Stone Garden

Stone Garden

At the age of twelve, her best friend abandoned her in the middle of a storm — not the real kind, but one that leaves you shaking, eyes burning, trust splintered.

When she was sixteen, a boy with warm eyes promised her forever - then walked away without a glance back. 

Two betrayals. Two clean cuts.

She didn’t wait for a third.

Trust wasn’t something she could afford anymore. 

Her mother was the exception.

The one person she could still lean on, the only one whose presence felt like sunlight in a cold world. They shared late-night talks, secret smiles across crowded rooms, and an unspoken promise that they would never leave each other.

Until the night her mother did.

A fight too sharp, words too loud — and suddenly her mother was gone, leaving her alone in the middle of a dark street with nothing but the sound of her own breathing.

Perhaps "forever" was woven into memories,

That night, the final light flickered and died.

Her parents became strangers with the same surname. She smiled at dinner, laughed at their questions, and buried every wound under layers of silence. She learned early that the safest place to bleed was alone.

Her unspoken instincts had grown into a fortress. People saw her, talked to her, even laughed with her at times, but they never touched the real her— that part lived in the quiet between the clicks of her pen, the spaces in her notebook where she poured the thoughts she’d never speak aloud.

By nineteen, her heart was no longer soft. It was a locked room with walls made of stone. She wasn’t lonely — loneliness needed longing, and she’d burned down that part of herself to ash.

Now, she watched the world like a scientist studying poisonous flowers: beautiful, but never to be touched. She stopped offering kindness, convinced it was just an invitation for someone’s hidden cruelty to bloom.

People called her cold. Some whispered behind her back, others spoke to her face with sharp words meant to cut. But nothing reached her.

No opinion, no insult, no rumor could touch the stone she’d become.

She told herself she was happy in her space.

And maybe she was.

Because in her garden of stone, nothing could grow —

and nothing could die.

But sometimes, late at night, when the world was quiet,

she could still feel something faint and aching, buried so deep in the stone

that even she couldn’t dig it out.

And she wondered… if someone ever found it,

would she thank them — or destroy them?

Written By Qunoot Khan

Edited by Gressica Gandhi