Dear Unknown 🤍

I wonder if, somewhere beneath this very sky, you are wondering about me too.

Perhaps your sword is still unsheathed. Perhaps your hands are still stained with the work required to become the man Allah intends you to be. Perhaps that is why they have not yet found mine.

I try not to resent the waiting.

I tell myself that castles are not built in a day, and neither are men capable of carrying kingdoms without crushing the women they love beneath them.

Still…

Some nights I stand at the highest balcony of my heart and look toward roads no one has travelled in years.

I imagine the sound of horse hooves long before they exist.

Every passing stranger becomes a possibility.

Every silence becomes another season.

I know it is foolish.

Yet I have always loved impossible things.

---

Do you know how peculiar it is to ache for someone whose eyes I have never looked into?

To carry homesickness for a place I have never been.

Sometimes I wonder if longing can exist before love itself.

If Allah places a quiet recognition inside two souls long before He allows their paths to cross.

Because there are days when the world feels whole.

And then there are moments that arrive so beautifully, they reveal the shape of someone who isn’t there.

The moon hanging low over sleeping cities.

The scent of old libraries where stories have outlived their authors.

Rain tracing slow paths across stained glass.

The silence that settles after Fajr, when the world still belongs to those who remember Him.

An untouched chair beside mine.

A second cup of tea that never needed pouring.

It is in those ordinary mercies that I notice you most—

not because you were ever there,

but because my heart keeps making room for someone it has never met.

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I have mistaken echoes for you before.

Men who admired beauty but feared devotion.

Men who loved possession more than partnership.

Men whose words arrived dressed as promises, only to leave wearing excuses.

For a while, I wondered if perhaps I had imagined you altogether.

If the kind of love I carried belonged only to stories.

But every time I tried to convince myself of that,

my heart refused.

Because none of them ever felt like home.

Each one carried your silhouette poorly.

None of them spoke the language my soul had been waiting to hear.

None of them understood that I was never searching for perfection.

Only peace.

So wherever this letter finds you—

I hope life has been gentle enough to preserve your heart,

and difficult enough to shape it.

If you are wounded—

I hope your wounds soften you.

If you are lonely—

I hope loneliness teaches you gentleness instead of pride.

If you are still fighting—

I pray the war does not convince you that love is another battlefield waiting to betray you.

Please…

Do not arrive victorious over the world if it costs you the tenderness required to love.

Because while life has been shaping you,

it has been shaping me too.

You will find me changed.

Not unrecognisable—

only quieter.

Less eager to chase what was never meant for me.

More willing to trust what Allah has already written.

I have buried versions of myself you will never meet.

The girl who begged to be chosen.

The girl who mistook uncertainty for mystery.

The girl who believed love meant proving her worth.

She rests somewhere behind the woman now writing to you.

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I hope when we finally meet, it feels less like an introduction…

and more like returning home after a war neither of us talks about immediately.

I hope your armour is heavy enough to have protected you—

but light enough that you are willing to remove it beside me.

Because I do not want the man the world fears.

I want the man only Allah truly knows.

The one who laughs without caution.

Who cries without shame.

Who lowers his head in sujood before he ever reaches for my hand.

---

Until then…

I suppose I’ll continue leaving this place in my heart untouched.

Not empty.

Reserved.

Like a room prepared long before the guest arrives.

Some call that hopeless romanticism.

I call it faith.

Because somewhere, if Allah has written you for me,

then every delayed sunrise,

every unanswered prayer that later revealed itself as mercy,

every heartbreak,

every lonely evening spent wondering where you were—

has only been guiding us toward the exact moment our stories were meant to become one.

So wherever you are…

Fight well.

Come back with your heart intact.

I have spent years protecting mine,

so that when you finally arrive,

I can place it in your hands

without fear,

without hesitation,

and without wondering if they are capable of carrying it.

I’ll be here.

I will not search for you.

I will simply become the woman you were always meant to return to.

If our story has already been written,

then one day,

somewhere between your last battle

and my final prayer,

you’ll find your way home.

Until that day…

the roses shall continue to bloom against these old stone walls,

the moon will keep watch over an empty balcony,

and somewhere beyond the horizon,

a knight who does not yet know my name

will unknowingly be riding toward it.