The first time Leyla saw Mariam, she was a flicker of light in the dust of the schoolyard. It was second grade, and the world around them was heavy, thick with the noise of growing tensions. Mariam sat alone under the shade of a mulberry tree, her headscarf slipping slightly, her hands cradling a book as if it were something sacred. Her eyes were wide, searching for escape within the pages, while the rest of the world rushed past her.

Leyla, with scuffed shoes and the weight of her father’s growing silence pressing heavily on her chest, took the empty space beside her. There were no words spoken, only the understanding that they both lived in worlds too loud for their hearts. The world around them seemed too full, too demanding, but here, in the quiet corners of the schoolyard, they found peace.

Leyla never told Mariam about the bruises, the nights when her father’s rage cut through their small house like a blade, or how her mother shrank further and further into herself with every angry outburst. She never had to. Mariam saw it in the way Leyla flinched at the loud sounds, the way she kept her wrists hidden, the way her laughter, when it came, was brittle. Mariam knew.

Their friendship bloomed in those quiet corners, a shared piece of bread under the mulberry tree, notes passed between them folded into tiny stars, whispers that danced on the edges of silence. It was a secret they both kept, a world of their own where the burden of their lives could be momentarily forgotten. They shared dreams of escaping the confining walls of their homes, imagining faraway places where girls could laugh without fear, where the future could be something they could shape with their own hands.

But the world was changing.

As they grew, the world around them began to feel even more oppressive. The silence in Leyla’s house became darker, more suffocating. Her father, once a man of rage and thunder, had become a storm, unpredictable and violent. Her mother, too, had lost the spark in her eyes, retreating into a silence that felt as though it might swallow them whole. At school, the whispers of the outside world crept in—news of the Taliban’s rise to power, of girls being taken from their classrooms, of freedoms slipping away like water through fingers. In the marketplace, the once open spaces were being closed off, and girls’ schools were being shuttered, like old doors no longer needed. The weight of it all pressed on their shoulders, heavier with each passing day.

Leyla saw the change in Mariam too. Her family, once full of hope and pride, had grown more closed off, more fearful. Mariam’s father, a man who had once encouraged his daughter’s education, now forbade her to speak in public, to walk without a male relative at her side. Slowly, Mariam’s world grew smaller. She stopped coming to school, stopped meeting Leyla under the mulberry tree. She stopped even passing notes. It wasn’t a fight that tore them apart. It was a quiet thing, like the slow closing of a door that neither of them could hold open any longer.

Years passed, and Leyla disappeared into herself, a shadow of the girl she had once been. The heat of the summers felt oppressive now, the schoolyard that had once felt like a haven now felt like a prison. Her father’s rage became something she couldn’t outrun, and when her mother finally left him and became one with the wind, the silence in their home became absolute. Leyla did the chores all day, her fingers calloused and her heart a quiet ache. When she would sit down to sew torn clothes, the needle and thread were her only companions. She sat stitching together a life that felt too small, too broken.

One day, after weeks of passing by the same dusty alleyways, Leyla saw Mariam again. It was by the well in the village, the place where the women gathered to draw water for their homes. Mariam’s eyes were downcast as she filled her clay pot, her headscarf pulled tightly against her face. Leyla hesitated, the weight of years and the silence between them pulling at her heart. But there was no turning back now. She stepped forward, the gravel under her feet crunching like old memories. She knew she had to be careful and restraint from being noticed for it would put them both in trouble.

“Mariam,” she whispered.

Mariam’s eyes lifted slowly, and for a moment, Leyla thought she might disappear again, like she had before. But Mariam didn’t run. She stood there, her face softened by years of hardships, but the warmth in her eyes still there, hidden beneath layers of things unsaid.

Leyla reached out, unsure if she had the right to ask, unsure if she had the strength to listen. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I didn’t know how to say it before, but I’m sorry. For everything.”

Mariam didn’t speak for a long time. She simply looked at Leyla, the pot of water now forgotten between them. The wind stirred the dust around them, and the old mulberry tree in the distance seemed to watch silently.

Finally, Mariam spoke, her voice soft but steady. “You don’t have to apologize, Leyla,” she said, her gaze steady, as if carrying a weight of its own. “I understand.”

Leyla’s chest tightened at the words, and for the first time in years, she let herself feel the weight of her past, of all that had been left unsaid. The years of silence, of drifting apart, of never finding the courage to speak their pain, suddenly felt like a mountain pressing down on her. “But I was so angry,” Leyla whispered. “I was angry at the world, at my father, at myself. I couldn’t talk to you. I couldn’t…”

Mariam stepped closer, her hand reaching out to Leyla, her fingers warm against her cold skin. “I know,” she said softly. “I was angry, too. I didn’t know how to be anything else but what the world wanted me to be. But I never stopped thinking about you, Leyla.”

And just like that, the walls between them began to crack. Not in one moment, but in pieces. They stood together by the well, the world around them still a quiet and oppressive place, but in that space, there was the quiet comfort of shared understanding. The past could never be erased. The world outside their village would always be a place where the shackles of tradition and fear were heavy on women like them. But here, under the bright sun and the endless sky, there was room to breathe again.

But as they walked back to their homes together, the weight of everything they had endured settled in once more. The lives they lived—lives governed by fear, by the quiet suffocation of rules they never made—would never be easy to forget. They were women in a world that demanded their silence, that weighed them down with expectations too heavy for their shoulders. Every moment, every glance, every word they spoke was measured, judged, weighed against a cruel scale they had no hand in creating.

And yet, as they reached the edge of the village, where the wind whipped the dust into the air, Mariam stopped. She turned to Leyla, her face softened by the years of knowing and not knowing, of living and surviving.

“It wasn’t just you,” Mariam said, her voice breaking through the silence. “It was all of us. We were all silent. We were all prisoners, whether we knew it or not.”

Leyla looked at her, seeing the woman she had once known, the girl who had whispered her dreams under the mulberry tree. And for the first time in so many years, Leyla understood. It wasn’t just the men who had kept them silent. It was a world that demanded it. The weight of their shared grief, their shared oppression, had been carried in quiet ways, in the small acts of survival that no one saw but each other. The years they had spent apart were years of silence, years of trying to exist in a world that didn’t allow them to speak.

And in that moment, Leyla realized something that felt like both a revelation and a deep sadness: there were no happy endings in their world. Only survival. Only the quiet victories of continuing to live, to love, to hold on to what little freedom they could claim for themselves.

Leyla took Mariam’s hand, squeezing it gently, knowing they could not change the world. But they could still, somehow, be there for each other. Maybe, in the end, that was all they had left. Maybe it was enough.

In the silence between them, the unspoken weight of their shared history hung like the oppressive air of their village. But it was in that silence that Leyla knew, perhaps for the first time, that even the smallest acts of love, of reaching out, were worth something—more than anything the world could ever take from them.