“Does this colour look good on me?”, she asked as I looked up from my laptop and gazed at her from head to toe. Every colour looks good on her. I don’t know why she even bothers asking. “Yeah. Looks great”, I replied shifting my focus back to How I Met Your Mother. “Ugh! Ted’s whining is difficult to bear at times”, I say and wait for a response but she’s focused on drawing a perfect eyeliner. She turns to me a while later and asks if her eyeliner is symmetrical.

I don’t know what it is that draws me towards her. Maybe it’s the way she passionately argues why HIMYM is better than FRIENDS, or she was the first person who introduced me to The Office and likes to say, “you are the Michael to my Holly”, or her weird way of eating dessert before the main course, or her pattern of trying to quit cigarettes every four days only to finish the whole pack in two, or maybe it’s because she convinces me to do things I wouldn’t otherwise, like trying Sushi for the first time or bungee jumping in Goa.

Everything about her draws me to her bare essence. I wouldn’t call her beautiful just because of her soft skin or perfect jawline or pretty eyes or her thigh gap. She is the type of beautiful who never gives up on people, the type who says “I am staying” after a fight, the kind that makes you feel like you’re in Shimla under the cold wide sky sipping tea when you’re sitting in a one bedroom apartment.
“I can’t wait for this pandemic to end”, she says as she takes my hand and leads me to the kitchen. She has made pasta again. This is the third time in a week we’re having white sauce pasta, the taste gets better every time so I can’t really complain. In the midst of dinner, as the world stopped around us, I got down on one knee. She pursed her lips in a weak attempt to stop from tearing up. Her eyes gleamed just like the diamond ring in my hand, and my heart pounding against my chest as I uttered the words, “I wanted to do it the Michael Scott way and fill the room with candles, but we are in the middle of a pandemic so I am hoping kneeling and Just Say Yes playing in the background will do.”



Simra Sadaf: MA English graduate. Reader. Writer. Book reviewer. I love to read books of all genre. I write poems and short stories for magazines. I did my Bachelors in Sociology and have an abundant knowledge about the workings of a society which I incorporate in most of my writings.