Beginning of an En
We were almost a story.Not a tragedy, not a fairytale — just two souls who collided too hard, too briefly, and burned out before the universe could write us an ending.
She came to me in my dreams last night.
At first, I didn't know if it was real — the air felt too alive. A faint light flickered in the distance, soft and blue like the hour before dawn. Then I saw her — Ayah — stepping toward me through a fog that shimmered like the sea. Her dress floated around her ankles. Barefoot. Weightless.
"Free me from this pain," I begged her. "Take me with you."
She didn't answer. Her eyes — those impossibly deep, knowing eyes — held mine for a heartbeat too long. Then she turned away. The light faded with her, and the silence that followed pressed down on my chest until I woke gasping.
White ceiling.White sheets.White noise.
The world above me looked blank, merciless. My breath came shallow, the taste of sleep still bitter on my tongue. Sweat clung to my skin despite the chill seeping through the window. Somewhere outside, the city exhaled — a muted hum beneath the hush of snow.
I turned my head toward the light.
New York lay frozen beneath a skin of winter. The rooftops were pale, the streets dusted silver. Cars buried in stillness. The kind of morning that looks beautiful from a distance — until you realize beauty has nothing to do with warmth.
I stood there, staring out at it. I don't know for how long. Time loses meaning when grief fills every second.
There's a kind of peace that comes after loss — quiet, heavy, cruel. I used to mistake it for calm, but it's not. It's absence wearing a beautiful disguise.
Her voice still lives inside me. Some days it's a whisper, some days it's thunder.Live, Aubrey. Live the way I can't.
But how do you live when your lungs are full of ghosts?
That morning, fragments of the past began to crawl back — the crash of a door, Michael shouting my name, the metallic wail of an ambulance. The echo of my father's voice — something between command and terror.
Arthur Ardel — the man the world worships. New York's immortal maestro. His name printed in gold, his music carved into history. The press calls him genius. They don't know he bleeds in silence.
He didn't cry when Alex died. Didn't cry when his wife, Serena Jewels, left him for another man. But that night — the night Michael found me, wrists pale under the bathroom light — he broke. His hands trembled. His voice cracked. For the first time, I realized my father wasn't heartless. He was just hollow.
After Alex's death, he saw me differently. Not as a son, but as a second chance. He handed me Alex's violin — the same one that played its last song the night Alex ended his life — and said, "You'll carry the name now."
He wanted a legacy. I wanted silence.
I became his living monument, sculpted from grief.
The world pitied us. Strangers whispered as we passed. That's the Ardel boy, the one whose brother—They never finished the sentence.They didn't have to.
I began to despise them all — their pity, their fascination with pain. I hated Alex for leaving, for making me a shadow. I hated my father for sculpting me from his ruin. I hated myself for surviving them both.
And yet, when the thought of ending it came, fear stopped me. Fear of what waited after. Fear of her not being there.
Then she arrived — Ayah Ferdous.
"Dread walks beside hope; hope walks alongside fear," she told me once, when I called her my hope. Her words used to confuse me. Now I know she was right. They walk together. Always.
When she entered my life, everything changed color. She didn't erase the darkness — she taught me how to see in it. With her, the silence felt sacred, not suffocating. I started painting again — the world through her eyes, not my father's.
And then, as if God had been listening too closely, He took her.
I don't remember the day she died — just the sound. The way the world fell quiet after. The way her laughter vanished like light at the bottom of an ocean.
This morning, when I blinked and saw a figure standing in my doorway, for one fragile second I thought it was her. But it was Michael. His shadow stretched long across the floor.
"You're zoning out again," he said gently, stepping closer.
I turned to him. "What do you want?" My voice sounded distant, like it belonged to someone else.
He hesitated before speaking. "The show starts at eleven. You need to finalize the paintings by nine."
Right. The exhibition. My rebirth.Her dream. My punishment.
"This is your chance, Aubrey," he added softly. "Your chance to be free."
Free. I almost laughed. There's no freedom in grief. You just learn to carry it differently.
After he left, I stood in front of the window again. The sky had brightened into a pale blue that looked nothing like hope. Down below, the city stretched endlessly — alive, impatient.
"I miss you, Ayah," I whispered, and my breath fogged the glass.
From the thirtieth floor, New York looked almost peaceful. Tiny cars. Distant noise. I pressed my palm against the window and imagined stepping through it. The fall. The air rushing up. The snow catching me gently.
Would it feel like flying, or surrender?
The bare trees looked like bones reaching out of the white. I remembered us standing under those same trees years ago, watching fireworks bloom across the night sky. Her hand in mine. The air warm with smoke and summer.
"There you are," I'd said, every time she appeared, as if saying it could make her stay.
I should have known even then — love that burns that bright can't last.
The cold snapped me back. Michael's voice again, closer now. "Aubrey, we have to go."
I slipped into the red coat she loved — said it made me look alive. My hair was slicked back, my reflection ghostlike in the mirror. "There you are," I said again — this time to the man I didn't recognize anymore.
The car ride blurred — city lights smearing into streaks of white and gold. By the time we reached the gallery, the world had already arrived before me. Cameras. Voices. Applause that felt like thunder in a room that wasn't meant for noise.
Inside, my paintings hung across the walls — every stroke of color a memory, every line a wound. Ayah lived in all of them. Her eyes in the twilight blues. Her laughter in the reds. Her last breath in the whites that refused to dry.
Reporters gathered near the stage. Michael touched my shoulder. "This is it," he said. "This is for her."
I shook my head. "No," I said quietly. "This is her."
When I used to play the violin, the crowd saw passion. What they didn't see was emptiness — the numbness between every note. I cried during performances not because the music moved me, but because it didn't.
Painting was different. Painting was pain I could control. Every brushstroke was a confession I didn't have to speak aloud.
I remembered the last time I stood in front of a crowd — announcing my retirement from music. Cameras flashing. My father watching. And beside me, Ayah — her smile steady, her eyes saying I believe in you.
That night, I thought we'd made it.I thought we were finally safe.
But love, like art, doesn't survive on belief alone.
Now, standing before my paintings, I can feel her — in the air, in the silence between my breaths. The applause builds around me, and for once, I let the noise in.
They think they're celebrating art.They're wrong.
They're watching me mourn.
I whisper her name under my breath — "Ayah." — and my chest tightens, not from pain but from the strange, impossible beauty of it all.
We were almost a story.And maybe that's what makes us one.