Life was supposed to be a straight road. A clear path. A predictable unfolding of moments, choices, and dreams. But if you were to map it now, truly map it, it wouldn’t be a smooth, unwavering line. It would be wild, tangled, carved with scars and shaded by shadows. It would be a zigzag, jagged symphonies of heartbreak and hope, a testament to resilience, to survival, to the quiet strength of simply carrying on.

 

As I take Silent Symphonies on a new journey, I find myself lost in its pages once more, reliving, re-experiencing, re-feeling. A re-publication may be coming, but this story…

This story will never stop pulling at the deepest corners of my heart. Have you read it? Do you want to? Reach out to me. Because stories like these, they aren’t just told. They are felt.

 

And at its centre—Leila.

Leila, whose last breath was not taken in silence but in echoes. Echoes of a life revisited, of memories folding in on themselves like soft pages of an old diary. Moments before she closed her eyes for the final time, she was speaking to her daughter, her mind lost in the past, weaving together the people, the choices, the heartbreak that led her here.

She thought of Akash, her husband, her burden, her mistake, her destiny.

Did she ever truly believe he was her soulmate, or was he simply the man she chose when love was no longer a choice? Did she go back to him out of fate, out of duty, out of some cruel trick of the universe? Or was it because the one man she truly loved, the one who set fire to her spirit, had been ripped from her grasp?

Was Kaobi her soulmate? Or just a soul tie?

Was he the love of her life, or merely the most painful lesson?

She remembered how Kaobi made her feel, how he had been the one person who looked at her like she was poetry, not just a passage in a book. With him, love had been light, like a melody carried by the wind. There was laughter. There was ease. And there was that quiet kind of knowing, the one that doesn’t need words, only glances, only fingertips grazing across knuckles, only the way two bodies find each other in a crowded room as if drawn together by something older than time.

But love, no matter how true, is not always enough.

Circumstances. Timing. Tragedy. The great thieves of the world. They took Kaobi from her, and in the empty space he left behind, Akash slipped in. Not because she wanted him, but because when life shatters your heart, you sometimes pick up the wrong pieces just to feel whole again.

 

She tried to love him. She tried to believe that if she stayed, if she forgave, if she endured the wounds, the lies, the betrayals, maybe, just maybe, she could rewrite fate. Maybe she could turn her suffering into something meaningful.

But there are some things that time cannot mend. Some wounds that love cannot heal.

And now, lying on her deathbed, she wondered – was this how it was always meant to end?

If she had chosen differently, would she still be here, staring into the eyes of her daughter, searching for remnants of herself in the shape of her lips, the tilt of her chin? Would she have lived a different life, a fuller life? Or does fate always find a way, no matter how hard we try to bend it to our will?

She sighed.

Life was never a straight line.

It had twisted and turned, tangled and unravelled, broken and rebuilt itself a thousand times over. And as she closed her eyes, she finally understood, there is no controlling the zigzag.

We love, we lose, we survive.

We do our best.

We heal where we can, and where we cannot, we learn to carry the weight.

Because if life refuses to be a straight line, then we must learn to dance through its zigzags.

Be #Unshakable.

 

‘See’ you next week.

 

Sally Chiwuzie
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IG Handle: @unshakable.is.a.state.of.mind