By Sana Gul Khurshid

Winter is almost here again. The sunsets have started slipping away early, as if they too are tired of the day. The evenings have grown heavier, the kind that press against the windows.

There are blankets now, the smell of burning wood, the familiar hum of heaters, and the emptiness that sits beside it all.

The rooms are warm, but there is an ache in the air that warmth cannot touch. I keep noticing those who are missing. Their absence feels louder than the wind outside.

When I look out from my window in Srinagar, people move with their heads bent low. Their shadows stretch long on the road. I keep watching them, searching for something I cannot name. Peace, perhaps.

Life changes without warning. No one told me that last winter would be my mother's last. We spoke about ordinary things: the price of apples, the way the sun hit the Chinar leaves in the courtyard. I didn't know I was living inside the last moments with her. When she left, it felt as if a door had shut and the house had fallen silent forever.

I still hear her voice in the rooms. The same rooms that now echo differently. Her shawl still hangs on the back of a chair. I touch it sometimes, as if fabric can bring back a heartbeat.

The days that followed were strange. I was breathing, but I had forgotten how to live. It was as if I was made of air and stone at once: light and heavy, alive and absent.

Grief is a private language. Mine came like snow, soft at first, then relentless. It filled every corner of my mind. I tried to hold it back, to seem strong for others, but it pushed against my chest until I couldn't breathe.

The world outside carried on, but I stayed behind, in a world that had tilted away from light.

There were days when I wanted to forget. And there were nights when forgetting felt like betrayal.

I learned that grief doesn't follow rules. It comes when it wants. It leaves when it must. The pain doesn't vanish. It changes shape, turns quieter inside you.

I prayed a lot that winter. I spoke to Allah through tears, silence, and the long nights when the valley slept. Each prayer felt like a thread holding me together. Slowly, the wound began to close. Not because I stopped missing her, but because I learned to live with the missing.

Loss feels multiplied in our homeland. The landscape remembers everything: the faces in photographs, the graves under snow, and the homes that once smelled of noon chai and laughter. Every family here carries a story of absence. My story is only one among thousands.

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