Bonus Episode 14 – What Forgiveness Feels Like
337 Words
Nadim had always thought forgiveness would feel like peace.
Like waking up and realizing the pain was gone.
But it didn’t feel like that.
It felt like silence.
Like sitting across the room from someone who once shattered you — and choosing not to leave.
He lay in bed, eyes half-open in the dark, watching the shadow of Yasmin’s hair fall across her face as she wrote in that same old journal.
There was something tender about her now.
Something slower.
Less defensive. More raw.
He remembered when she used to read parts of it to him.
Little poems. Lists of dreams. Sketches of imaginary apartments they’d one day live in.
Then she stopped showing him the pages.
Around the same time she started hiding her phone.
He had thought she fell out of love with him.
Now, in the stillness of their new routine — hospital meds, careful tea, quiet apologies — he was beginning to think she just forgot how to love out loud.
And maybe… so did he.
He turned on his side and whispered, “Are you still awake?”
She turned quickly, surprised. “Yeah.”
“Come here.”
She crossed the room like it might break under her. Carefully. Gently.
Then she sat on the bed beside him, legs tucked under.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever forget what you did,” he said.
She nodded, not expecting anything else.
“But I’m tired of hating the person I used to pray for.”
Yasmin’s breath caught.
“I don’t know what comes next,” he added. “But if you’re willing to stay for it… I think I am too.”
She didn’t say anything. She just leaned forward and rested her forehead to his.
And for the first time in a long time, Nadim didn’t flinch.
Forgiveness wasn’t soft.
It wasn’t easy.
It was a choice — quiet, trembling, fragile — made over and over again.
But tonight, he made it once.
And that was enough.
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- Writer
