, as if life had rehearsed its cruelty, it was his turn. He began having headaches. She told him to stop being dramatic. "Just take your meds," she had said.
She regretted those words more than anything.
Still, he asked to see her. She wasn't fully well, but she went anyway. Something in her knew. That day, under the muted light of a Dhaka evening, he asked her to marry him.
She said yes. But with conditions: their own flat, a big balcony, and she would be a red, traditional Bengali bride.
He smiled. "You'd look stunning," he said. "I was already imagining it."
Two days later, he messaged from the hospital. Routine checkup, he'd said. Nothing to worry about.
She told him she'd come on Friday.
But by Friday, he was gonenot in body, but in memory. His mind had unravelled. He no longer recognized faces. Even his mother, his childhood friends... they faded from him.
Except Aneesha.
She was the one name he held onto, even in the fog.
She tried to reach him. Called everyone. No one responded. Until seventeen days later, someone finally did.
Sarfaraz had died.
Sometimes, Aneesha wonders if she imagined it all. But then she feels himwhen she cries quietly, when she laughs alone like a fool, when the wind brushes against her skin like a hand once familiar.
He had once told her, "I promised I'd never leave your smile."
And now, every time she smiles, it breaks her because Sarfaraz not there to see it.
