The silence you left was much louder than the words you spoke when you were here. When you left, the world became too loud— your voice replaced with the absence of it. I was a cricket when you came now a cricket without legs. I was yelling but you couldn’t hear me. Like walking past the homeless in an overly populated city. The sun is out but it stopped shining for me. My lungs like a smoker’s it became hard to breathe. (Haal-E-Dil means “The Condition of My Heart” in Urdu)