I never believed a hospital could feel like the beginning of something beautiful.... until I met him.It was in the therapy room at UPTH, one of those long afternoons when the doctor spoke in slow, careful words about heartbeats and healing. I wasn’t really listening. I was too busy trying not to notice the boy staring at me from across the room.His name was Jamil.... 18 years old, a second-year engineering student at the University of Port Harcourt. I was sixteen, still in SS2, and all I wanted was to disappear quietly into the background like I always did. But Jamil wouldn’t let me.He said “hey” four times before I finally looked up. That was how it started....the awkward, unexpected friendship between two people whose hearts were both running out of strength, but still found a way to beat for something more.Jamil was the kind of person who smiled through pain. He told me stories about his mom and his younger sister, about losing his dad and pretending to be okay. I never told him much.... I didn’t know how to.... but he listened to my silence like it was a language. He called me Ruby, said I reminded him of the gemstone: quiet but strong, fragile but rare.For the first time, I felt seen.At school, I was still the shy girl — the one who only talked to Aisha, my loud, football-loving best friend from SS1. I didn’t like noise or crowds, but I loved books, poems, and running. Writing was how I made sense of everything I couldn’t say out loud.But every time Jamil smiled at me, something inside me began to shift.He made therapy feel less like treatment and more like a heartbeat shared between two souls learning to breathe again. Even our doctor noticed. “Faiza,” he said one day, “I see you’ve finally made a friend.”Jamil just laughed and said, “She didn’t have a choice.”Between 2018 and 2019, our lives became a quiet rhythm ......calls at night, long talks about dreams, the rain in Port Harcourt, and what it meant to live even when life felt uncertain. We never said “love.” We didn’t need to. What we had was softer, deeper.... something between friendship and forever.And then one day, the rhythm stopped.I came for therapy with my notebook full of poems to show him. His chair was empty. The doctor’s eyes said it all before his words did. Jamil was gone.My world went silent.But silence was something I knew how to live with..... and this time, I filled it with words. I wrote for him, about him, through him. Every poem I wrote became a heartbeat that refused to fade.Years have passed since then, but I still write as Ruby. People online read my poems and say they feel real... like they can hear a heart between the lines. They don’t know the truth: that the words belong to someone who taught me how to live before he left.I still visit the hospital sometimes. I sit where he used to sit, close my eyes, and whisper, “Hey.”And in the quiet that follows, I almost hear him whisper back.Because the truth is....love doesn’t always need forever.Sometimes, it just needs time enough to change you.