I love this couplet by our Indo-Persian spiritual poet, Amir Khusrau Dehlvi:

 من تو شدم تو من شدی،من تن شدم تو جاں شدی

تاکس نگوید بعد ازیں من دیگرم تو دیگری 

Transliteration:

Man tu shudam, tu man shudi
Man tan shudam, tu jaan shudi
Taakas naguyad ba’d az een
Man deegaram, tu deegari

Translation:

I became you, and you became me; I became the body, and you became the soul. So that none can say, from this moment on: I am someone else, and you are another.

My mom was working on some projects in Persian, and you know I’ve always been ahead of my age when it comes to regional literature.

So I started skimming until my eyes stopped at a phrase, “man tu shudam.” I stopped there and didn’t understand it, didn’t try to read it. I just looked at the words, and the words did something to my soul. I was lying on the bed, and I suddenly sat upright, drawn by something I couldn’t explain, and read it.

Mom corrected my pronunciation when I was trying to read it. It became a part of me, and I used to put it in every translation and explanation related to spiritual love, so much so that even my teachers used to love this couplet, and it instantly became a thing in my college as well.

Once, I wrote it as “نہ گوئید,” and one of my teachers corrected me that it was “نگوئید,” and it made me so happy to see that someone in our college knew this masterpiece.

Any teacher would read my paper and instantly know — this is Sadia’s wording, this is her way of writing Urdu. Even at the parents-teachers meeting, one of my Urdu teachers complained to my father that they have to open dictionaries to check my paper.

“She should moderate it. It adds to our knowledge, but the board examiner won’t open dictionaries. He would cross the lines he doesn’t understand because teachers there aren’t that expert. Corruption, you know. Anyone can become an examiner here.”

So I moderated my Urdu, and instead of writing, I started verbally using such words and phrases.

I was obsessed with this phrasing. I recited it a few times during my school and college life, and they noticed it so much that whenever my fellows saw me in public or at the academy, they would greet me with:

“Hey shudam shudiiii!”
“Salam, shudi”
“Oye, shudam”

And once, one of my fellows came to me and said,
“I crammed this part for you,” and shortly after, she learned the whole couplet. She came running to recite it to me — the happiness on her face was indescribably beautiful.

And the happiness on my face… we jumped and laughed.

I think, love back then was really just noticing someone… it wasn’t hard.

It was remembering the little things, showing up, sharing a moment, a laugh, a glance—and that was enough. It was doing one thing that connects you… wasn’t it? Just emotional presence. Just care.

It was learning one line of poetry for a friend, saving them a seat, listening without needing to speak. It was simple… pure… and somehow, it meant everything. It was borrowing a pen and never returning it—yet somehow, it became your memory. It was sharing notes, inside jokes, walking home together even if your paths didn’t match.

It was waiting—waiting for someone just because they mattered. It was buying your friend’s favorite snack from the canteen even when you had just enough pocket money. It was passing folded notes in class, scribbled with thoughts you couldn’t say out loud.

It was giving someone the last page of your notebook because they forgot theirs again. It was group studies that turned into laughter marathons, and laughter that turned into memories. It was hiding your friend’s water bottle and then helping them search for it, just to tease them.

It was teasing the entire class until the teacher lost patience and shouted, “You are the worst class I have ever seen in my career! I feel like I am in the fish market” And then pretending to be naive, suddenly quiet, listening with the straightest faces—only for the classroom to turn into a “fish market”  again the moment they left.

And the chaos… the joy… the laughter… we lived for that.

It was laughter echoing in empty hallways, the rush of running late together, the silence of shared worry before results.

It was the ease of love, the kind that didn’t demand, didn’t ask too much—just the kind that quietly said, ‘I see you,’ and that was all you needed to feel known.

Back then, love didn’t need labels. It was just moments — built quietly with kindness, care, and memory. And somehow, those little things stayed with us longer than anything else.

Now when I think about this verse by Amir Khusrau, though it is a metaphor for divine love and deeply rooted in Sufi thought, beyond its spiritual context, I find myself reflecting on how two people, too, become each other in certain ways. They carry one another in their hearts—in the way they speak, in their habits, in the things they grow to love or dislike simply because of someone else’s influence.

And even now, years later, as I write these words, I realize that’s the quiet beauty of it all—people, places, moments, and memories resurface without warning. Perhaps that is love—not just in its conscious declarations, but in how we subconsciously, unintentionally, become fragments of the people we’ve known and loved.

— Sadia Hakim  // A Memo from Letters Unsent

If you feel suffocated in this body, this claustrophobia inspired piece is for you.