You gave me ten words to write a story. A long time ago, I asked you, as I’d been asking people, to give me ten random words that I could use as a writing prompt. So you sent them to me later that day, ten words so lovely, so beautiful, that it sounded like you’d sent me a poem. I wrote them out, over and over, whenever I needed to write something, I wrote them out. I wrote your words out so many times that I learned them, in order, by heart, and they took root at the tips of my fingers so that it soon became second nature to me to write your ten words any time I put my pen to paper. I wrote them out on pages and pages of notebooks, on receipts and scraps, on napkins and flyers, on computer documents and drafts of emails. But I never wrote anything past them. Your words plugged up mine. Whenever I felt those ants in my pants, that familiar itch to create something beautiful, I would write out your words, your sometimes-numbered ten-line poem, and tap my pen on line eleven, waiting, full of needing to say something but somehow having nothing to say.

I couldn’t write your words in my words. I couldn’t give them context. I couldn’t take them and make them mine. I was afraid. I didn’t know if you would stay or if you wouldn’t, and I couldn’t bear to make something I loved, something mine, with something yours. I couldn’t make something permanently ours. If you left, I thought I couldn’t bear having this reminder of you.

I write down the words again, but I can write past them today. Because, in the end, everything always changes, and I left, and you left, and we are still friends, but we grow and we are apart, so we grow apart with every day we don’t see each other, and besides, I realized something the other day, and it’s going to sound odd, but I think I fell in love with you-in-Islamabad. It’s strange to think of Pakistan as romantic, I know, but you in Pakistan were the most romantic thing I have ever encountered. Separately, you are both things that I love; together, you became something that I could not help falling in love with.

I don’t think I can love Pakistan like I did when it had you in it. I am back here now, but you are not, and it feels less beautiful, less fun, less spontaneous and free, and less sincere. Once again, I feel alone and restless and frustrated in my own home, without you to share it with. You helped me discover something I had my whole life. And Islamabad helped me discover you.

I don’t think I can love you like this anywhere else. It was you and the city, it was the things we could and couldn’t do, the things we did, the fun we invented, the people we didn’t have that compelled us towards each other. Removed from Islamabad, our relationship is not the same. We are part of a larger world now. Our lives are bigger than just you and me. You are palpably drawing away from me. I can feel people and events and careers and relationships pricking at our bubble. They are not relentless on purpose; they are simply resuming their natural place. We had been alone with each other too long. The city cocooned us, it enclosed us in a you-and-me bubble; we had it all to ourselves with no ghosts or baggage or outside world to distract us from that months-long conversation that never stopped, that instead just paused long enough for impatient breaths and contented sleep. You were all I needed, all those months, but these things rarely happen in the first place, and when they do, they rarely last forever. You and me and Islamabad, we could only be together for so long. Maybe it was a curse to meet you here, to experience this kind of impossible attraction that makes life stop like we are alone at the centre of time, but it is not a curse I can ever regret.

And now that we are gone, and my greatest fear is coming true, I feel the loss of you and Islamabad like a sudden and permanent loneliness that I can’t possibly ever be rid of. I have somehow lost two things at once, but they are both still here, still the biggest parts of my life, to serve as separate reminders of what I am constantly missing, underscoring the ache of knowing that I will never get it back. And knowing this, knowing that I can never love you like this anywhere else, is the saddest realization of all. Nothing is worse than knowing that you can’t love someone enough. But it also releases me from the fear that had paralyzed my pen and my words. Today, I take your words and I make my own story with them, so that I can stop calling them your words and make words – my own words – for you with them. This story is for you, for the love of my life that didn’t last, and the best friend I’ll have forever.