Two years. In normal measures of time, it's a period for growth, for change, for building the foundations of a future. For Keyla in Leiden, two years were a series of challenging semesters, new friends from various countries, seasons changing colors from golden green to the white of snow. She told me everything through video calls, which we made almost every weekend at first.
I saw her small but neat room, with stacks of thick books on her study desk and a knitted scarf she bought at a flea market draped over a chair. I saw her wearing thick sweaters, her cheeks flushed from the cold air. She told me about a fierce but brilliant philosophy professor, about how hard it was to learn Dutch, about how much she missed the taste of nasi padang.
And I listened. I smiled. I told her I was proud.
Meanwhile, in my world, two years was a cruel countdown. Two years was silence.
Not silence because we stopped talking. We still talked. But silence because all our conversations were one-sided. I became a spectator to her vibrant life, while my own life faded in quiet. I couldn't tell her about how the headaches that once came only occasionally had now become a constant, tormenting guest, often forcing me to lie in a dark room for hours.
I couldn't tell her about the subtle tremors that had begun to appear in my right hand—the same hand I relied on for drawing. That tremor was my greatest terror. It was a constant reminder that this illness would not only take my life but also strip away the only thing that made me feel alive: my ability to pour my world onto paper.
My mother looked at me with increasingly anxious eyes each day. She made herbal concoctions whose smells filled the house, a desperate effort from a mother who refused to give up on the doctor's diagnosis. My father was mostly silent, but I could see the deepening exhaustion and sadness in his eyes whenever he looked at me. They were the most loving prison I could imagine; I was confined by their love, unable to burden them further by showing them how sick and scared I truly was.
Video calls with Keyla slowly became less frequent. Not because our love was fading, but because our worlds were drifting further apart. She was busy with exams and student activities. Time zones became a real barrier. Sometimes, when she called excitedly in the middle of her day, it was past midnight here and I was battling waves of nausea that came from nowhere.
"You look tired, Yasa," she said one night, her face on my laptop screen looking worried. "Are you staying up too late drawing again?"
"Just a lot of college assignments," I lied, a standard answer I had memorized by heart. "You know, final year."
I wasn't in college. I stopped after the first semester, when my illness began to make it impossible for me to focus in class. My college savings were now gone, spent on endless medical treatments.
My sketchbook became the only place where I could be honest. Its pages no longer only contained Keyla's smiling face. Now there were other drawings. Sketches of my own trembling hand. Sketches of rooms that felt tilted. Sketches of dark shadows creeping into my peripheral vision. And among those dark images, her face was still there—a light I tried to preserve amidst the spreading darkness.
Time continued to pass. One year turned into two. My hair began to thin from the harsh effects of the treatment. My body grew thinner. The tremors in my hand became harder to control. I had to grip the pencil with both hands just to draw a straight line.
The climax came one afternoon in August. I had just returned from the hospital after the doctor gave me the verdict I feared most. No longer about "possibility" or "hope." Now there was a number. A few months. Perhaps less.
I sat in my room, staring blankly at the wall. The world felt utterly silent. These two years of silence had brought me to this point. The point where there was nothing left to wait for.
Then, my phone rang. A message from Keyla. A photo of her smiling broadly, standing in front of a canal in Amsterdam, with the caption: "When will you keep your promise to come here? I'm waiting for you."
Seeing her hopeful face, completely unaware of the wall that had just crumbled around me, something inside me broke. But from that crack, a burning determination was born.
I wouldn't die in this room. I wouldn't end my life as a dark sketch in a drawing book.
I had written a painful prologue at the airport two years ago. But the epilogue, the epilogue of our story, I wouldn't write in silence. I would write it there. In her city. Beside her.
I looked at Keyla's photo again. These two years of silence would soon end. I would make one last sound. An echo she would hear forever. I had to go. Now.