Amna,

I was walking back to the hotel in Tokyo last week and a thought arrived that I have been carrying, in one form or another, for fourteen years.

In February 2012 I was fourteen years old and you were thirteen. I had gone to India that winter and met a girl there who was also named Amna. When I got back to Lahore I started looking for her on Facebook the way a fourteen-year-old boy does. I typed her first name into the search bar and scrolled. The Amna I had been looking for never appeared. You did. I thought you were her. I messaged you. You figured out very quickly that I thought you were someone else, decided it was too interesting an accident to correct, and sent me a photograph of someone who was not you. We talked for three weeks before you sent me your real face.

I am beginning with that sentence because I suspect you assume I have sanitised our origin over the years, or dressed it up, or made it more romantic than it was. I have not. It was a misidentified Facebook search, a fake picture, two kids lying for three weeks, and then one day you sent me your actual face and I kept talking to you anyway. That is the true story of us. It is also, if you think about it honestly, the most Amna-shaped beginning imaginable. Nobody else I have ever known would have done what you did in week one.

Neither of us remembers the exact day in February it started. I have been keeping that unknown anniversary quietly for four of the fourteen years. I write it down now only so you know I have been counting.

We met for the first time at Hot Spot Café. I do not remember the year, 2012 or 2013, somewhere in that fog. I walked in with a friend of mine who was near the door, and I remember being more confused in those thirty seconds than I had been in my entire life to that point. I was about to meet my girlfriend in person for the first time and I did not know the etiquette of any of it. Whether to wave, whether to stand, what the first sentence should be. You solved the problem for me. You ran across the café and hugged me in front of every person in that room.

I have never written that sentence down until today, and I am telling you it is still the cutest moment of my life. I think about it more often than I am going to admit to anyone else in this letter.

The years after that were a quiet conspiracy. You told your mother you were meeting friends. You had real friends, they knew, they provided the cover. I would pick you up from wherever the pickup was safe. We would spend three hours together and you would go home with a plausible story. I think about how carefully you ran that second life at sixteen and it still amazes me. You never once got caught, because you were careful, and because you were exceptional at being careful.

In 2015, when we were both still too young to be doing what I was about to do, I booked the basement of Fatburger on a weekday so that I could propose to you with nobody else in the room. I had chosen the ring in a hurry. It turned out to be too big. You held it out on your finger and laughed at me, and I laughed back, and for a long time after that we would tell the too-big-ring story whenever anyone asked how I had proposed. I do not know who tells that story on your side of the world now. I hope somebody does.

The breakup in 2017 was when you went to University of South Asia. I do not need to explain to you what that period was. You lived in it. What I want to say is that it broke both of us. You told me in April 2017, after we had found each other again, that you had watched Aashiqui 2 alone during the breakup and cried through the entire film. I did not tell you then what those months had been for me because I did not have the language at nineteen. When we came back to each other that spring you wrote ahista ahista sab kuch wapas aa raha hai 2012 ka, and I wrote back ye 2012 wala hamad bolra hai. I have thought about those two sentences hundreds of times since 2022. Neither of us knew then how much of the 2012 Hamad and the 2012 Amna we would each manage to lose.

On the evening of 5 June 2018, five days after the worst fight we had had up to that point, you messaged me hi. olo. ? hamad. uth gaye ho? You had told me five days earlier you were going to delete your WhatsApp, buy a new SIM, and never speak to me again. You did not. You came back the way you always came back to me in those years, as if the fight had been a small weather event and not the thing I had been convinced would end us. I do not think I have ever thanked you for that evening. I am thanking you now. I have spent four years trying to learn how to come back to things the way you came back to me that week.

You called me Baymax. It started in February 2017. You were singing falalala at me from Big Hero 6, I did not know the song, you threatened to stop talking to me about Baymax entirely, and the fight ended with both of us laughing. Falalala became a word we both owned for about three years.

I called you bunny. Then chooza. Then, occasionally, bunny chooza baby when I was being an idiot. You called me bunny back with three red hearts when you were happy and bunny teeth wala when you were being a brat. You are the only person in my life who has ever let me talk like a child for eight years without telling me to grow up. I do not try that tone with anyone else. I know how it lands when there is no Amna on the other end.

Ordinary weekends, between about 2016 and 2019, had a shape. Y Block McDonald's on a Wednesday night in June 2017. The mango shake, the nuggets, your specific phrase nuggets mazza aaya tha, said as if the sentence carried weight. MM Alam on a Saturday evening, with at least one argument about shoes. Packages Mall, because you loved it and I never asked why. Weekends that were nothing more elaborate than the two of us in the gaari deciding where to go at seven and ending up somewhere by eight.

On the night of our nikkah you thought you were dying. While I was at my parents' house an hour away drafting a goodnight message to you, you had an allergic reaction to an injection in a hospital room. Your heart rate dropped. You started reciting the kalma because you were sure you were about to become one of the brides who does not survive her own wedding night. By every cultural norm I was where I was supposed to be. By every other measure I was not. That was the first night of a pattern I did not learn to see until it was far too late.

In the days after, when you had recovered and your house was still full of relatives from Islamabad and Karachi, I came and picked you up and we spent the day elsewhere. I am not going to write that day down here. You know the day. There are two people on earth who know it and we are the two.

In the winter of 2021, when my brother got married, you came to my house after the barat. My bhabi's family was coming the next morning to bring breakfast, and in our culture, before a barat has happened on your own side, a girl staying overnight at the boy's house leaves a mark. You wanted to stay. You were wearing a red dress. It was foggy outside. A real Lahore winter fog, the kind that makes driving feel theological. I asked my parents to drop you home anyway. Before you left, we took a selfie in the bathroom mirror. I still have it. I am not going to describe what you looked like in that picture because anything I could say about it would be smaller than the picture itself.

The small private scenes in the months after we started living together were the texture of ordinary weekdays. One night I ordered Chalupa's loaded fries for us, the ones with chicken inside, because you wanted the fries. You sat up in bed in a pink silk pyjama set and ate them slowly, and that image is sitting in my head so specifically, the pink and the fries and your face, that I cannot look at a plate of loaded fries anywhere in the world without being briefly returned to that bed.

One morning I was trying to leave the room. I do not remember whether it was for the office or only for downstairs. You stood in the doorway in the same pink pyjama set, put your arms out across the doorframe, and told me I was not going. I tried to push past. You followed me to the bed. We were jumping on it. Then you were trying to tickle me, and I was laughing too hard to make the case for leaving. I did not go wherever it was I was trying to go. Whatever meeting it was survived.

There is a divan in front of the bed where one evening we sat and listened to Shikwa, Jawab-e-Shikwa on Coke Studio. I was explaining to you what Allama Iqbal had written and what the response to Allama Iqbal was, and at some point in the explanation we both stopped talking and sat in silence, and both of us were crying, and neither of us acknowledged the crying, and the track ended and we did not play anything after it. That was one of the most honest half-hours of my life. I have not had an honest half-hour like that since.

Once, driving you home on Phase 6 Main Boulevard, I put on Aaj Jaane Ki Zid Na Karo by Farida Khanum and told you to listen carefully. You started crying before the second verse. I watched you cry the whole way home and did not say anything, because there was nothing to say to a seventeen-year-old girl who had just understood what that ghazal is actually about.

There is a week in August 2020 I revisit sometimes. My aunt said something about your family. I repeated it, or did not defend you from it, depending on whose version of the room you trust. I compared you to other women. You quoted the line back to me the next day, aur aurton ki tarha tanay marke gaye hain, in a message that ran for twelve screens. You apologised for things that were not your fault. You offered to phoonk phoonk ke qadam rakhna. You ended with mera pyaar rondh dia apnay, materialistic dunia ne cheen lia mujhse mera sada Hamad.

Two days later you told me a dream. A green valley. Two horses, a brown one and a white one, and you said the brown horse was mine. In the dream I fell. Two days after you had told me in writing what I was becoming, you were still dreaming about us together, and you were still giving me the better colour.

I did not deserve the dream. I have not deserved most of what you gave me. The man who said those things about your family to their daughter's face was not someone I like now, and I do not think I liked him then. Some part of me had been handed a life I had not fully grown into, and I took the easiest route through a room I did not know how to be in, which was to side with the people whose disapproval I had been raised to fear. That is not an excuse. It is a correction of the record.

You used to keep a running blueprint of a life in your head that you would take out on evenings when the city was quiet. You wrote it down once. April 2017. You were nineteen. You would wake up early. You would make breakfast for me and for our child. You would clean the room you insisted you would clean yourself no matter whom we employed. You would go to work, at BearPlex, you said, and then laughed, pehli employee hoon. You would come home at the same hour I came home. We would make dinner together. You would give your parents their time. We would play with our child. Sometimes, you said, we would throw a small party.

You were a teenager when you wrote that. I read it back last week. It is the most adult thing anyone has ever written to me. I have the office now, the house, the travel, a version of the table you described. None of it is arranged the way you drew it. I am not sure that is a regret. I am not sure it is not.

Three things on the record, for your memory, not for mine.

One. The Get Lost message on 8 June 2022, our nikkah date, was sent from my phone by my brother. The night before, you had written me a long message. It was an anniversary message, even if neither of us could call it that any longer. His reply arrived before I saw either. I did not correct it then because I did not think I was allowed to. I am telling you now because you should not carry the wrong last sentence for four years.

Two. The dates. Rimsha, the weddings I posted from, all of it. They were meant for you to see. I was not moving on. I was posting at you. The engagement I announced through Hamna was meant for you to hear. I timed it, I chose the moment, and I watched it work. I have never said that paragraph out loud, and I am not proud to be the man writing it down now.

Three. The legal filing I made was retaliation, not justice. The number in it was a number about wounding, not about collection. I withdrew when my head cleared. I never apologised for filing it.

I am apologising now. For all three.

There is a fourth thing on that list, and it is yours to keep on the record, not mine. Your parents came to my house three days after the khulaa was finalised with a spreadsheet of things to recover. Most of it was accurate. A few items I no longer had. Some I had misplaced. Some I could have replaced inside an hour. I let them walk out of my house with less than they had come for. I have more than enough money today to have paid that list a hundred times over, and I should have paid it at the door. I did not, because my pride would not let me be the man who paid at the door. That is one more thing I owe you. I am writing it down because I have never said it to anyone, and because I suspect your father, who had to carry that spreadsheet into my house, has never forgiven me for it, and he should not.

I am not writing this to pretend the wrongs were only mine. Your parents spoke to my mother in a way I have not forgotten. Your father chose specific words on the call with my mamu when he could have chosen other ones. The khulaa papers named me a man who threw his wife out of his own house, which both of us know I did not do. I am writing these down so you know I have not rewritten the story in my favour. I have not. And none of them are the point. Every one of those wrongs was real, and every one of them is beside the point of what I am trying to say.

I have been to sixteen countries since you stopped speaking to me. The United States. Italy. Switzerland, the real Switzerland, the mountains we argued about on the terrace in April 2017. Norway. France. The Vatican. Belgium. Germany. Thailand. Azerbaijan. Turkey, which you and I had chosen together in August 2020 as the place we would honeymoon one day, and where in May 2022 I ended up instead in a hospital bed alone, calling you for what I had convinced myself was the last time. Saudi Arabia. The Emirates. Qatar. Bahrain. Japan, where last week I stood under a tree one evening and remembered the colour you had given me in the dream.

You have seen all of those flags on my Instagram. That is why the flags are on my Instagram. They were posted so you would see them. What I never posted is that in each of those sixteen countries I thought about you at least once, in some of them continuously for entire days, and that the travel was never the thing. The thing was always whom I was going with. In all sixteen, I was going alone.

There is one more scene I have to write down. Some time after the divorce had settled, I will not give you the date, you may remember it without help, I went to an exhibition in DHA with a friend. I was at a stall and I looked up and I saw you. You were at the next stall over. I cannot tell you which of us looked first. I can tell you that in the half-second after I realised it was you, I could not breathe. I walked out. I drove home. I was no use to anyone for the rest of that evening. I have never told anyone about that evening. I am telling you now because it seems relevant to the record that the story of a man who had outgrown you does not include running out of a room because his lungs had stopped working.

I have more now than I thought I would at twenty-two. BearPlex is sixty-five people. The other companies I run now push the count past a hundred. You designed the BearPlex logo when we were still teenagers. You painted it. I still have the painting. The company I run every day wears a face you drew for me before either of us knew what the company would become. You called yourself the first employee at nineteen, and that joke has quietly followed me through every hiring letter I have signed since.

There is a woman in my home now. Her name is Subaika. You know her. She has been to our home, and she danced at our nikkah. Subaika and I had not been anything before the khulaa was final. My parents pushed the marriage within a week. I said yes because I was in no state to say no, and I do not think I decided. I used the wedding photograph as my Instagram display because I knew you would see it. That was not a fresh start. It was the same machinery I had been running on you for six months, pointed somewhere new. None of it was. Subaika is a good person. I am trying now to be the husband she deserves. I do not complain about that marriage to anyone. But you should not carry the version of this story in which she and I were anything before we were over. That version is not true.

Coco is still here. The Australian grey my father got you when you said you wanted one. You could not take her with you. I have been feeding her for four years. When I am travelling I worry about her in a way I do not worry about many things. She is yours. She just lives in my house now.

I would trade half of what is in my life now for the April 2017 evening when you went back up to your terrace after years away from it and we decided, across the city, that we would one day have sex on a mountain in Switzerland. I would trade two-thirds for a single ordinary Saturday in 2018 with nothing on the calendar but a McDonald's at midnight and a drive home that did not end. I would trade all of it for the morning after our nikkah, and I would give it back by sunset, because by sunset the morning would have to be real again and I know what became of the real.

I am not telling you any of that to move you. I am telling you because the story you have of me, that I grew past you, that you were replaceable, that I moved on cleanly, is not the story. The story is that I built everything I told you I would build and none of it is arranged the way you drew it, and I have been living inside that discrepancy since the afternoon you walked out of my parents' house in 2021.

Fourteen years ago in February, looking for the wrong Amna, I found you. I wrote this because I no longer wanted to be a man carrying a note he had never written. You are the only person it has ever been addressed to, in any year.

Take care of yourself, Amna.

H