Chapter 0
The Quiet Disorder (part 1)

When we first arrive in America, I think the hardest part will be the cold. I imagine snow falling on our shoulders as we step out of the airport — the kind of cold that feels new, fresh, hopeful. A new beginning.

But it’s not the weather that tests us. It’s something quieter, invisible. Something that doesn’t melt away with spring.

Aizan and I have been married for five years when we land in this country. We’ve survived the chaos of Dhaka traffic, the noisy neighbors, the thin walls of rented flats. In Bangladesh, everything is loud — the calls to prayer, the street vendors, even our families. Here, everything is quiet. Almost too quiet.

We rent a small one-bedroom apartment in New Jersey. The carpet smells faintly of detergent, and Aizan spends the first week cleaning it. Every corner, every vent, every light switch. She says she can’t sleep until the place feels “new.”

I think it’s jet lag. I think she just misses home.

She scrubs until her hands turn red, and when I tell her to stop, she smiles and says, “It helps me think.”

In those early months, I notice small things that don’t seem important at first.
She can’t touch doorknobs without wiping them.
She washes the same dishes twice.

She arranges our shoes perfectly parallel to each other by the door — not touching, not too far apart.

When I move one shoe by mistake, she quickly adjusts it back with an anxious glance, as if the world might tilt if she doesn’t.
At night, when we pray, she repeats her verses under her breath long after I’ve finished. If I interrupt her, she looks startled, almost guilty.

I tell myself she’s just careful. Maybe she inherited her mother’s love for cleanliness, her father’s sense of discipline. In Bangladesh, women are taught that a clean home is a reflection of their faith. It seems harmless enough.

We dream of the American life we’ve seen in films — good jobs, good schools, shiny cars. I plan to work in IT. She wants to learn driving, get a license, and maybe start a small business someday.

But things don’t unfold that way.

I fall sick a few months after our arrival. The doctors call it a kidney disorder. They say I’ll need regular treatment, maybe dialysis if things get worse. The word “dialysis” feels heavy, too heavy to say out loud.

Aizan is frightened, but she doesn’t cry. Instead, she starts cleaning even more. The more I rest, the more she scrubs. The more I hurt, the more she organizes. It’s like her way of fighting what she can’t control — the illness, the fear, the silence.

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of running water. She’s in the kitchen, washing the same plates she washed an hour ago.

When I ask why, she says softly, “They didn’t feel clean enough.”

I don’t know what that means, but I let it go.

Our life becomes a rhythm of care and caution. I start my treatment. She starts a new job at a nearby grocery store. She comes home exhausted, yet instead of resting, she begins wiping, folding, reordering.

I watch her from the couch one evening — her hands trembling slightly as she sprays disinfectant on the same table over and over.

“Aizan,” I say gently. “It’s already clean.”

She stops, looks at the bottle, then at me, and says, “I know… but it doesn’t feel clean.”

It’s the first time I hear that word — feel. Not look, not smell, but feel.

Something about the way she says it stays with me.

The day she decides to learn driving, I’m the happiest I’ve been in months. She’ll finally have her own freedom, her own sense of control. We buy a used Toyota, and she schedules lessons with one of our community friends — a senior lady named Mrs. Noor, a retired psychiatrist from Dhaka who now lives here.

When I drop Aizan off for her first lesson, she’s nervous but smiling. She waves, clutching the steering wheel like it’s a lifeline.

I wait in a nearby café, sipping weak coffee and imagining her first drive through the quiet suburban streets.

But when I return an hour later, I find her sitting on the curb, pale and shaking. Mrs. Noor is beside her, looking thoughtful — too thoughtful.

That moment will change everything.

The Quiet Disorder (part 2)

The day Mrs. Noor finally speaks, I am not prepared for her words.

She sits beside Aizan after the driving lesson, her posture calm, deliberate. She is gentle but firm, the kind of presence that makes even panic seem manageable.

“Fias,” she says quietly, “Aizan isn’t just anxious about driving. She has Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. It’s severe.”

The words land softly at first, almost polite, but then they echo through the empty classroom like a bell. I feel my stomach tighten. OCD. The word is clinical, precise, and yet it explains everything—the cleaning, the repetitive prayers, the constant fear of germs, hospitals, even small decisions.

I look at Aizan. She is pale, her hands twisted in her lap. Her eyes are wide, but she does not speak.

Mrs. Noor continues: “It’s not uncommon. Many people live with it silently, especially in Bangladesh, where mental health is taboo. But here, there are ways to manage it. Therapy, cognitive behavioral techniques, support.”

Aizan shakes her head subtly. “I can’t… I don’t want pills. I don’t want to go to a hospital again.”

Her voice trembles, but there is clarity in her refusal. It is a fear I have seen before — a fear of control, of losing herself in procedures and chemicals she does not understand.

I squeeze her hand. “We’ll manage it together,” I whisper, more to myself than to her. I do not know exactly how, but the promise forms naturally, without thought. We have no choice — our lives are intertwined.

It’s a life I didn’t imagine, Aizan writes later in her diary.

I came here hoping for freedom. I came here hoping we could breathe. But fear followed, and now it is a shadow in every room, every step. I cling to him because he is the only one who understands the storm that rages inside me.

Chapter 1 
Living with OCD: The Unseen Struggles

When people hear the term “OCD,” most think of a neat desk, a spotless kitchen, or someone who likes things “just so.” It has become a casual label for tidiness, almost a compliment.

But the truth is, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is not neat, and it is not a compliment. It is an invisible guest that barges into a person’s mind, reshaping their life and the lives of those around them. It is not simply liking order—it is fearing chaos. It is not choosing to clean—it is being unable to stop. It is not wanting control—it is being controlled.

The Faces of OCD

OCD wears many masks. Over the years, I’ve learned to recognize its different faces, not only through my wife’s struggles but also through study and experience.

Here are some of the most common types:

• Contamination OCD — The fear of germs, dirt, or “uncleanliness.” People with this type often wash hands until they bleed, scrub surfaces until they shine, or refuse anything that feels “contaminated.”

• Checking OCD — The compulsion to repeatedly check whether the stove is off, the doors are locked, the lights are out, or even whether one has harmed someone without realizing.

• Symmetry and Order OCD — The need for things to be perfectly aligned, balanced, or arranged. A crooked painting can feel like torture.

• Intrusive Thoughts OCD — Perhaps the most invisible kind. These are disturbing, unwanted thoughts—of violence, sin, harm, or taboo subjects—that play in a person’s mind like a broken record, leaving them with guilt and shame.

• Hoarding OCD — A compulsion to collect or hold on to items out of fear that throwing them away could cause something terrible to happen.

Each type is rooted in fear. And that fear, once it grips the mind, rarely lets go without a fight.

OCD in My Home

My name is Fias Ramo, and I’ve been married to Aizan Fias for over fifteen years. When we wed, I didn’t yet know OCD was a silent partner in our marriage.

Over time, I began to realize that my wife’s habits were more than just quirks:

• She cannot drive, because her fears and rituals overwhelm her behind the wheel.
• She avoids hospitals and doctors, terrified of medical procedures. This fear spills over into our intimacy, because to her, pregnancy means hospitals, and hospitals mean terror.
• She cannot stop cleaning—day and night, surfaces, floors, corners. Our home is spotless, yet never “clean enough” in her eyes.
• She refuses to allow pets in our home, seeing them only as walking sources of dirt.

For outsiders, these may look like strong preferences, even eccentricities. But when you live inside that world, you begin to understand: these are not choices. These are compulsions.

OCD in Marriage: The Shared Struggle

In marriage, two people usually imagine sharing responsibilities, joys, and challenges. But OCD changes the equation.

It is not only her struggle—it is our struggle. OCD dictates our routines, our conversations, our travel, our intimacy. It sets limits on what we can or cannot do.

• Loss of Balance: In a healthy marriage, both partners take turns carrying the load. But OCD shifts the balance. I drive her everywhere, I adapt to her endless cleaning rituals, I live with the absence of pets and the silence of childlessness.
• Loneliness: At times, I feel like a bystander in my own marriage, watching her battle fears that I cannot touch. Her attention is often stolen by her compulsions.
• Frustration vs. Patience: I want her to seek treatment, but she is terrified of psychiatrists and medication. I oscillate between wanting to push and needing to stay patient.
• Unseen Battles: Outsiders never see the full picture. They may admire how “clean” our house is or how “cautious” she is. They cannot see the exhaustion behind it.

Yet, it is not a one-sided marriage. Here is the other side of the truth: while I live with her OCD, she lives with my chronic illness.

The Other Half of the Story

When we arrived in America ten years ago, my body was already failing me. I had a chronic illness that drained me physically and financially. Aizan, despite her own mental battles, became the one who worked seven days a week. She became the provider, the caretaker, the person who made sure I had food, medicine, and shelter.

So while OCD steals from her, it does not steal her courage. While she cleans compulsively, she also sacrifices tirelessly. While I drive her everywhere, she works endlessly.

This is the paradox of our marriage: I care for her mind, and she cares for my body. Together, we survive.

Everyone around them had an opinion about their marriage. Friends, relatives, even strangers at the community center. Some saw Aizan as the long-suffering wife — patient, loyal, carrying a man through his storms. Others saw Fias as the wounded husband — trapped inside a body and a mind that betrayed him daily. But neither of them felt seen, not entirely.

Because the truth was divided, like two mirrors facing each other.

Aizan’s version was quiet. She remembered the early mornings, the smell of coffee, the long drives by Fias to her workplace then to his dialysis centers, the way she whispered prayers into the steering wheel before each drive by Fias. She saw her love as survival — as something that endured even when affection no longer came easily.

Fias’s version was louder, more desperate. His mind replayed the years in America like a loop: the loss of control, the endless forms, the pitying looks. His OCD didn’t always let him see love; it filtered it through fear. To him, Aizan’s concern often sounded like criticism. Her patience sometimes felt like distance.

Neither of them was entirely wrong.

When they spoke to the psychiatrist, their sentences often overlapped, each trying to explain a wound that didn’t have a single cause. The doctor listened quietly, pen unmoving. “There isn’t one story here,” he finally said. “There are two — and both are true.”

That was the hardest thing to accept.

Because love, they learned, isn’t always a shared experience. It’s a series of interpretations — what one gives, what the other receives, and what is lost in translation.

Later that night, back in their apartment, Aizan sat at the edge of the bed while Fias lay on the couch. Between them, silence pressed down like humidity before a storm.

In her diary, she wrote:
“Everyone thinks healing means becoming one again. But maybe healing is learning to live as two — without tearing the other apart.”

And somewhere in the next room, Fias whispered into the dark:
“She doesn’t know how much I’m trying.”

That, too, was the other half of the story.

Lesson One: Redefining OCD and Marriage

The first lesson I want to leave with you is this: OCD is not a quirk. It is a disorder. And in marriage, it is never one person’s burden—it is shared.

But the second lesson is equally important: a marriage is more than illness.

Yes, OCD has made our marriage unconventional. Yes, my illness has added weight to her shoulders. But our story is not about defeat—it is about endurance. It is about two flawed, fragile humans who have learned to care for one another in ways we never imagined.

Love, in our home, does not look like flowers and candlelit dinners. It looks like her working seven days to pay the bills. It looks like me patiently driving her through her fears. It looks like a spotless home and a tired body, side by side, still standing.

Understanding OCD and the Marriage That Holds It

From the outside, Aizan and Fias might look like any other long-married couple — the small arguments, the quiet meals, the occasional laughter that echoes through their modest home. But beneath that ordinary surface lives a daily battle against fear, fatigue, and the invisible rules of Aizan’s mind.

OCD is not just about washing hands or keeping things neat. It’s about the what ifs that never stop. For Aizan, it means living in a world where every detail matters too much — every drop, every crack, every smell, every sound. And for Fias, it means learning how to love a person who is constantly at war with her own thoughts.

Yet, amid the rituals and anxieties, there is tenderness — sometimes quiet, sometimes buried, but always there.

For fifteen years, Aizan has cooked almost every meal they’ve shared. From their first small apartment in Dhaka to their current one in America, she’s kept that habit alive. Even when she’s tired after work or when Fias tells her to rest, she insists, “I’ll cook — I know how you like it.”

But her OCD doesn’t stop at cleaning. It follows her into the kitchen. A tiny change in flame color, a bubble forming too quickly, or a slight sizzle too loud can send her into panic. In her effort to make things perfect, the food often burns.

The first few times it happened, she cried — quietly, ashamed, and trembling. “I ruined it again,” she whispered once, staring at a charred pan of rice.

Fias didn’t say a word. He just sat down, took a bite, and smiled. “It’s good. A bit smoky, but good,” he said, and finished every spoonful.

Sometimes she still burns the food — a curry too thick, a bread too crisp, fish left on the stove for a few seconds too long. Fifteen years later, Fias still eats it without complaint. Out of love, out of pity, out of understanding that it’s not the food he’s eating — it’s her effort, her care, her fight against her own mind.

He knows that each burnt meal is not carelessness, but courage. Aizan keeps cooking because it’s her way of showing love, even when her fears make her hands shake and her timing falter.

To an outsider, it may look like a small thing — a husband eating a burnt meal. But in their world, it’s an act of survival, a form of wordless compassion. Because in an OCD marriage, love is not shown through perfection; it’s shown through patience.

Every meal, every ride, every shared silence — they all tell the same story: that love can survive even the things it can’t fix.

Chapter 2 
Nights Apart: Sleep, Fear, and Compulsions 

We left Bangladesh with hope. Like so many immigrants, we believed America would be a fresh start—a place of opportunity where we could build a life, free from the weight of poverty, superstition, and limitations.

What I didn’t know then was that America would also be the place where my wife’s secret companion—her OCD—would finally be named.

From Habits to Illness

Until that day, I had thought Aizan’s behaviors were just habits, or maybe her way of being careful. I thought she was just a bit too cautious, a bit too clean, a bit too anxious.

But this woman, with decades of experience in psychiatry, explained to me that what I had been witnessing were symptoms of a mental illness.

• Her refusal to drive wasn’t just nervousness—it was OCD paralyzing her with “what ifs.”
• Her endless cleaning wasn’t about loving cleanliness—it was about fighting invisible contamination.
• Her refusal of hospitals wasn’t stubbornness—it was fear fused with compulsion.
• Her refusal to have pets wasn’t dislike—it was contamination fear magnified by OCD.

For the first time, I saw my wife’s world through a different lens: not as quirks, but as a cage.

My Own Illness, Her Sacrifice

The timing of this revelation was complicated. While I was processing what OCD meant for her, I was also battling my own chronic illness. I was weak. Some days I could barely move. Most days I couldn’t work.

And here was my wife—working seven days a week, carrying our financial survival on her back, and still coming home to fight her unseen battles with OCD.

It humbled me. It made me feel both guilty and grateful. Guilty that she carried so much. Grateful that she never gave up.

That is when I realized: we were both sick, in different ways. And somehow, we were each other’s medicine.

The Cultural Shock

In Bangladesh, no one had ever said “OCD” to us. Mental health was not a topic. If someone struggled, they were called lazy, stubborn, or worse—possessed. To admit to a mental illness was to invite shame, judgment, or ridicule.

But in America, here was this woman, calmly naming it for what it was. Not a curse, not a weakness, not a superstition—an illness. Something real. Something that could be treated.

The irony, of course, is that while America gave us the vocabulary, Aizan was still too afraid to seek treatment. She refused psychiatrists. She refused pills. The fear was stronger than the diagnosis.

But for me, the recognition was still a turning point. For the first time, I knew what we were dealing with. And when you can name a thing, you can begin to face it—even if only in small steps.

The first winter in America hits like a confession they were not ready for.
The cold seeps into their bones, but the silence is what truly unsettles them. No street vendors calling out prices, no neighbors dropping by unannounced, no loud azan echoing across the rooftops. Just the distant hum of passing cars and the quiet loneliness of snow.

In Bangladesh, life was chaotic but connected. Aizan’s OCD was hidden within the noise — there was always someone to distract her, someone to tell her she was just “too clean,” or “too careful.” But here, in the quiet suburbs of America, her thoughts grow louder. The compulsions take center stage. Every speck of dust becomes an enemy; every doorknob, a silent threat.

For Fias, the shock comes differently. He expected opportunity — not isolation. Back home, there was always a cousin to call, a neighbor to lean on. Here, every errand requires a car, every appointment a digital portal. When his illness worsens, he realizes how alone they are. The healthcare system feels like a maze of paperwork and policies, and without enough work credits, he doesn’t qualify for assistance.

He tries, on his better days, to take odd jobs. But between dialysis sessions and exhaustion, his strength betrays him. Aizan works instead — seven days a week sometimes, double shifts under fluorescent lights. Her body moves, but her mind is constantly checking: Did I wash my hands? Did I touch something dirty?

When she comes home at night, she begins cleaning immediately — wiping, scrubbing, sterilizing. Fias wants to tell her to rest, but he knows it’s not a choice for her. It’s a ritual of control in a world that keeps reminding them they have none.

Cultural differences amplify everything. Back in Bangladesh, she could have walked anywhere, hailed a rickshaw, traveled without fear. Here, driving feels like a threat to her sense of control. The highways are wide, the cars fast, the consequences real. So Fias drives her everywhere — through rain, snow, and late-night shifts. When he is too tired to speak, she watches the road in silence, tracing the headlights like prayers.

And yet, despite everything, there’s love — not the cinematic kind, but the quiet, persistent kind that keeps them tethered. The kind that folds laundry at midnight, drives an hour after dialysis, and waits outside her workplace with a thermos of tea.

“In America,” Aizan writes in her journal, “we learned that freedom can feel like fear when you have no one to share it with. But we also learned that home is not a place. It’s a person willing to carry your silence.”

Fias reads the entry months later and smiles faintly. For all the shock, the paperwork, the tears, and the sleepless nights — they are still here. Still choosing each other in a country that neither of them fully understands, but where both of them are still trying to belong.

Lesson Two: The Power of Recognition

The second lesson I want to leave with you is this: naming the problem is the first step toward living with it.

For years, I thought my wife’s behaviors were personal choices. That made me frustrated, even angry at times. But when I learned it was OCD, my anger began to turn into empathy. I could finally separate her from her illness.

It didn’t solve everything—she still refuses treatment, and her compulsions still rule much of our life. But recognition gave me patience. It gave me perspective.

If you live with someone who has OCD—or any hidden illness—remember this:

• Don’t confuse their compulsions with their character.
• Don’t confuse their rituals with their love for you.
• And don’t confuse their illness with their identity.

Recognition may not cure, but it transforms how you carry the burden.

When Love Sleeps Apart

Marriage, in its most romanticized form, is often pictured as two people falling asleep in each other’s arms and waking up together every morning. For Aizan and me, that image exists only in fleeting dreams. The reality of our nights is much different. We sleep in separate rooms, divided not by a lack of love, but by the peculiar burdens that illness and obsession place on a marriage.

Aizan’s fear is unshakable: she worries that I might stop breathing in the middle of the night. Her OCD feeds this terror like an endless loop. If she hears my breathing change, she jolts awake, her heart pounding, convinced that death is hovering in the dark. It’s not just fear—it’s paralysis, the inability to convince herself that what she feels is irrational. For her, the worst-case scenario is always the most likely scenario.

On my side, I’ve long been aware of my heavy snoring. At first, it was a nuisance; later, when my illness made me weaker, the sound grew rougher, more alarming to her ears. She associated every rasp of my breath with the possibility of loss. I saw how it consumed her, and so, one night, I quietly suggested that perhaps we both sleep better if we rested in separate rooms. That decision became our compromise, our silent pact to preserve both her peace of mind and my dignity.

But even in separate rooms, the intimacy of marriage has not left us. I often hear her footsteps in the hallway late at night, as she checks to make sure my door is unlocked, as though ready to rush in should the silence grow too deep. And I, in turn, pause at her doorway some mornings, watching her from the crack as she folds and refolds the same blanket in perfect symmetry, her rituals giving her a sense of control in a world that feels too chaotic.

The bed we don’t share is not a sign of absence—it is a symbol of survival. Where other couples might see distance, we see endurance. We have learned that love is not always about closeness, but about respect for each other’s fragile spaces. Our marriage is a balance of contradictions: fear and safety, illness and caregiving, distance and devotion.

Sleeping apart has taught us that sometimes, the deepest intimacy is found not in holding each other close, but in knowing when to let each other breathe.

The Larger Picture: Sleep, Compulsions, and Fear in OCD Marriages

What Aizan and I live is not unusual for couples where one partner struggles with obsessive–compulsive disorder. Sleep is often the first casualty. For some, it is contamination fears—worries that bedsheets, pillows, or pajamas are “dirty” or not folded perfectly. For others, it is hypervigilance, like Aizan’s fear of my death in the night, which keeps both partners awake for hours. Sometimes, it’s rituals—checking locks, rewashing hands, rearranging objects—that stretch far past midnight and leave the house silent only when the sun is rising.

When sleep is disrupted, marriages suffer in subtle ways. Couples may begin to feel like roommates instead of partners. Separate bedrooms, while protective in some cases, can also reduce physical intimacy, making the relationship feel fragile. And yet, as I have discovered, sometimes that distance is the only way to preserve harmony.

Compulsions extend into the bedroom as well. Many partners of people with OCD report that bedtime routines can last for hours, delaying rest. A person may need to shower multiple times, clean the room obsessively, or repeat prayers until “it feels right.” The spouse without OCD often feels torn—wanting to help, but also frustrated by exhaustion.

Fear also takes root in unexpected ways. For Aizan, the hospital is her greatest fear, and because pregnancy leads to hospitals, she associates sex itself with danger. For others, fear may attach to germs, betrayal, or the possibility of harming a loved one. OCD is not just an illness of the mind; it reshapes the entire emotional landscape of a marriage, dictating where intimacy can and cannot exist.

And yet, despite all this, many couples—like us—find ways to survive, even thrive. We learn to adapt, to respect boundaries, to communicate in whispers of patience rather than shouts of frustration. We discover that love can stretch farther than we ever thought possible, even across separate rooms.

At night, their apartment divides into two islands.
Fias sleeps in the smaller bedroom — the one with the dialysis machine beside the bed, its steady mechanical hum echoing like a second heartbeat. Aizan sleeps in the other room, surrounded by air purifiers and disinfectant wipes, her sanctuary against the invisible threats her mind conjures.

They didn’t plan it this way. It just happened — gradually, quietly, like most changes in long marriages do.

At first, they tried sleeping together. But Fias’s illness brought restless nights, labored breathing, and the fear that one morning she might wake up beside a body no longer breathing. Aizan’s OCD magnified every sound, every small movement, until her mind became a storm of fears.

“Sleep,” Fias would whisper when she stirred.
“I can’t,” she would whisper back. “I keep listening for you to stop breathing.”
“I’m fine,” he’d say.
“But what if you’re not?”

So they began sleeping apart — not out of lack of love, but out of necessity. The first night apart felt like betrayal. The second, like a reprieve. By the third, they accepted it as part of their survival.

For Aizan, the space brought control. She could keep her room spotless, free from the medical odors that triggered her panic. For Fias, it meant he could rest without worrying about his snoring or his machines disturbing her. Yet both felt the absence — the quiet ache of a bed half empty, the touch that no longer came naturally.

“We don’t share a bed,” Aizan writes in her diary, “but we share a life. And sometimes, that has to be enough.”

There are nights when she stands by his door, watching the gentle rise and fall of his chest under the dim light. She feels both relief and fear — relief that he is alive, fear that she might lose him if she looks away too long. Then she turns off the light and walks back to her room, where the air hums with cleanliness and loneliness.

In the mornings, she brings him breakfast. He teases her for disinfecting the tray before handing it to him, and she smiles shyly, knowing he’s right but unable to stop. They eat quietly, side by side, two people whose bodies need different kinds of peace to keep surviving.

“Love doesn’t always sleep in the same bed,” Fias reflects. “Sometimes, it just waits in the next room, listening through the walls.”

Over the years, they’ve learned that intimacy isn’t about constant touch — it’s about constant presence. Their love breathes between rooms, carried in small acts: the sound of her slippers in the hallway, the way she checks that his machine is running before she sleeps, the way he leaves her favorite mug by the sink each morning.

Their marriage may not look like anyone else’s. But in the quiet hours, between the soft hum of the machine and the steady rhythm of her footsteps, they find a version of love that still endures — gentle, imperfect, and awake even when they sleep apart.

Chapter 3 
The Road She Couldn’t Drive

Driving is freedom in America. The wide highways, the sprawling suburbs, the endless distances between places—without a car, you are a prisoner of geography. For many immigrants, the driver’s license is more than a piece of plastic; it is a rite of passage, proof that you can belong to the rhythm of this country.

When Aizan and I first arrived, we both assumed she would learn to drive. She was intelligent, determined, and hardworking. But behind the wheel, something invisible paralyzed her. She froze at green lights, unsure if it was truly safe to move forward. She panicked when other cars honked, convinced she had made a life-threatening mistake. The very act of steering became a battlefield between her will and her obsessive fears.

It was during one of those driving lessons with a retired psychiatrist friend that the truth first revealed itself. Our friend watched her closely and then told me, with a kind but serious expression, “Fias, your wife has severe OCD. That is why she cannot drive.” At the time, I didn’t fully understand. But as the months turned into years, the reality became impossible to ignore: Aizan’s compulsions and anxieties had stolen from her the ability to sit confidently behind a wheel.

So I became her driver. Ten years later, I still am. Every appointment, every errand, every workplace, every late-night grocery run—it is me behind the wheel, her in the passenger seat. What some couples divide evenly, we carry as one person’s burden.

And yet, I never saw it only as a burden. There was something deeply symbolic about it: my role as the one who steers us forward when she cannot. In many ways, our car became a metaphor for our marriage. She trusted me to navigate, and I accepted that trust as both responsibility and privilege.

Of course, the reality was not always so poetic. There were times when I longed for her to drive herself, to take just a little of the weight from my shoulders. There were days I resented the extra hours, the exhaustion of always being on call. But then I would remember her face at the wheel—tense, pale, overwhelmed with fear—and my resentment softened into compassion. The road was simply one more place where OCD dictated the rules.

The Lady With Sharp Eyes

It happened almost by accident. Aizan had never driven in Bangladesh, but in America, driving was not optional. Without a car, life feels nearly impossible. We decided it was time for her to learn.

A senior lady friend of ours—kind, wise, and retired from her work as a psychiatrist—offered to help. She had taught others before, and she was patient enough to handle new drivers.

One day, while sitting in the passenger seat, the lady watched carefully as Aizan gripped the steering wheel. Her knuckles were white, her breathing shallow. She adjusted the mirror once, twice, three times. She wiped the steering wheel with a tissue. She asked me if the door was locked. Then she asked again. And again.

The car barely moved, but her mind was already racing a hundred miles per hour.

The lady didn’t say anything at first. She let Aizan fumble, hesitate, freeze. Later, when the session was over and Aizan went inside to rest, she turned to me and said quietly, almost gently:

“Your wife is not just nervous. She has severe Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.”

Those words hit me like a stone in water, sending ripples through everything I thought I knew.

Driving Nowhere

After that, the driving lessons stopped. She could not continue. The anxiety was too much. She would never get her license.

And so, for the past ten years, I have been her driver. Every trip to work, every errand, every grocery run, every appointment—it’s me.

At first, I resented it. It felt like a chain around my neck. But over time, I began to see it differently: it was not a chain—it was a bond. A small way in which I could carry her, as she carried me through my illness.

She worked to support me. I drove to support her. In our imperfect way, it balanced.

OCD and Driving: Why the Wheel Feels Impossible

OCD often robs people of ordinary freedoms. Driving, for many, is among the most terrifying. Some fear that they might run someone over without noticing, replaying every bump in the road as a potential tragedy. Others cannot stop checking mirrors, signals, or locks, repeating rituals until their anxiety is unbearable. Still others are paralyzed by intrusive thoughts: What if I cause an accident? What if I die? What if I kill someone else?

To an outsider, these fears may seem irrational. But for the one living them, they feel as real as the road beneath the tires. The result is often avoidance—some with OCD simply stop driving altogether.

For their spouses, the consequences ripple outward. The non-driving partner must take on the role of chauffeur, disrupting work schedules, social lives, and independence. Resentment can creep in, not out of lack of love, but from sheer exhaustion. And yet, hidden within this sacrifice is also a form of intimacy. Driving becomes more than transportation; it is a daily act of care, a repeated vow of companionship.

In our marriage, the steering wheel is mine, but the journey is ours. Every trip we take—whether across town or across states—is a reminder that love sometimes means carrying the other where they cannot go. Aizan cannot drive the roads of America, but she has driven me through my illness, through despair, through the long nights when I thought I would not make it. In her own way, she is my driver too.

But there is another layer to this story, one that is less personal and more political: the silence of the system. For all the years that Aizan has been unable to drive, unable to live with the independence most Americans take for granted, there has been no safety net, no recognition from the federal government that obsessive–compulsive disorder can be a disabling condition.

When people think of “disability” in America, they picture the visible—wheelchairs, canes, prosthetics, or conditions that can be proven with X-rays and blood tests. What they rarely see are the invisible illnesses: the relentless compulsions, the crippling anxieties, the quiet prisons of the mind. OCD, despite being recognized by psychiatry as a chronic and often debilitating disorder, still struggles for legitimacy in the eyes of bureaucracy.

I learned this the hard way. I once researched whether Aizan could qualify for disability benefits, even temporarily. The forms asked for proof of hospitalization, psychiatric reports, medication records. But Aizan has none of these. She fears doctors and refuses treatment, terrified of pills and psychiatrists. And without those papers, the government sees her not as someone disabled, but as someone unwilling.

The irony is unbearable. Her inability to seek treatment is part of her OCD. Yet the system punishes her for the very symptom that defines her illness. The door to assistance remains shut, because OCD does not fit neatly into the categories that policy-makers understand.

And so, the burden falls entirely on us. She works seven days a week despite her compulsions, carrying me through my chronic illness. I drive her everywhere she needs to go, ensuring her life does not collapse under the weight of immobility. Together, we stitch together a survival plan with no thread of government support.

This is what the world does not see: behind every OCD marriage is not only the struggle of compulsions and fears, but also the quiet abandonment by the systems that should help. We are left to care for each other, and only each other.

When we first arrived in America, I imagined a future where I would work hard, build a life, and support Aizan as she adjusted to a new country. Instead, fate played a crueler hand. Within months, my body began to fail me. A chronic illness settled in, stripping me of my strength and my ability to work. The timing was devastating—newly arrived, I had no employment history here, no “work credits” built into the system. And so, when my kidneys failed and I looked to the government for disability assistance, I discovered the fine print: without a decade of steady employment, I was invisible to the very programs meant to help people like me.

In the eyes of the federal government, I did not exist as a worker, and therefore I did not exist as someone worthy of support.

That left Aizan. Despite her own battles with OCD—her rituals, her anxieties, her cleaning that never seemed to end—she became the breadwinner. Not just with one job, but with two, sometimes even three, stacked back-to-back. Seven days a week she worked, her body growing weary but her will unbroken. She earned for both of us, carried us both.

Imagine this paradox: a woman disabled in her own right by obsessive–compulsive disorder, unable to drive, unable to rest, trapped in cycles of cleaning and fear—yet still standing tall enough to hold me up. This is not the picture people expect of an OCD marriage. Society imagines the husband as caretaker, the wife as fragile. In our case, it was both true and false at once. I drove her everywhere, but she carried me everywhere else.

Her sacrifices cannot be measured in paychecks alone. She gave up her own dreams of independence, her own chance at rest, her own opportunity to slow down. She worked so I could live.

And the government? It stood aside, blind to the complexities of our life. There were no benefits for her OCD, no disability coverage for my illness, no recognition of the reality that we were two people drowning together but holding each other up by sheer force of will.

We often say that marriage is about compromise. For us, marriage became survival—two flawed, fragile bodies learning how to keep each other afloat in a system that refused to throw us even the smallest rope.

It was nearly midnight when I pulled up outside her workplace, headlights casting long shadows on the empty sidewalk. Aizan emerged slowly, her shoulders slumped, her steps heavy from another double shift. I watched her through the windshield—my wife, my partner, my warrior—carrying the weight of two lives in her tired body.

There were nights when my own body had been strapped to a dialysis machine only hours earlier, the needles still leaving fresh marks on my arms. I would sit through the draining routine, then climb into the car, driving an hour through the dark just to bring her home. The exhaustion was bone-deep, but I knew she was waiting, just as I knew she depended on me to keep moving forward.

She opened the door and slipped into the passenger seat without a word. For a moment we just sat there, listening to the quiet hum of the engine. Her hands were raw from endless hours of labor, but when she set one gently on my arm, I felt the strength that had carried us through ten years of hardship.

“I’m so tired,” she whispered.

“I know,” I said. And I did.

I put the car in gear, and we drove home through the sleeping city. She leaned her head against the window, her eyelids fluttering, trusting me to take her safely where she needed to be. And I thought about how many times we had repeated this ritual: her working, me driving, both of us holding each other up in ways no one else could understand.

We had no help from the government, no benefits, no outside support. What we had was each other. She carried the burden of our survival, and I carried her where she could not go. It was not the marriage we imagined, but it was the marriage we built—one mile, one shift, one dialysis session, one sacrifice at a time.

And yet, survival did not mean serenity. Our arguments lived on a spectrum most couples never touch. Where others might argue about bills or household chores, our disagreements bent around Aizan’s OCD. She could fight with me over fears that had no logic—whether my breathing meant death was near, whether a hospital visit spelled catastrophe, whether dirt invisible to my eyes was destroying our home. I often felt lost in these battles, wrestling not with her words but with the invisible illness that shaped them.

And still, I stayed. Because beneath the confusion and exhaustion, there was something stronger: the quiet knowledge that we were both broken in different ways, and that our only chance at wholeness was holding on to each other.

And in that quiet night, as the traffic lights flickered green above us, I realized again what our life had taught me: love is not just about sharing joy—it is about sharing exhaustion, fear, and responsibility. It is about knowing, without speaking, that you both depend on each other to keep the road ahead alive.

Chapter 4
Fear of Hospitals, Fear of Intimacy

For many people with obsessive–compulsive disorder, hospitals represent the ultimate paradox: places meant for healing that instead become symbols of danger. Medical fears are one of the lesser-known but deeply crippling dimensions of OCD. They can manifest as contamination fears—terror of germs, infections, or medical equipment. They can appear as health anxieties—intrusive thoughts about death, disease, or procedures going catastrophically wrong. And sometimes, they take the form of avoidance, where the very thought of entering a clinic triggers overwhelming panic.

At the heart of this pattern is a struggle with control. OCD thrives on uncertainty, and few environments feel more uncertain than hospitals. To a mind already wired to doubt, every needle, every diagnosis, every possibility of complication becomes unbearable. What most people accept as a routine procedure—a blood draw, a dental cleaning, a pregnancy checkup—can feel like stepping into mortal danger.

This fear does not only affect the individual with OCD. It spreads into marriages, families, and relationships. It affects how couples make decisions about health, how they handle emergencies, and even how they navigate intimacy. If medical procedures are feared, pregnancy itself becomes feared. If illness is terrifying, discussions about health become arguments rather than plans.

In this way, OCD does not stop at the hospital door; it follows couples home, reshaping their private lives in unexpected and painful ways.

Aizan sat on the edge of the bed, twisting the hem of her work shirt between her fingers. Fias had mentioned it again—just a simple routine check-up at the clinic down the road. “Fifteen minutes,” he had said gently, “and it would give us both some peace of mind.”

But the words felt like daggers to her chest. The thought of walking into that building, the smell of disinfectant, the fluorescent lights, the distant echo of machines—her whole body rebelled.

Her OCD was loudest in moments like this. What if they find something? What if they tell me I’m sick too? What if hospitals aren’t for healing but for trapping?

She shook her head violently, pacing the small room. “I can’t, Fias. I can’t go. They’ll poke me, they’ll test me, and then I won’t sleep for weeks wondering what they saw in the blood.”

Fias, weary from his dialysis session earlier, leaned back in his chair, clutching his side. He tried not to let the frustration show, but it was there, simmering under his exhaustion. “Aizan… it’s not about fear, it’s about knowing. You work so hard—three jobs sometimes—and you never stop. Your body deserves care.”

Her eyes flashed with panic. “No! If I go, I’ll find out something terrible, and then I’ll lose control. Don’t you understand? It’s safer not to know.”

The room fell into a tense silence. He wanted to argue, to shout even, but her trembling hands and the way her breath came in shallow bursts reminded him this wasn’t stubbornness—it was terror, tangled in the knots of her OCD.

He closed his eyes and exhaled slowly. “Alright. Not today,” he whispered. “But promise me someday.”

Aizan didn’t answer. Instead, she sat back on the bed, head buried in her palms, whispering prayers under her breath to quiet the storm inside her.

And in that small, dimly lit apartment, the unspoken truth hovered between them: love wasn’t always patient or kind. Sometimes, it was just surviving one another’s fears without walking away.

Like a Child

Fias had long ago realized that if Aizan ever went to a doctor’s office or dentist, he would have to go with her. She would never walk through those doors alone. Even then, it was an ordeal.

At the primary care clinic, she would cling to his sleeve the way a child clings to a parent on the first day of school. Her eyes darted at every sound—the rolling of a cart, the squeak of shoes on tile, the faint buzz of fluorescent lights. And when the nurse approached with a needle, Aizan’s body stiffened like stone.

“I can’t,” she would whisper, her voice breaking. “Don’t let them do it, Fias. Don’t let them hurt me.”

He would take her trembling hand in his, then gently cover her eyes with his palm. “Don’t look,” he’d murmur softly. “Just breathe. I’m right here.”

Every time, without fail, Aizan cried. Not the controlled tears of an adult holding it together, but the raw sobs of someone who felt cornered, powerless, terrified. The nurse would glance at Fias, as if to ask silently, Is this normal? And Fias would simply nod, weary but protective.

At the dentist, it was no different. Even the hum of the cleaning tools made her fists clench, and he had to sit in the waiting area listening to her muffled whimpers through the walls. When she finally came out, cheeks blotched and eyes swollen, she would look at him as though she had survived a battlefield.

For Fias, these visits were exhausting. He had his own illness to manage—his dialysis, his pain, his fatigue—but in those moments, none of that mattered. What mattered was getting her through it. He carried the weight of both their fears, both their bodies.

When they got back home after one of those appointments, Aizan often retreated straight to the bedroom, curling up under a blanket as if the whole world had been too much to bear. Her sobs would fade into exhausted silence, leaving behind only the sound of her breathing—still quick, still uneasy.

Fias would sit in the living room, body aching from his own treatment, staring at the quiet home they had built together. He thought about the strange paradox of his wife: the woman who cried like a child when a needle approached, yet worked like a soldier day and night, seven days a week, to keep them alive.

In public, Aizan was the warrior—managing two, sometimes three jobs, navigating buses, juggling responsibilities, and keeping a roof over their heads. But in those sterile clinic rooms, she was fragile, terrified, and in need of protection. Fias had learned to hold both truths at once.

He leaned back, closing his eyes. Their marriage wasn’t built on the illusion of normalcy. It was built on survival. On her carrying him through his illness, and him shielding her from her fears. On tears in the doctor’s office and strength on the factory floor.

This was their version of love—mutual caregiving in the face of two different, relentless battles. And though it was never easy, it was theirs.

It’s late afternoon. The winter sun leaks through the blinds, painting stripes of gold across the hospital floor. Fias sits beside Aizan’s wheelchair, holding a cup of tea that has long gone cold. She looks at him with the quiet fatigue of someone who’s learned to live between breaths.

He’s folding the paper napkin in his hand—again and again—until it becomes a tiny, crumpled square. His fingers tremble. She watches him, then laughs softly.

“You always do that,” she says. “When you don’t know what to say.”

Fias looks up, half-smiling. “And you always notice.”

They sit in silence. The faint beeping of a heart monitor in the next room blends with the shuffle of nurses’ shoes. Then Aizan reaches out her hand, thin but steady. “Sometimes,” she whispers, “I wish I could just start over. Like a child. No fear, no pride. Just… trying again.”

Fias lowers his gaze. The napkin tears between his fingers. “Maybe that’s what we’re doing,” he says. “Starting over, every day.”

Aizan nods. “Then promise me you won’t give up before I do.”

He leans forward, rests his forehead gently against her hand, and for a moment the air between them feels lighter—like forgiveness, like the weight of years lifting.

Outside, a child’s laughter echoes from the corridor. The sound carries through the doorway, bright and careless, reminding them both that love—like childhood—must sometimes relearn how to breathe.

Aizan had always been the kind of person who believed that love meant doing something — fixing, helping, saving. When she saw Fias struggle through his dialysis sessions, when she heard the steady whirring and beeping of the machine that kept him alive, something inside her broke a little more each time.

One evening, while Fias rested on the couch after dialysis, she sat beside him and spoke in a trembling voice. “I want to give you my kidney,” she said. Her eyes were full of sincerity, of the desperate wish to end his pain. “You can’t keep doing this forever. Let me help you.”

Fias turned to her, his face pale and tired but soft with affection. “Aizan,” he said, taking her hand, “you don’t understand. You’d be terrified even before the surgery began. You’d probably die of fear alone.”

She looked at him, confused, hurt. “So you don’t trust me to do it?”

He squeezed her hand tighter. “I trust you with my life — that’s why I can’t let you do it. I can’t live knowing I took a part of you and risked losing you forever. I’d rather wait… even if it takes years. Even if it means I have to suffer through all this.”

The room fell silent except for the faint hum of the dialysis machine. Tears welled up in Aizan’s eyes, not from rejection, but from the deep, quiet truth of his love.

Fias looked away toward the window, where the sun was setting. “They say it takes five to seven years to get a cadaver kidney,” he murmured. “So be it. I’ll wait. I’ve waited for worse things in life.”

Aizan turned her head toward him, her lips trembling. “And what do I do while I wait with you?”

He smiled faintly. “You live, Aizan. That’s all I ever wanted for you — to live without fear.”

That night, Aizan lay awake beside him, staring at the ceiling, her heart a battlefield of love, fear, and helpless devotion. For the first time, she realized that sometimes the greatest act of love was not to give — but to not give, when giving might destroy the other.

Chapter 5
The House That Must Stay Clean 

One of the most recognizable forms of Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder is the cleaning compulsion. While outsiders often joke about being “a little OCD” when they like things neat, true OCD-driven cleaning is not about tidiness—it is about fear. Fear of contamination. Fear of germs. Fear of invisible harm.

For many sufferers, the home becomes both sanctuary and prison. The very place that should bring peace instead becomes the battleground where compulsions must be carried out again and again—scrubbing, wiping, sweeping, washing—until exhaustion takes over. And for spouses, the home is no longer just a place of comfort, but the stage for a partner’s endless rituals.

Fias had long ago stopped trying to argue about it. Aizan cleaned from the moment she woke up until she went to bed, often rising in the middle of the night to wipe down counters or re-mop the floors. To her, a speck of dust was not just dirt—it was a threat. Shoes were left at the door, clothes washed more often than they were worn, and any thought of pets was out of the question.

“No animals,” she declared firmly once. “They carry filth. They will ruin the house.”

Fias knew there was no convincing her otherwise. The house was her kingdom of control, the one place she believed she could hold back chaos. And yet, even in its gleaming state, she never felt satisfied. The fight against contamination had no finish line.

Sometimes, Fias would watch her from his chair—her hands raw from scrubbing, her face tight with focus—and wonder what peace would look like if she ever allowed herself to stop.

The cleaning compulsions bled into their intimacy as well. Aizan’s fear of contamination intertwined with her fear of hospitals, creating an invisible wall between them. Pregnancy, in her mind, meant medical procedures, and medical procedures meant terror.

“Don’t ask me to go through that,” she would whisper whenever the subject arose. “I can’t. The hospital… I can’t.”

And so, their marriage carried a quiet absence, a space where fear silenced desire. For Fias, it was painful, confusing, and sometimes lonely. But he also knew that behind every refusal was not rejection—it was dread.

Arguments about this, like so many others, often spiraled into misunderstandings. Her OCD responses confused him, made him feel as though they were speaking two different languages. When he tried to reason, she grew more frantic. When he asked for closeness, she pulled away.

Yet, despite the walls OCD built between them, there was also resilience. They still sat together after long days, still leaned on one another in exhaustion, still shared a bond held not by touch alone but by survival, sacrifice, and the quiet knowledge that no one else could understand their struggles the way they did.

That night, after a double shift, Aizan came home long past midnight. Most people would have collapsed straight into bed, but not her. She dropped her bag, changed her clothes, and went straight to the kitchen sink. The faucet hissed as she scrubbed a dish that was already clean, then moved on to wiping counters that had been wiped three times already that day.

Fias sat in the living room, his body aching from dialysis, watching her in silence. He wanted to tell her to stop, to rest, to sleep beside him. But he knew better—this was her ritual, her shield against the fears that stalked her mind.

Her shoulders drooped with fatigue, her hands moved slower than usual, yet she did not stop. Even when her eyes were heavy with sleep, she clung to the belief that one more wipe, one more scrub, might bring her peace.

Fias leaned back, sighing softly. His own body betrayed him with weakness, hers betrayed her with compulsions. And yet, together, they kept moving—he driving her through her panic, she working through his illness. Two tired souls locked in a cycle of care, each unable to let the other fall.

In that quiet moment, as Aizan wiped down the table one last time before finally sitting to catch her breath, Fias thought: This is love, in its strangest form. Not flowers or poetry, but sacrifice and survival. A love that cleans, drives, weeps, and carries.

The apartment has become both sanctuary and prison — a fragile balance between order and chaos. For Aizan, every object carries moral weight; every corner whispers danger if neglected. The cushions on the sofa must be perfectly aligned, the cups in the kitchen cabinet facing the same direction, the towels folded into precise thirds. It isn’t vanity. It’s survival.

When Fias leaves a crumb on the table, Aizan feels her chest tighten — as if the entire world teeters on the edge of collapse. Her eyes fixate on the small speck until it grows monstrous in her mind. The crumb becomes contamination; the table becomes unsafe; the room becomes unlivable. She scrubs until her fingers ache, and only then does her breathing slow again.

Some nights, Fias watches her from the doorway, torn between guilt and helplessness. He wants to stop her, to hold her, but he knows — interruption feels like betrayal. Instead, he quietly joins her, wiping the counter beside her hand. It’s the closest thing to love language they share now — cleaning as communion.

Aizan’s fears are not only about germs or dirt. They’re about control in a world where everything feels like it could fall apart. Once, she noticed a small crack on the wall above their bed. Her mind spiraled instantly — she saw the crack widening, the roof crumbling, beams collapsing, both of them buried beneath dust and concrete. She could almost hear the sound of the ceiling giving way. She pressed her palm to the wall and whispered a prayer, as if her touch alone could hold the house together.

At other times, when Fias drives to dialysis, Aizan imagines him in an accident. She pictures the screech of tires, the shattering glass, the silence after impact. In her mind, he doesn’t survive. She sees herself standing alone in the ruins of their clean, empty home. The thought makes her grip the phone tighter, refreshing the GPS tracker until he arrives safely.

To an outsider, her world seems irrational. But to Aizan, cleanliness is not about perfection — it’s a fragile shield against uncertainty, against grief, against loss. The house must stay clean because it is the only thing she can still control.

Yet there are moments of grace. Fias, understanding the invisible storm inside her, installs small hooks and storage bins, labeling everything she touches most. When her panic rises, he reminds her softly, “The house is still standing, Aizan. We are still here.”

Sometimes she smiles faintly, wipes the last trace of dust from the table, and replies, “Then maybe it’s clean enough.”

Fias’s Reflection — Through His Eyes

To Fias, the house stopped being a home a long time ago. It became a breathing organism — alive, temperamental, and demanding constant attention. The faint scent of disinfectant lingers in every room, the hiss of running water from the kitchen sink marks the rhythm of their days. Aizan says she’s just cleaning, but he knows she’s fighting — fighting a war no one else can see.

When he first married her, he thought it was just her way of keeping things tidy — a habit, a quirk. But now, he sees the fear behind every motion. The moment she spots a stain or a misplaced object, her face changes — her eyes dart, her body stiffens, and her breathing turns shallow. To her, disorder means danger. It’s as though something terrible might happen if she doesn’t fix it right away.

He’s learned not to argue. At first, he tried reasoning — “It’s just a crumb,” he’d say. “It’s only dust.” But every time he said that, she would look at him as if he didn’t understand the gravity of the world she lived in. And maybe he didn’t.

Now, when she cleans, he joins her quietly. He wipes what she wipes, folds what she folds, not because he believes it will stop the roof from collapsing or save him from a car crash — but because he knows it brings her peace, even for a moment. In those silent hours, their love has changed shape. It no longer lives in touch or laughter, but in shared motion — in synchronized care.

He sees her exhaustion after every episode, the trembling hands, the faint red lines on her skin from too much soap. And though his own body fails him slowly — the dialysis, the fatigue — he hides his pain when she’s watching. Because if she sees him weak, it will feed her fears again.

Fias sometimes thinks about what life would be like in Bangladesh. There, maybe Aizan wouldn’t need to drive or walk far — she’d have rickshaws, tuktuks, people everywhere to help her move. She’d have mobility, comfort, and perhaps a little more laughter. But then, he thinks of himself — how the medical bills there would crush them both. No government help. No coverage. Just the slow draining of savings, until nothing remained.

So, they stay here — in America — trapped between comfort and cost, love and fear, duty and exhaustion. Their house is spotless, but their lives are cluttered with what-ifs.

Still, Fias doesn’t see Aizan’s rituals as madness. To him, they’re proof that she loves him so much it terrifies her. Every scrub, every wipe, every late-night check on the locks — it’s her way of keeping him alive, keeping them together.

Sometimes, as she drifts into restless sleep beside him, he whispers, “You don’t have to hold the world together, Aizan. Just hold me.”

And though she doesn’t answer, her fingers curl around his hand — gentle, trembling, but still holding on.

Aizan’s Diary — Morning After

The morning light falls through the blinds in thin, trembling lines — like the cracks I can’t stop seeing everywhere. On the wall above the bed, there’s one again. A thin line running like a vein through the plaster. It wasn’t there yesterday. Or maybe it was, and my eyes have only now decided to notice it.

I stare at it until my stomach tightens. My brain begins its familiar movie — the ceiling gives way, the fan crashes down, the roof follows, and we are buried beneath it all. Fias doesn’t move in the dream. I scream, but no sound comes out. Then, I blink, and everything is still in place. Just a quiet morning. Just us.

Last night, before sleep, he whispered something — “You don’t have to hold the world together, Aizan. Just hold me.”

Those words stayed in my head all night. I wanted to tell him that I’m not trying to hold the world together — I’m trying to keep it from falling apart. From falling on him. Every time I see a crack, every time I imagine his car crashing, it’s my heart warning me that I can’t lose him. I don’t know how to explain it to anyone else. To my friends, it’s “irrational fear.” To me, it’s love dressed as panic.

They don’t see how my hands shake when I can’t clean the kitchen before he gets home. They don’t know the relief I feel when I check his breathing at night — that quiet confirmation that he’s still here, still alive.

In Bangladesh, I think I could move easier. Rickshaws, people, the sound of life everywhere — I wouldn’t feel so trapped in this house, in this silence. But then, I remember that there, he would have no help, no treatment, no system that would save him when his body gives up. Here, at least, he lives.

Maybe that’s our trade — my mind breaks a little, and his body survives a little longer.

I don’t want pity. I don’t even want a cure anymore. I just want balance — a day when the house feels like a home again, when love doesn’t have to wear the face of fear.

I trace my fingers over the crack in the wall. It’s cold. I whisper softly, “You’re not real. We’re safe.”

And for a moment — just a small, precious moment — I almost believe it.

Droplets

Fias is exhausted when he pulls the car into their driveway that night. The engine hums quietly, then dies as he leans back into the seat, staring blankly through the windshield. His arms ache from steering, his stomach feels hollow, and his veins still sting from the dialysis needle marks that afternoon. It’s past 10 p.m., and the only light left on in their street is the small porch bulb flickering weakly in the wind.

Aizan sits beside him, still in her work uniform. The smell of disinfectant from the hospital clings to her hands. Neither speaks for a while — both too drained to even sigh. Then, almost automatically, she reaches for her purse. Fias forces a small smile, the kind he’s practiced over the years, and says softly,
“Home.”

But home is not peace tonight.

As soon as they step inside, the faint scent of soy sauce and ginger greets them — remnants of the Chinese stir-fry Fias had cooked earlier before picking her up. The kitchen counters glisten, but a few droplets of water sparkle near the sink. On the dining floor, two tiny splashes of cooking oil catch the light.

To anyone else, it’s nothing. To Aizan, it’s chaos.

Her breath quickens. Her eyes dart to the sink, to the floor, then back to the counters. Her fingers begin to twitch, her body tightening as though danger has entered the house.
“Fias…” she says sharply, pointing to the droplets. “You didn’t clean properly.”

Fias knows this tone — the one that carries not anger, but panic disguised as control.
“I’ll wipe it up,” he says gently, already reaching for the towel. But the moment he bends down, she pulls it from his hand.

“No, you’ll just spread it more! You don’t see it — there’s oil everywhere!” Her voice rises, trembling, urgent.

He straightens, his eyes heavy from the day’s fatigue. “Aizan, it’s just a few drops. Please, I’m tired.”

Her eyes widen — as if he just denied gravity. “You don’t understand! It’s not just drops. It’s contamination. The whole kitchen— it’s dirty now!”

Something in Fias snaps. Maybe it’s the exhaustion, maybe the dialysis pain, or maybe just the weariness of being misunderstood one too many times. “Aizan, I cooked for you. I drove an hour to bring you home. I’m trying.”

She freezes, hurt flashing across her face. “And I’m trying to live in a clean house!” she fires back, her voice cracking.

Silence swallows the kitchen. For a moment, both just stand there — breathing heavily, staring at each other across a battlefield made of invisible oil stains.

Then Aizan turns away. “I’m sleeping in the other room tonight,” she says quietly, her voice brittle.

Fias doesn’t stop her. He just watches as she disappears into the guest room and closes the door. The click of the latch echoes like a small heartbreak.

He wipes the counter anyway. Not for her, not for cleanliness — just to do something with his hands. Then he sits down in the dark living room, staring at the walls they’ve both built and rebuilt, wondering how love can survive so many invisible wars.

Morning arrives soft and golden. The smell of toast drifts through the house. Fias opens his eyes to see Aizan standing by the doorway with a tray — tea and two slices of toast, just the way he likes them. Her eyes are swollen, but her smile is gentle.

“I made breakfast,” she says quietly.

He nods, too tired to speak, too grateful to pretend. She sets the tray beside him and sits down, smoothing the wrinkles of her skirt.

After a long silence, Aizan murmurs, “I don’t like when we fight.”

“Me neither,” he says softly.

She looks down, tracing circles on the teacup’s rim. “Sometimes I see things that aren’t there. But they feel real. Like the oil last night. I couldn’t stop seeing it.”

He reaches for her hand. “And I couldn’t stop seeing how tired you were. Maybe we’re both just trying to survive the only way we know.”

She nods, eyes glistening. “Then… let’s keep surviving together.”

In that quiet morning light, between burnt toast and tired hearts, love doesn’t look like perfection. It looks like forgiveness — served warm in a chipped teacup.

Aizan’s Inner Monologue – The Fear Beneath the Clean

Sometimes I wish he could see what I see.

When I look at a few drops of water, it isn’t just water. It’s the beginning of a disaster. My mind doesn’t let me stop there — it builds stories. It tells me that the droplets will spread, that mold will grow, that the floor will rot, that one day the roof will collapse and bury us in our sleep. It’s not logic. It’s survival instinct gone wrong — a mind that thinks fear is protection.

When I see oil stains, I don’t see a stain. I see danger — someone slipping, falling, bleeding. My brain whispers, “You could have stopped this if you just cleaned better.” So I scrub, not to clean, but to silence the voice.

I know it exhausts him. I see his shoulders droop every time I say, “It’s dirty.” I know he cooked with love, not carelessness. But when my anxiety rises, love and logic both disappear. All that’s left is fear — sticky and unstoppable.

Last night, when I walked away and closed the door, I wanted him to follow. But I also wanted him safe from me — from my words, my compulsions, my spirals. I lay awake imagining he would leave me one day, the way my thoughts leave me behind.

But this morning, when I saw his dialysis machine, silent and waiting beside the bed, I remembered why I can’t give up. He never gave up on me — not when I screamed about the oil, not when I refused treatment, not when I couldn’t touch the car door without sanitizing it five times.

He drives me everywhere, even when he’s sick. I clean for him, even when I’m breaking. Maybe that’s our love language — care tangled in fear. We both fight something invisible, and somehow, we keep holding on.

When I made tea and toast today, my hands trembled. But when he smiled, even a little, the voice in my head quieted. Maybe love isn’t about curing each other. Maybe it’s about staying long enough for the fear to lose its power.

I still see the oil stains sometimes — but now, when he holds my hand, I can almost believe they’ll fade on their own.

Chapter 6
Between Illness and Responsibility 

Arguments are inevitable in any marriage. But in a marriage shaped by OCD, the fights are rarely about what they seem. Dishes, laundry, driving routes, hospital visits—on the surface, they appear ordinary. Yet underneath, the real struggle is between fear and reason, two forces speaking different languages.

For Fias, arguments began with logic. He wanted to explain, to solve, to reassure. For Aizan, arguments began with dread. She wanted certainty, safety, escape. Neither was wrong, but neither could fully understand the other’s world.

One evening, after dialysis, Fias mentioned he needed to refill a prescription. “It’s just the pharmacy,” he said casually, “five minutes inside.”

But Aizan’s face twisted. “No, don’t go. People cough there, people sneeze. You’ll catch something worse. Why risk it?”

“It’s medicine I need, Aizan,” he replied, tired but firm. “I can’t skip it.”

Her voice rose, edged with panic. “You don’t understand! If you go in there, you’ll bring germs back, and then what? What if you collapse in your sleep? What if—”

He cut her off, frustration seeping out. “You think I don’t already collapse enough? You think I don’t live every day with that fear too?”

The room went quiet. Her breathing was sharp and quick, his words heavy with bitterness. He hadn’t meant to wound her, but OCD had a way of dragging both of them into corners they didn’t want to stand in.

These arguments were never simple wins or losses. They left both drained, misunderstood, and sometimes resentful. Fias would sit alone, wondering why her fears seemed stronger than her trust in him. Aizan would sit in her own silence, feeling that her terror was invisible, dismissed as nonsense.

And yet, despite the sharpness of these exchanges, they always circled back to each other. Because beneath the words, both knew what the other couldn’t always say aloud: I’m scared of losing you. I don’t know how to live without you.

The Bedroom Divide
At night, Aizan often insisted they sleep in separate rooms. “What if you stop breathing while I’m next to you? What if I wake up and find you gone?”

Fias tried to reassure her. “That’s not how it works. Me snoring won’t kill me, and me being alone won’t save me.”

But Aizan shook her head, tears in her eyes. “You don’t understand. If I’m next to you and you die, I’ll never close my eyes again.”

For Fias, the loneliness of that choice cut deep. He missed the comfort of her beside him, the quiet rhythm of shared sleep. But her fear was immovable, a wall no words could climb

The Cleaning Spiral
Another common flashpoint came late at night. Exhausted from dialysis, Fias begged her to stop cleaning. “Please, Aizan. The house is clean enough. Lie down, rest. Your body needs it.”

But she would keep scrubbing the same spot on the floor, anger flashing in her voice. “It’s not clean. Can’t you see? You never notice the germs. You don’t care if we live in filth!”

Her words stung, though he knew they weren’t true. In her mind, the fight wasn’t about dirt—it was about safety. Still, to him, it felt like rejection of his presence, his judgment, even his love.

The Fear of Intimacy
Perhaps the most painful arguments came when Fias longed for closeness. “We are husband and wife,” he whispered one evening. “Why do you always pull away from me?”

Her answer came sharp, almost panicked. “Because if I get pregnant, I’ll be trapped in hospitals. Needles, doctors, surgeries—I can’t! Don’t you see? It terrifies me.”

He turned away, hurt. “So my love is a threat to you?”

“No,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “The fear is. But you can’t fight fear with reason.”

These arguments were never about winning. They were about colliding worlds—his logic against her compulsions, his longing against her terror. Each fight left wounds, but also a strange kind of resilience.

Because in the quiet after the storm, when neither had the energy to keep arguing, they always ended up back at the same truth: they needed each other. His illness bound him to her care, her OCD bound her to his protection. It was a cycle of frustration, sacrifice, and love spoken in two different tongues.

That night, after one such argument, they sat in silence in the car outside her workplace. The engine hummed softly, the streets were empty, and neither spoke for a long while. Then Aizan reached over, resting her trembling hand on his. He squeezed it gently, no words exchanged.

It wasn’t resolution. It wasn’t understanding. But it was enough to remind them that even when their fears and logic collided, they were still holding on to each other.

The fear of intimacy is one of the cruelest symptoms of Aizan’s OCD. It isn’t about rejection or lack of love — it’s about terror. Her mind turns closeness into risk. The idea of pregnancy becomes a flashing red warning sign: hospitals, doctors, needles, procedures. To her, it’s not the beauty of new life — it’s a map of everything she fears most.

For years, Fias tried to understand. There were nights he would sit beside her, trying to hold her hand, and she’d tense — not because she didn’t love him, but because her anxiety told her that love could hurt, that comfort could bring danger. Over time, he stopped asking for more than what she could give. Their love quietly transformed — less physical, more emotional, like two souls learning to speak through care instead of touch.

But love needs warmth, even when it cannot have closeness. And so, they found a strange ritual — one that became their version of family life.

Almost every evening, after Aizan returns home from her shift and Fias finishes his dialysis session, they settle into their worn-out couch. The TV glows softly. On the screen, families around the world share their lives: mothers bathing newborns, fathers teaching toddlers to walk, children laughing through birthday cakes and school mornings.

They watch vlogs — hours of them. “Our Baby Turns One,” “Morning Routine with Twins,” “Family Picnic,” “Baby’s First Steps.”

It began as a way to pass time, but soon it became their nightly comfort.

Aizan smiles quietly when she watches the babies giggle, sometimes laughing through tears. “She looks like my niece back home,” she says softly. Fias nods, his arm resting behind her shoulders but never pressing. “He looks like he’ll grow up to be a troublemaker,” he jokes.

They talk about what kind of parents they might have been. Fias imagines teaching a child how to drive one day — though he knows Aizan would never allow that car to get even a smudge of dirt. Aizan dreams of dressing their child for school, braiding their hair perfectly, teaching them prayers before bed.

But neither of them cries about what isn’t. They simply share in what is — the quiet peace of watching someone else’s family grow, from behind the safety of a screen.

It’s not sadness that fills the room, but something gentler. Acceptance, maybe. A kind of shared tenderness that doesn’t need to touch, doesn’t need to prove.

Sometimes, when the videos end, they sit in silence. Aizan leans slightly toward him — not close enough to touch, but close enough to feel his warmth. Fias turns down the lights, the dialysis machine humming softly in the background.

In that small moment, between the glow of the TV and the quiet of their home, they aren’t two broken people anymore. They’re just Fias and Aizan — a couple who found a different kind of intimacy, one born not from touch, but from patience.

And as another vlog begins, a baby somewhere in the world takes its first steps.
Aizan smiles through glistening eyes and whispers, “She’s growing up so fast.”

Fias smiles too — because in their own way, they both are.

Chapter 7 
Exile from Two Worlds 

For Aizan, Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder was never called by its name in Bangladesh. Growing up, her cleaning rituals and fears were seen as quirks, even virtues. A spotless home was praised, a cautious woman respected. But no one understood the torment behind those rituals—the endless cycle of fear and relief, the exhaustion that followed.

Mental illness was a forbidden topic in her homeland. Too poor, too religiously entangled, too superstitious, Bangladesh had no room for “invisible sickness.” Families whispered about madness, but never about disorders. For Aizan, this meant she arrived in America carrying not just OCD, but also the silence of a culture that refused to name it.

In America, silence gave way to survival. The government had no program for people like her—OCD was not recognized as a disability that could earn assistance or support. So she worked. Two jobs, sometimes three, seven days a week. Her hands scrubbed in restaurants, in offices, in other people’s homes, and still she came home to scrub her own.

Fias, meanwhile, carried his own burden. His illness struck not long after they arrived, making steady work impossible. His dialysis schedule ate up entire days, leaving him drained and weak. He tried—on his “good days,” he took odd jobs, short shifts, anything to ease the load. But his body betrayed him. After an hour, sometimes less, fatigue and pain forced him home.

Worse still, his role as Aizan’s driver kept him tethered. Her fear of driving meant he had to remain on stand-by mode, phone always at his side. Aizan would call between shifts, her voice hurried and weary: “Fias, come now. I finished early.” Or, “Fias, I can’t wait here long, it’s too much, please hurry.”

And he would go. Always. No matter how weak, no matter the hour, he drove—an invisible lifeline in the background of her working life.

The financial strain was constant, gnawing at their sense of stability. Rent, bills, food, medicines, gas—everything depended on Aizan’s paycheck. There were months when she broke down, clutching the bills in her hands, whispering, “I can’t do this anymore.” There were days when Fias felt the crushing guilt of being unable to provide, his own body reduced to dependency.

And yet, they survived. Not by ease, but by endurance. She worked until her feet blistered. He drove until his bones ached. Together they carried the weight of two worlds—the cultural silence of Bangladesh and the unforgiving reality of America.

At night, when Aizan collapsed into her bed after back-to-back shifts, Fias sometimes sat alone in the living room, phone still in hand as if it might ring again. He thought of the irony: in her country, her illness did not exist. In this country, it existed but had no support. And somewhere in between, the two of them had carved out a life that was both fragile and fierce.

It was not the life they dreamed of, but it was the life they fought for. Every day, every ride, every shift.

Sometimes, late at night, Fias’s mind drifted back to Bangladesh—the humid evenings, the crowded streets, the sound of rickshaw bells ringing into the dusk. He remembered their conversations back then, when America was still only a dream. They spoke of safety, of opportunity, of a country where hard work would be rewarded and health care would be accessible.

He had pictured himself working, saving, building a new home. She had pictured herself free of worry, maybe even learning to drive through quiet suburban streets. They believed that America would lift the burdens that Bangladesh had pressed on their shoulders.

But reality had been different. Illness struck him, OCD bound her tighter than ever, and survival replaced dreams. Instead of freedom, they found new kinds of chains: medical bills, work shifts that never ended, and fears that stalked them even in this land of promise.

Rideshare services—those lifelines for many immigrants—were another wall for Aizan. Her OCD made her suspicious of every driver, male or female. “What if the car is dirty? What if they’re careless? What if something happens to me on the road?” she whispered. For her, strangers behind the wheel were unbearable risks. And so, every ride began and ended with Fias. He was not just her husband; he was her chauffeur, her protector, her guarantee that she would not be left vulnerable in someone else’s car.

As he thought of those rickshaw rides in Dhaka—their laughter bouncing in the air, their simple trust that tomorrow would be brighter—Fias felt both the weight of loss and the stubborn strength of survival. America had not delivered the life they dreamed of, but in this new life, they had only each other. And perhaps, in the end, that was what kept them going.

They often joked that they were “foreigners twice over.”
In America, they were too Bangladeshi. In Bangladesh, they had become too American.

Fias sometimes said it half-smiling, half-tired — but there was a heavy truth behind it.

Life in America gave them modern medicine, clean streets, and endless paperwork. But it also gave them distance — distance from neighbors, from family, from the soft chaos of home. The sound of the muezzin calling from a nearby mosque had been replaced by the low hum of refrigerators and distant sirens. Their lives now fit inside scheduled routines: dialysis appointments, work shifts, grocery lists, reminders.

Back in Bangladesh, everything was close — the people, the noise, the emotion. But it was also suffocating. Mental illness there wasn’t spoken of. OCD was not an illness but a “habit,” something families whispered about behind closed doors. Aizan would have been told to pray more, to “be stronger.” No one would have called it by its name. No one would have understood why she cleaned till her hands bled or why she froze at the sight of a doctor’s white coat.

So, they belonged to neither world.

In America, the system saw Fias as incomplete — no work credits, no insurance safety net, a man surviving by sheer endurance and his wife’s double shifts.
In Bangladesh, society would have seen him as cursed, perhaps even a burden.

Aizan, too, lived between these worlds. In Bangladesh, she would have found comfort in community — women who cooked together, shared chores, and watched each other’s children. But her OCD would have made that impossible. In America, she had space and cleanliness, yet she was alone — trapped in her spotless apartment, her rituals keeping her safe and imprisoned at once.

Sometimes, late at night, she stood by the window, looking out at the streetlights. “We came here for freedom,” she thought, “but I built a smaller cage inside this big country.”

Fias, from his room, would listen to the faint sound of her cleaning — the swish of a mop, the click of a spray bottle — and feel both gratitude and sadness. Gratitude that she stayed. Sadness that neither of them had found peace in the place they fled to.

They lived in exile — not from a land, but from belonging itself.

Still, they endured.
Every morning, Aizan drove him to dialysis, her fingers tight around the steering wheel. Every evening, he drove her home from work, his eyes heavy but determined. They spoke little, yet every gesture carried a quiet promise: we are still here.

In the absence of home, they became each other’s homeland.

Aizan wrote once in her notebook:

“Maybe we don’t belong to a country anymore. Maybe we belong to this effort — this trying, this survival. Maybe this is home.”

And Fias, reading her words later, closed the diary gently and whispered,

“Yes. This is enough.”

Chapter 8
Love as Mutual Caregiving

In the quiet rhythms of their days, Fias and Aizan had come to understand love not as the grand gestures sung in songs, but as the steady pulse of endurance. Their lives had been stripped of illusions—romanticized dreams of America, smooth health, or boundless energy—but what remained was raw and undeniable: the bond of two people caring for each other when the world seemed indifferent.

Fias, weakened by dialysis, had little strength left to claim his old ambitions. Yet he clung to his role as Aizan’s anchor, the one who answered her calls no matter the hour, who stood ready by the phone to ease the panic that her OCD brought like an invisible storm. Aizan, trapped in compulsions and fears that few around her could understand, poured her energy back into caring for him in the small ways she could—reminders of his medication, the comfort of warm meals, and prayers whispered for his strength.

Their caregiving was mutual, though unequal in form. Fias gave mobility and vigilance; Aizan gave presence and devotion. Together, they carved out a definition of love that was practical yet profound: survival, side by side.

Theirs was not a perfect story—it was human, messy, and full of unanswered needs. They lived without the safety net many took for granted: no extended family to lean on, no strong community to understand OCD without shame, no financial stability to absorb the cost of illness. Yet even here, in scarcity and fragility, they discovered endurance as a form of intimacy.

As their story closes, it does so not with finality, but with a mirror to countless others who remain unseen in similar struggles. OCD is not simply a quirk or habit; it is a debilitating disorder. Chronic illness is not merely an individual burden, but a family’s daily trial. Yet these realities are often dismissed, minimized, or overlooked.

According to the World Health Organization, nearly 2% of the global population lives with OCD—tens of millions of people—yet treatment resources remain scarce, especially in immigrant and minority communities. In the United States alone, an estimated 2.5 million adults experience OCD each year, but less than half receive proper treatment. Even fewer receive acknowledgment of the disorder’s disabling impact on work, relationships, and basic functioning. For many, OCD remains invisible, unrecognized as the serious condition it is.

The silence around it—the lack of formal recognition, the absence of support structures, and the stigma that shadows those who suffer—echoes in every immigrant family like Fias and Aizan’s, where illness and survival intertwine.

Their love was not easy, and their lives were not soft. But in their struggle, they reveal something urgent and universal: the need to see OCD not as a private shame, but as a real disability. Only when we recognize its weight can we begin to lift it together.

This, then, is the redefinition of love: not the absence of suffering, but the willingness to endure it, together.

They had now been together for fifteen years. Fifteen years of compromises, of doctor visits and midnight calls, of laughter that often arrived in spite of pain. Their marriage was not marked by milestones others would easily recognize—no extravagant trips, no easy financial comfort, no carefree years. Instead, it was measured in survival: another year through dialysis, another day through compulsions, another morning waking up together despite the exhaustion of yesterday.

OCD, in its relentless grip, had taught Fias patience beyond measure. The rituals, the hesitations, the refusals—all required him to wait, to adjust, to sacrifice quietly. It taught him resilience: the ability to continue in a life where spontaneity was impossible, where planning often collapsed into fear. He learned that endurance was not passive; it was a daily choice, made over and over, to remain steady when chaos pressed in.

Illness, in turn, had shaped Aizan in ways she never anticipated. Watching her husband tethered to machines, drained by weakness, and denied the dignity of steady work taught her a heavier kind of responsibility. She had to become his advocate, his caretaker, his second strength when his first gave out. It awakened a compassion rooted not in pity but in shared suffering—the understanding that love means holding the other when they cannot hold themselves.

Together, they had become mirrors of endurance. One gave patience; the other gave strength. One learned sacrifice; the other learned compassion. They became not simply husband and wife, but each other’s caregiver, standing in for what illness and OCD had taken away.

Their final truth, hard-earned over fifteen years, was simple: OCD does not define their marriage. Dialysis does not define their marriage. What defines it is caregiving—mutual, flawed, and sometimes weary, but steadfast. Love for them is not a perfect picture but a living practice of showing up for one another, especially when it is most difficult.

As their story closes, it does so not with despair but with clarity. Love, stripped of its illusions, is not fragile after all. It is endurance. It is sacrifice. It is the daily decision to hold on—together.

And that is enough.

There comes a time in every long marriage when the idea of romance quietly transforms into something quieter, deeper — and far less visible to the outside world.

For Fias and Aizan, love had stopped looking like candlelight dinners and anniversary gifts a long time ago. Instead, it looked like small, ordinary mercies — a warm towel after dialysis, a favorite meal left covered on the stove, a phone call made just to say, “Did you take your meds?”

In the beginning, Aizan thought caregiving was one-directional. She was the one with the anxiety, the panic, the rituals. Fias was the stable one — her anchor, her reason to keep trying. But life, unpredictable and cruel, evened that balance when his kidneys began to fail. Overnight, the roles blurred. The caregiver became the patient, and the patient became the caretaker.

It was not easy. Some days, Aizan’s fear of contamination made it nearly impossible to touch his dialysis bandages or handle the medical waste. Other days, Fias would hide his pain so she wouldn’t spiral. They both pretended to be stronger than they were, not out of pride, but love — because they knew if one fell apart, the other would, too.

Caregiving, for them, became an unspoken language.
He learned to sense her panic before it surfaced — the slight tremor in her hands, the way her breathing quickened when her OCD rituals got interrupted.
She learned to sense his exhaustion before he admitted it — the silence that stretched too long, the way he’d sit on the bed just a little too slowly.

There were days when love looked like endurance: sitting together through hospital waits, long silences, endless bills. There were nights when it looked like holding hands through fear, when the future felt like a hallway that kept narrowing.

They discovered that love was not in the grand gestures but in the repetitions — the same way she wiped the doorknob every morning, the same way he set out his dialysis bag every night. These acts, though mechanical, were proof of care, of attention.

Their marriage, once built on dreams, now rested on routines. Yet those routines, though born from illness, became the heartbeat of their shared life.

Aizan wrote once in her journal:

“I used to think love meant being chosen. Now I know it means choosing — every day, even when it’s hard, even when it hurts.”

Fias would sometimes reread that line after a long day, his chest swelling with both pride and sorrow. Because that was the truth — they were choosing each other daily, not out of habit or pity, but from an understanding that love was not about escape. It was about staying.

And in that staying, they found something sacred — a love not defined by health, beauty, or ease, but by persistence.

They were each other’s medicine. Each other’s witness. Each other’s home.

In the quiet of their small apartment, between the sound of her prayer beads and the rhythmic hum of the dialysis machine, they built a life that was not perfect — but it was theirs.

Love, in its purest form, is not built on grand gestures or romantic perfection. It’s built on care — quiet, daily acts that sustain two lives tethered by fragility and endurance. For Fias and Aizan, love has become something sacred and practical — something that breathes between hospital visits, long drives, clean rooms, and sleepless nights.

When Fias’s kidneys failed, their marriage shifted overnight. What was once a partnership of dreams became a partnership of survival. Aizan learned how to handle dialysis schedules, medication timings, and insurance paperwork she barely understood. She worked double shifts, triple shifts sometimes, because his illness left him unable to work. Each night, she came home with aching feet and a soft smile that tried to hide exhaustion.

And when her OCD began to control her world, Fias quietly took on the caretaker’s role. He cleaned beside her when her hands bled from over-scrubbing, not to humor her rituals but to calm the storm in her mind. When she froze before walking into a doctor’s office, he held her trembling fingers and promised, “I’ll be your courage until yours returns.”

Mutual caregiving doesn’t mean equality in labor — it means equality in sacrifice. Both gave up parts of themselves so the other could keep going. Fias gave up sleep, comfort, and his independence. Aizan gave up rest, ambition, and the illusion of a “normal” life. Together, they built something far rarer than convenience — a bond shaped by endurance and unconditional presence.

They learned that love isn’t always beautiful. Sometimes it’s swollen eyes after a fight, or hands scrubbing the same counter five times before feeling clean. Sometimes it’s the sound of a dialysis machine in the background, filling the silence that words cannot. But within all of it, there is tenderness — not loud or dramatic, but deep and steady like the heartbeat of something eternal.

In American culture, where independence is prized, such interdependence often appears as weakness. But for them, it is strength. In Bangladeshi culture, care between husband and wife is seen as sacred duty — a moral rhythm of “I take care of you, and you take care of me.” That cultural thread, woven into their upbringing, becomes their greatest survival tool in America.

Aizan never abandons Fias, even when her friends tell her to leave and start fresh. Fias never lets her face her fears alone, even when his body begs for rest. They are two halves of a single act of care — one cleaning, one healing; one driving, one waiting.

Their love story is not about passion or perfection. It’s about showing up. It’s about understanding that in sickness and in fear, love is not about fixing the other person — it’s about standing beside them when nothing can be fixed.

In a world that celebrates independence, they redefine love as dependence done with grace.

When Fias picks her up after her shift — tired, dialyzed, and aching — and she leans her head on his shoulder during the drive home, there are no words. Just two breaths, steady and synchronized. That is their language now. That is love — mutual caregiving, rewritten as devotion.

Epilogue

Sometimes I think about Bangladesh — the noise, the crowds, the rickshaws, the tuk-tuks waiting at every corner. If we were there, I would have more freedom to move, to go anywhere without fear of driving. I could hop on a rickshaw, close my eyes, and let the city carry me. But Fias would not survive there. He would have to pay for every dialysis, every medication, every hospital bill from his own pocket. There are no safety nets, no programs, no help. Only survival.

Here in America, I am trapped by distance, by highways and steering wheels I cannot touch. Yet here, his life continues. His treatments keep coming, and somehow, that makes this the better prison to live in.

Sometimes, when the house is quiet and Fias is resting after dialysis, I find myself thinking about the years gone by. Fifteen years feels both long and short—long because every day has carried its own weight, short because our love has kept us moving, one step at a time.

I have often wondered if our struggles will ever be understood by the world outside our walls. OCD is invisible until it isn’t, until it becomes the reason I cannot ride with a stranger, cannot take a routine blood test without trembling, cannot fall asleep without fear. Yet in those moments of fear, Fias has been there—hand over my eyes when the needle pricks, steady voice when the panic rises.

And though he has been ill, unable to work, his presence has been my safety. He is not weak to me; he is the one who waits in the car outside my workplace at midnight, who drives when I cannot, who endures when most would have given up.

For the next generation—for those who come after us—I hope our story is not just about illness or disorder. I hope it is about the kind of love that survives them. I hope it teaches patience, sacrifice, and resilience. I hope it shows that even when the world does not recognize certain struggles as disabilities, the people who live them know how real they are.

Love, in the end, is not about perfection. It is about showing up, again and again, in the hardest seasons. That is the story I want to leave behind. That is the hope I carry forward.

OCD has been both my shadow and my prison. It has shaped the way I think, the way I act, the way I fear. But in those shadows, Fias has stood with me, never letting me face the darkness alone. Every time I cried at the thought of hospitals, every time I panicked about strangers, every time I cleaned the same spot over and over until my body ached, he reminded me that I was more than my illness.

And his illness—his long years of pain, his fragile health, his nights tied to dialysis—taught me the meaning of responsibility and strength. I became the provider, the one who worked day after day, sometimes through exhaustion so heavy it felt like my bones would give way. Yet I never saw it as a burden, because it was for us, for our survival, for our love.

Together, we became each other’s caregivers. That is the truest story of our marriage. Not OCD. Not chronic illness. But the care we give, back and forth, every single day.

To anyone reading this, I want to say: OCD does not define a person, and illness does not erase worth. What defines us is how we endure, how we show up, how we love. The world may not yet fully see OCD as a disability, but those of us who live inside its walls know its weight. And we also know the power of resilience.

I hope the next generation learns to see mental illness with compassion, not shame. I hope they grow up in a world where asking for help is not taboo, where care is available without fear, where marriages like ours are not weighed down by silence.

If there is one message we leave behind, it is this: love does not cure illness, but love makes illness bearable. Love does not erase OCD, but love teaches patience to walk alongside it. Love, in its purest form, is mutual caregiving. And that is enough.

Final Note to Readers

To anyone holding this book, please know this: marriages touched by illness are not broken, and they are not failures. They are unique stories of survival, written in sacrifice and love. The world often celebrates only the easy partnerships—the ones filled with health, adventure, and freedom—but there is another kind of love, quieter and harder, that deserves to be honored. That is the love of couples who carry illness together, who face fear and exhaustion but choose to stay.

In our case, coming from Bangladesh meant that marriage was never seen as something temporary or disposable. Our upbringing taught us that commitment was not about convenience—it was about endurance, even in the hardest seasons. That cultural foundation became the backbone of our marriage. It gave us the mindset that when illness entered our lives—OCD for Aizan, chronic disease for me—we did not see it as a reason to leave. We saw it as a reason to fight harder for one another.

If you are in such a marriage, here is our advice:

• Acknowledge the illness, but don’t let it become your only identity. You are still partners, still people with dreams, not just patients or caregivers.
• Practice radical patience. Illness and OCD both bring irrational moments—arguments that feel confusing, fears that seem impossible. Instead of trying to always fix or argue back, sometimes the best response is calm understanding.
• Divide the care, but also share the care. It’s easy to slip into roles of “the sick one” and “the strong one,” but in truth, both partners need support. Both must give and receive.
• Protect your bond. Find small ways to connect outside of the illness—watch a show together, share a quiet meal, pray, or simply sit in silence holding hands. These little moments are the glue that keeps you whole.
• Don’t measure your marriage by others. Your love is not less because it looks
• It may be defined by hospital visits, sleepless nights, or relentless work shifts, but it is still love—and in many ways, it is a deeper love than most will ever know.

Our story is not perfect, but it is real. And if you take one lesson from it, let it be this: survival together is its own form of victory.

Faith also guided us. Belief in God gave us the patience to accept what we could not change, the courage to carry burdens heavier than we thought possible, and the hope that tomorrow might bring ease. When the world felt cold, prayer reminded us we were not alone.

If you are in such a marriage, here is our advice:

• Let love be stronger than fear. Illness brings uncertainty, but love gives the reason to keep going.
• Respect each other’s struggles. Even when fears seem irrational, they are deeply real for the one living them.
• Share the weight. Illness may shift roles, but both partners must give care and receive care.
• Lean on your roots. Whether it is faith, culture, or the lessons of family, let them hold you steady when the road feels too heavy.
• See your marriage as sacred. Love is not only companionship—it is service, sacrifice, and protection of one another in sickness and in health.

Our marriage endured not only because of personal will, but because of the values our culture instilled, and the strength faith provided when willpower alone was not enough. Love gave us the heart to carry on, but culture and faith gave us the backbone.

If you take one lesson from us, let it be this: survival together is not weakness. It is the highest form of love, and it is victory.

OCD Awareness & The World We Live In

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is one of the most misunderstood mental health conditions in the world. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), OCD affects about 2–3% of the global population — nearly 150 million people worldwide. In the United States alone, an estimated 1 in 40 adults and 1 in 100 children live with OCD symptoms.

Yet, despite these numbers, OCD remains underdiagnosed, undertreated, and often stigmatized — especially in developing countries. In nations like Bangladesh, mental health awareness is still in its early stages. Limited psychiatric infrastructure, cultural shame, and strong religious interpretations often prevent families from seeking help. Many people with OCD go their entire lives without ever being properly diagnosed.

For immigrants, the challenges multiply. Language barriers, lack of insurance, and social isolation make treatment even harder. The U.S. federal system does not yet recognize OCD as a disability on its own, leaving thousands of people — like Aizan — without financial or occupational assistance.

But awareness begins with stories. Every marriage, every home, every act of caregiving helps to change the narrative — proving that OCD is not a weakness of will, but an illness of the mind, deserving of compassion and understanding.

If you or someone you love is struggling with OCD, know that you are not alone. Help is available. And sometimes, the first step toward healing begins not with medicine — but with understanding.

The world does not see OCD for what it truly is.
It laughs at it, trivializes it, folds it into jokes about neatness or organization.
“You’re so OCD,” people say when they color-code their closets or alphabetize their spice racks.

But Fias and Aizan know that OCD is not about being tidy — it is about being trapped.
It is the endless loop of doubt that never lets go. The fear that a single mistake could lead to catastrophe. The mind that refuses to rest even when the body begs for peace.

In Bangladesh, where Aizan was born, there is no language for this suffering. Mental illness is dismissed as weakness, or worse — as punishment. The idea that the brain itself could betray a person is alien in a place where superstition still fills the gaps left by science. Families hide their afflicted relatives. Neighbors whisper. Clerics offer holy water instead of help.

When Aizan was young, no one told her she had a disorder. They said she was too clean, too careful, too fearful of germs. Her relatives laughed when she washed her hands until her skin cracked. Her teachers scolded her for refusing to touch the shared chalk. The word OCD had not yet entered her world — only taboo had.

Then she moved to America, a country she thought would understand. But even here, understanding was incomplete. The doctors she met saw numbers and symptoms, not stories. Insurance forms asked for boxes to be checked, but none fit her. Therapy was expensive, medication terrifying. And society — for all its progress — still did not see OCD as a disability.

There were no benefits, no disability coverage, no programs to ease the burden.
If you could walk, talk, and work, you were considered fine — even if your mind was at war with itself.

Fias learned this the hard way, watching Aizan spiral in silence, knowing that there was no safety net for her, no recognition that this invisible illness could wreck lives just as thoroughly as any physical one.

He often wondered how many others lived this way — trapped in a double bind of stigma and survival. How many couples like them carried this weight in secret because they feared judgment or poverty more than the illness itself?

The numbers were staggering.
Globally, over 280 million people live with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
In the United States alone, 1 in 40 adults suffers from it — but most go undiagnosed for years. In developing countries, that number is even more obscure, hidden behind walls of denial and religious misinterpretation.

What these statistics never show is the cost:
The broken marriages.
The sleepless nights.
The lost jobs.
The isolation.
The quiet endurance.

Aizan sometimes wonders aloud — if she had been born in a wealthier country, would she have been treated early, maybe even cured?
And Fias, who knows the answer in his bones, never tells her. Because cures, even in rich nations, are rare. Understanding — real understanding — is rarer still.

OCD is not a choice. It is not a flaw in character or a matter of willpower. It is an illness that demands compassion, patience, and recognition.

Aizan often says:

“If people saw my fear the way they see a broken leg, they’d never ask me to just ‘get over it.’”

And Fias adds quietly:

“If they saw her courage the way I do, they’d know what real strength looks like.”

For them, awareness is not about pity. It’s about truth — the truth that mental illness can coexist with intelligence, faith, and dignity. The truth that love can survive inside it. The truth that societies, no matter how advanced, still have far to go before the invisible pain of the mind is treated with the same urgency as the visible pain of the body.

Their story is a small part of that larger truth — two lives intertwined by illness, faith, and endurance, teaching the world that compassion is not just a feeling. It is a form of justice.

But beneath all that resilience, there is still the unseen battlefield inside Aizan’s mind — the one even love cannot always quiet.

Sometimes, while cleaning the apartment late at night, she notices a tiny crack in the corner of the wall — just a thin, harmless line. But in her mind, it becomes a prophecy. She imagines the crack spreading, the ceiling giving way, the entire roof collapsing on their heads while they sleep. Her breathing quickens, her heart races, and she runs to Fias’s room to check if he’s awake, if he’s safe, if the walls are still holding.

Fias, weary but gentle, assures her every time:

“It’s only a line, Aizan. It’s been there since we moved in.”

But the reassurance fades quickly — because OCD is not cured by logic. It thrives on what might happen, not what is.

Other nights, when he leaves to pick her up from work or to get groceries, she stands at the window and imagines a car crash — flashing lights, a crushed door, Fias lying unconscious somewhere on the road. The image is so vivid that she begins to cry before anything has even happened. She calls his phone again and again until he answers, his calm voice grounding her back into reality.

For Fias, these moments are reminders of how relentless the illness is. But for Aizan, they are everyday life — the mind’s betrayal disguised as care.

She doesn’t mean to control him, to call ten times in a single hour, or to check the locks three times before sleeping. To her, these compulsions are acts of love — twisted by fear, yes, but still born of love.

And it’s that love, shaped by her Bangladeshi upbringing, that keeps her holding on. Because in her heart, worry equals protection. She was raised to believe that the more you care, the more you guard your loved ones from harm. OCD simply amplifies that instinct until it consumes her.

When she sees Fias’s tired face after dialysis, she panics that he won’t wake up the next morning. When he coughs in his sleep, she stands by the doorway counting his breaths, afraid of the silence between them.

Most people might call it irrational, but to Aizan, fear has become her language of affection. And to Fias — who understands the difference between madness and pain — that fear no longer frustrates him. It moves him. Because he knows that every imagined disaster comes from a heart trying too hard to keep him alive.

Cultural strength meets personal struggle here, in the quiet middle of their marriage. In Bangladesh, they were taught that fear of loss keeps love alive. In America, they were told that fear means something’s broken. Between these two worlds, they found their own truth — that sometimes, caring too much is not a flaw. It’s simply the form that love takes when the mind won’t rest.

Resources & Support

If you or someone you love is living with OCD, anxiety, or caregiving stress, these organizations and communities offer information, support, and ways to connect:

United States

• International OCD Foundation (IOCDF)    www.iocdf.org
  Provides education, research, and support groups for individuals and families living with OCD.
• National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI)    www.nami.org
  Offers free programs, helplines, and local chapters that provide community resources and counseling referrals.
• Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA)    www.adaa.org Supports people living with anxiety disorders, OCD, and related conditions through research and professional networks.

International

• Mind (UK)    www.mind.org.uk
  Offers mental health guidance, advocacy, and crisis resources across the UK.
• World Health Organization (WHO) – Mental Health Division    www.who.int/mental_health
  Global data, education, and initiatives promoting mental health care access in developing countries.
• Bangladesh: Kaan Pete Roi (Mental Health Helpline)
  +880-1730-176-177
  A volunteer-based emotional support helpline available in Bengali and English. 

Online Communities

• Reddit: r/OCD & r/Caregivers — Peer communities for sharing experiences.
• 7 Cups (www.7cups.com) — Free anonymous chat support with trained listeners and therapists.

Remember: Reaching out for help is not weakness — it is courage in motion. Healing begins when the conversation starts.

Closing Passage

As we look back on fifteen years together, through illness, fear, and endless nights of uncertainty, we have come to understand that love is not built on perfection — it’s built on endurance. Aizan’s OCD taught me patience; my illness taught her compassion. Together, we learned to survive where others might have let go.

To those who live in marriages shaped by sickness, know this — your story is not a failure. It is proof that love can exist in the quiet act of staying. When life becomes a series of hospital visits, panic attacks, or dialysis sessions, staying is the truest form of devotion.

In our culture, promises are not just words — they are threads that tie souls together through time and pain.

As the Bengalis say, love isn’t leaving when the river floods — it’s holding the boat steady until the waters calm.

To My Loving Wife.

Rita, Faro, and little Sulari step out of the elevator into the polished marble hallway of the new SouthBank apartment complex. Rita holds Sulari’s small hand tightly, while Faro follows behind with a single travel bag slung over his shoulder. The apartment door opens before they can knock.

Standing there is Ronda Riy with her wide round glasses, her hair pulled into a neat bun. At her side is her own daughter—
Mira Riy, a thin girl of 4 years old with the same pale complexion as her mother and curious, watchful eyes.

“Welcome, again!” Ronda says, lips curling into a smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes.

Rita bends down, hugging Ronda stiffly, her embrace cold and distant. Ronda barely pats her back before stepping away. Faro steps forward and wraps his arms around Ronda warmly, but then she surprises everyone—leaning in and planting a kiss directly on his lips. Sulari blinks in confusion. Rita’s green eyes flash sharply, though she says nothing at first.

Inside, the apartment is spacious, freshly painted, with four bedrooms spread down a long hallway.

Rita takes charge quickly. “Here is how it will be arranged,” she says firmly, her tone echoing through the walls. “I will take the second bedroom with Sulari & Faro. You, Ronda, will remain in the master with your daughter. The third and fourth can serve as spares if need be. As for rent—Faro will soon get a job and will pay my part and Sulari’s share. You will cover yours and Mira’s.”

Ronda stood with her arms crossed, her glasses catching the light as she spoke with quiet authority.

“Listen, Rita, this is my apartment. Here’s how it will be arranged,” she said firmly. “You, Sulari and Mira will take the second bedroom together. Faro stays with me in the master. The other two can stay as spares if anyone visits. As for rent—since you chose to stay here, you’ll cover your part and Sulari’s. Faro is my guest, so his place is with me and Mira.”

Ronda crosses her arms, her glasses sliding down her nose. Then, with a sharper edge, she adds: “You should find a job Rita.”

As for Faro—” she turns, placing a hand on his chest possessively, “he will help me here. In the house. With the children.”

Sulari tugs Rita’s skirt, sensing the tension. Rita’s jaw tightens as she glares at Ronda. “Why,” she asks icily, “does Faro not need to work like the rest of us? Is he your pet now?”

The room falls into silence, only broken by the ticking of the kitchen clock.

Rita’s eyes narrowed, her arms crossing beneath her chest as she stood firm. “Why, Ronda?” she asked again sharply, “should my husband be listed under your expenses, Ronda? He is not your burden to bear. Do not think I will let you claim him in the ledgers as well as the bed.”

The tension hung heavy, Ronda holding her ground, her jaw tight with authority. Before the argument could spiral further, Faro stepped forward, his voice calm but steady.

“Enough,” he said, raising a hand. “Ronda’s conditions stand. You, me and Sulari need shelter, Rita, and this roof of Ronda provides it. Pride doesn’t matter here—safety does.”

Rita opened her mouth to protest, but Faro cut her short by wrapping an arm around her waist, pulling her close in front of Ronda. His lips pressed against Rita’s with sudden intensity, silencing her resistance.

Ronda stood still, her face betraying nothing, but her eyes—dark with jealousy—followed every second of the kiss. The sting of being sidelined in her own home lingered like a silent accusation.

Ronda, still trying to keep her pride intact despite the jealousy boiling inside her, crosses her arms and says firmly:

Ronda: “Let’s not forget something important. Here in Thundarr City, the law doesn’t recognize your… union. Which means, Faro, if anyone asks, I am your wife. Rita can stay here, but only as Sulari’s guardian. That way no officials will question why two women and a child live in my apartment with you.”

Rita’s eyes narrow at Ronda’s words, her tone sharp but not raising her voice in front of Sulari.

Rita: “Pretend, you say? How convenient for you, Ronda. You want the title of wife without the duties of one. Do you think I’ll accept being pushed into the shadows, called nothing more than a guardian?”

Faro quickly steps in, holding Rita’s hand and stroking Sulari’s hair with his other hand to calm the storm.

Faro: “No one here is in the shadows. Ronda is only thinking of survival, Rita. She’s right—this city plays by its own rules, and we need to be careful. Let her carry the name, if it keeps Sulari safe and us under one roof. It doesn’t change what you and I are.”

Rita softens slightly, but the tension lingers in her green eyes. Ronda smirks faintly, masking her jealousy with a sense of victory, though deep down she knows Rita’s bond with Faro runs deeper than any “pretend marriage.”

Later that evening at dinner time.

The candles on the dinner table flickered low, casting long shadows across the plates of roasted duck and spiced roots that Rita had prepared. The children had long since gone to bed, leaving the three adults alone in the quiet of the apartment.

Faro leaned back in his chair, arm draped lazily across the backrest as he studied Ronda. His tone was casual, but the weight behind his words was sharp:

Faro: “So, Ronda… what of Cal? Does he know about this arrangement of ours? You pretending as my wife, Rita as guardian, and me staying under your roof?”

Ronda placed her fork down carefully, her round glasses catching the faint shimmer of the candlelight. She exhaled softly before answering, her voice calm but carrying an undertone of unease.

Ronda: “Cal doesn’t know. And it’s better that way. He’s… complicated, Faro. If he were to find out that you and Rita were staying here—under my roof—he wouldn’t see it as a family necessity. He’d see it as betrayal. You know how he is.”

She paused, glancing briefly at Rita before continuing.

Ronda: “I’ve kept my distance from him for months. He’s drowning in his own secrets and women, pretending to be untouchable. If he knew about this, he’d use it against me—or worse, against you. He doesn’t understand the kind of bonds we’re trying to protect here.”

Rita crossed her arms, leaning back in her chair with narrowed eyes.

Rita: “So, you’re hiding this from Cal… not for us, but for yourself. To keep your pride intact.”

Ronda’s lips tightened, but she didn’t argue.

Faro, sensing the tension building again, tapped the table lightly with his fingers.

Faro: “Enough. We all know Cal isn’t the type to play family. He’s too busy playing the Clowns sidekick.”

At those words, Ronda stiffened, her eyes widening just slightly. Rita’s smirk said she had caught the reaction.

Rita: “So you do know about his little criminal life…”

Ronda quickly composed herself, pushing her glasses up her nose.

Ronda: “Knowing is one thing. Speaking of it is another. Cal’s choices are his own. But Faro, if you’re asking whether he’ll be a problem for us—then yes, he will. The less he knows, the safer we all are from him and the Clown.”

The table fell silent, the only sound the faint crackle of the candle. Faro’s eyes shifted between the two women—his jealous Ronda and his defiant Rita—knowing full well the storm of Cal Faros and the Clown loomed over all of them like a shadow.

The doorbell rang suddenly, its sharp chime breaking the quiet of the dinner table. Faro pushed back his chair and went to answer it, his face still half-focused on the conversation they had been having about Cal.

When the door swung open, Faro froze.

There stood Flint, his brother – grinning ear to ear, dressed in red and blue. In his hands he held two bouquets of roses—one lush red, the other bright yellow.

“Hey there, brother man!” Flint’s voice boomed with forced cheer, the kind that carried an undertone of mischief.

Faro’s eyes narrowed, his hand tightening on the doorframe. “Flint…” he muttered, suspicion and surprise mixing in his tone.

Flint extended the flowers forward with an exaggerated flourish. “One red bouquet for the lovely Mrs. Rita Faros, and the other yellow bouquet… well, you’ll just have to guess who it’s for.” He winked, shifting his gaze past Faro, clearly aware that Ronda and her daughter were inside.

From the dining table, Rita’s eyes darkened. She leaned slightly forward, already sensing trouble. Ronda sat stiffly, her hand brushing the edge of the tablecloth, unsure whether to smile politely or brace for something worse.

The silence at the doorway lingered heavy, the roses looking strangely out of place in Flint’s hands—like a mask for intentions no flower could sweeten.

From behind, Ronda’s voice broke the silence. “Flint? What a surprise!” she said, stepping closer. Her tone carried a playful astonishment, but as her eyes met Flint’s, she gave him a subtle wink—a silent signal to play along and not reveal too much.

“How on Sol did you find out about our new place?” she added, feigning ignorance as though the visit were a complete mystery to her.

Flint caught the wink instantly, his grin widening. “Ah, you know me,” he said, stepping forward with casual confidence. “Word gets around. A little bird must’ve chirped it into my ear.”

“Besides, I figured my little brother and his wife, who is also my aunty, deserved a proper housewarming visit—with roses for the ladies of the home.” he said smoothly.

He extended the red bouquet toward Rita and the yellow one toward Ronda, his eyes glinting mischievously as he waited for their reactions.

Rita narrowed her eyes at the doorway, already suspicious of the exchange, while Faro’s lips parted, unsure whether to feel anger, confusion, or wariness at Flint’s sudden intrusion.

Ronda Riy’s world collapsed quietly, not with one confession, but with pieces of truth slipping into her hands like shards of broken glass. It began when Flint approached her, his tone almost casual, but his words soaked with venom.

“You should know what your husband does when he says he’s ‘working.’”

At first, Ronda dismissed him—Flint was a Faros, and she had learned to distrust the family’s twisted games. But then came the proof. Videotapes, grainy yet undeniable, showing Cal Faros—her husband, the man she thought she tamed with marriage—wrapped in the arms of other women. Not once, not twice, but over and over again. Different cities, different hotel rooms. Each time, Cal smiling, murmuring words of charm that Ronda once thought belonged only to her.

Flint had followed him, tracked him with a secret recording device, a cruelly clever eye behind the lens. He compiled the evidence meticulously, savoring the slow destruction of his cousin’s image. Ronda’s hands trembled as she watched, as she saw Cal’s lies unfold—those “business trips” that kept him away for weeks, the dinners that were supposed to be meetings, the moments he missed with her and their daughter.

The betrayal stung not just as a wife, but as a mother. Cal hadn’t just lied to her—he had lied to their little girl, spinning tales of duty and responsibility while indulging in selfish desire.

In her pain, Ronda turned to the very network Cal once boasted of fighting against. With Flint as her bitter guide, she gained access to Clown Inc.’s vast surveillance and communication technology. The irony was sharp—reaching out through the empire of Mr. Clown, the enemy of the Faros name.

But her message was clear, carved with longing and sorrow:

“Faro, it’s me… Ronda. I need your help. I was blind, and I see it now—Cal was never faithful, not even from the start. He lied to me, to my daughter, to all of us. I can’t stay in that mansion. I don’t want riches, I don’t want lies. I want to go back to when we were real. Our SouthBank apartment, just the two of us. Or three—Rita can come too, with her children. I don’t care if it’s crowded. I just want us to live again. Together. Honest. Free.”

Her voice cracked at the end of the transmission, a mix of desperation and fragile hope. And somewhere, beneath the stars of Planet Thundarr, Faro Faros received the call—his heart torn between memory, desire, and the dangerous path Flint had just opened for them all.

The Oasis of Lovers shimmered in moonlight, its waters still and deceptive, reflecting a paradise that felt more like a prison. Faro and Rita rested against the cool stone, weary, stripped of their powers and the confidence those powers once gave them.

The silence broke with a flutter of delicate wings. A Fairy descended from the palms, her glow painting the oasis in silver. She hovered before Rita, her small hands cupping a glowing mote of light.

“For you,” the Fairy chimed softly, her voice like bells. “A message from far away.”

Rita extended her hand, and the mote dissolved into sound. Ronda’s voice spilled into the air, fragile and breaking, carried on magic rather than wire:

“Faro, it’s me… Ronda. I need your help. I was blind, and I see it now—Cal was never faithful, not even from the start. He lied to me, to my daughter, to all of us. I can’t stay in that mansion. I don’t want riches, I don’t want lies. I want to go back to when we were real. Our SouthBank apartment, just the two of us. Or three—Rita can come too, with her children. I don’t care if it’s crowded. I just want us to live again. Together. Honest. Free.”

The Fairy bowed and drifted back into the night, leaving Rita holding the echo of the words. For a long moment, she did not look at Faro. She only stared at the glowing pool, her jaw tight.

Finally, she turned. Her green eyes glistened, but her voice was steady. “The message was meant for you. But it came to me instead.” She moved closer, kneeling beside him. “So I’ll ask—what do you want, Faro? Do you want her back, with her daughter, with her dream of that little SouthBank apartment? Or do you want me, here, now, even if all we have is this… and no powers left to shield us?”

The oasis was silent again, save for the distant call of night-birds. The question hung between them, heavier than their lost strength, heavier than the chains of the curse itself.

Faro leaned forward, running his hand through the sand, his reflection trembling in the moonlit water of the oasis. The air was heavy with Ronda’s words, but his voice when it came was steady, practical.

“Rita,” he said, “we can’t stay here forever. Not like this. Stripped of our powers, stranded, naked under the sky as though we’re prisoners of fate.” His gaze lifted to hers, sharp with resolve. “The children need a home. A roof, walls, a place where they can sleep without fear. Whatever else we’ve lost, we cannot take that from them.”

He drew a breath, the weight of Ronda’s plea pressing down on him. “SouthBank. It’s not the Cave of Falcon, it’s not a fortress, but it’s something. A place in the city where they can be safe. Where we can be safe… at least for now.”

Then he turned fully to Rita, his eyes holding hers, refusing to dictate the path but refusing to run from it either. “This isn’t just about me—or her. This is about us, about the family we carry whether we chose it or not. You heard her. Ronda is willing. She has a daughter. You have children. They deserve better than this.”

His hand hovered near hers, trembling between pleading and strength. “So I’ll leave it to you, Rita. You make the final decision. Do we take Ronda’s offer? Do we go back to SouthBank, to her apartment, even if it’s only temporary? Or do we try to find another path? Tell me.”

The Oasis of Lovers fell into silence, broken only by the rustle of palms. The stars seemed to lean closer, waiting with them, as if the entire night held its breath for Rita’s answer.

Rita listened to Faro’s words in silence, her green eyes reflecting the shimmer of the oasis waters. For a long moment, she said nothing—only let the wind stir her hair while the Fairy’s glow faded into the night.

At last she spoke, her voice low but firm. “You’re right. The children cannot grow up in the Pigmen village. They deserve a home, not mud huts and fear. But Pifo…” She shook her head, sorrow cutting through her tone. “He cannot stay in Thundarr City. The D.E.C. bars Pigmen at the gates. If he comes with us, he’ll be hunted, caged—or worse.” Her hand curled into the sand, tight with anger.

She lifted her gaze back to Faro. “Still, I agree. We will go to Ronda. A four-bedroom apartment at SouthBank. Enough space for family. But I set one condition—my daughter will not share a room with hers. They each deserve their own walls, their own space, their own place to dream. If Ronda wants to build something new with us, it will be done with respect.”

Faro’s heart leapt at her words, joy bursting through the weariness of exile. He stood suddenly, laughing, the sound echoing off the dunes like thunder against the stars. He reached for Rita, pulling her into his arms. “Yes! Yes, Rita! You’ve made the choice, and it is the right one. A new life waits for us!”

Their laughter tangled together as they stumbled into the soft dunes, the sand cool beneath their bare skin. Faro kissed her deeply, hungrily, the desert’s silence broken by their breath and the rustle of shifting sand. In that moment, stripped of power, stripped of titles, they were only man and woman—clinging to each other, finding fire in the heart of their exile.

The Oasis of Lovers cradled them, its eternal stillness bearing witness as their joy turned to love, their love to surrender.

In the mansion’s high chamber, Ronda sat by the window, the city lights of Thundarr flickering like a restless sea below. Flint’s shadow lingered in the corner, his sly grin never far from her eyes.

“The choice has been made,” Flint told her smoothly. “Rita agreed. She’ll bring her children to SouthBank. Faro too. The Oasis no longer holds them.”

Ronda’s lips curved slowly, her reflection in the glass catching the glint of her round spectacles. She drew in a slow breath, her chest rising, her eyes narrowing as if seeing beyond the walls, beyond the city, straight to the moment she’d been waiting for.

“So it begins…” she whispered. A smile, almost tender, touched her lips. “Now I can make Faro my husband, like destiny meant it to be.”

Her fingers trailed the glass, tracing an invisible circle around the city skyline. The thought of him—no longer poor, no longer trapped—stirred something fierce and determined in her heart. Ronda Riy had suffered betrayal, endured lies, and now she clung to one truth with the grip of iron: the past could be remade, and this time, she would not lose him.

Behind her, Flint’s grin widened, pleased to see his quiet manipulation blooming into resolve.

Ronda’s whisper still lingered in the chamber air—“Now I can make Faro my husband, like destiny meant it to be.”

From the shadows, Flint let out a low chuckle, his arms crossed, eyes glinting with mischief. “My lucky bastard of a brother,” he sneered, “will be living with two wives! Aunty Rita in one bedroom, and you in another—and both of you too blind to see the joke in it.”

Ronda shot him a sharp look, though her smile never fully vanished. “You call it luck,” she said, her voice cool, “but I call it fate. Maybe you’ve forgotten, Flint, but I loved Faro before any mansion, before the riches, before Cal ever laid eyes on me. Besides Rita is his maternal aunt and that marriage is not recognized by the Thundarr City laws!”

Flint shrugged, amused, his grin wide. “Oh, I haven’t forgotten. But don’t mistake my honesty for mockery. Two women circling him, both willing to share his bed, his name, his fire… If that’s not luck, I don’t know what is.”

Ronda turned back to the window, hiding the flicker of warmth and jealousy in her eyes. Flint’s laughter followed her, curling like smoke through the room.

Ronda adjusted her glasses, her eyes still fixed on the glittering city outside the mansion window. Her smile faded into calculation, her voice calm but edged with steel.

“Flint,” she said, turning to face him, “I need you to arrange something for me.”

Flint raised an eyebrow, his crooked grin already anticipating mischief. “Go on.”

“I want divorce papers,” Ronda continued, her tone crisp. “Fake ones. Documents that say Cal and I have separated, so there’s no trouble when it comes to the apartment lease. And while you’re at it, draft fake marriage papers between Faro and me. If the authorities look, everything will appear proper—our signatures, the seals, the dates.”

Flint laughed, shaking his head. “So that’s your grand plan? To play wife on two stages at once?”

Ronda’s smile returned, thin and cold. “I still want to be legally married to Cal. His money is mine, his status protects me. I won’t throw that away just to work for a living like the rest of them. But with Faro…” Her eyes gleamed with desire and spite. “With Faro, I’ll have what Rita thinks she owns. I don’t care if the marriage is fake on paper. All I need is the illusion strong enough to bind him—and to break her.”

Flint leaned against the wall, arms crossed, clearly entertained. “You really are a wicked little genius, Ronda. Playing both men at once… Cal for the gold, Faro for the heat. And poor Rita? She won’t stand a chance.”

Ronda adjusted her skirt, standing taller. “Let her watch. Let her crumble. Once Faro is mine again, she’ll learn what it feels like to lose everything she thought was safe.”

Flint smirked, already plotting the forgery. “Consider it done. I’ll give you your papers, sister-in-law—real enough to fool any clerk in Thundarr City. And when the ink is dry… well, we’ll see how long your little empire of lies holds.”

Ronda’s smile sharpened, satisfied. “Long enough. Long enough to get what I want.”

Faro lay on the hard ground beneath the endless canopy of stars, Rita’s quiet breathing nearby the only sound. Exhaustion claimed him, and soon his mind slipped into the shifting fog of dreams.

At first, the vision was sweet. He was no longer a wanderer or a fugitive of fate—he was a man of wealth and stature. Before him stood a grand mansion, its marble pillars gleaming in the daylight, banners with the Falcon crest fluttering in the wind. Ronda Riy was there wearing her big round glasses, her expensive black dress swaying as she ran toward him with a smile that melted the bitterness of his waking life.

“You did it, Faro,” she said, clutching his hand. “You’re not poor anymore. We don’t have to struggle. We can live here together.”

For a fleeting moment, joy filled him. He saw her laughter echo in the halls of his estate, her presence softening the edges of luxury. The dream wrapped him in warmth—the life he had secretly longed to give her.

In the dream, wealth does not trickle—it cascades. Faro’s mansion stands proud at the heart of Thundarr City, its gardens sprawling like emerald oceans. Fountains of crystal water sing in the courtyards, and servants bow as Faro and Ronda pass, though neither of them need such obeisance.

Inside, the halls glow with warmth. Sunlight pours through vast windows, spilling across velvet rugs and chandeliers. Ronda runs through the corridors barefoot, laughing, her skirt fluttering like a blue flame. She stops only to press her lips against Faro’s, her joy untainted by worry or want.

At night, they dine in gold-lit rooms where polished silver gleams, and the air tastes of roasted duck, sugared fruits, and sweet cola. Ronda leans close across the banquet table, her voice soft and proud:
“You gave me this life, Faro. You gave us freedom.”

She leads him to the balcony overlooking the city. Below, crowds chant his name as though he were a king, their cheers rising like a hymn. Ronda takes his hand, rests her head against his shoulder, and whispers:
“We’ll never be poor again.”

Together they stroll through art-filled halls, rooms lined with books, gardens where roses bloom even in winter. In the evenings, she curls against him on silk sheets, smiling as though the world has finally given her peace. For the first time, Faro feels whole—his love returned, his dignity restored, his name honored.

But then, as dreams so often do, it shifted. A shadow stepped into the mansion’s bright corridors. Flint. His older brother, smiling with that sly, poisonous grin. Faro’s chest tightened as he saw Ronda’s eyes turn toward Flint.

At first, it was just a glance. Then it was more. Flint whispered in her ear, touched her hand, and soon their closeness burned in Faro’s vision like betrayal carved into stone. Ronda laughed at Flint’s words, her warmth now shared with him, as though Faro were fading into the background.

The mansion, once a monument to triumph, warped into a cage of mockery. Faro stood powerless as Flint’s hand slipped around Ronda’s waist. Her smile—once his—now belonged to another.

And in the pit of his heart, Faro felt the sharp stab of envy, rage, and despair.

He jolted awake under the open night sky, sweat running down his brow. Rita stirred beside him, her eyes half-lidded. “Another dream?” she murmured softly.

Faro didn’t answer. He only stared upward at the cold, distant stars, the ghost of Ronda’s laughter and Flint’s treachery still echoing in his mind.

For the poem (surreal version):
“Echoes in the Marble Dream”

He sleeps beneath the sky’s black mirror,
and the stars melt into chandeliers.
A mansion rises where the soil should be,
pillars carved of silver, walls whispering wealth.

Ronda waits at the gates,
her round glasses gleaming like twin suns.
She is smiling,
smiling as though hunger and dust never touched them,
smiling as though the world had finally bent in his favor.
“Faro,” she breathes,
“you are no longer poor.”
Her voice drips honey,
her hand a promise in his.

The halls echo with laughter not his own.
Shadows spill from the corners like ink.
From that ink steps Flint,
his eyes twin knives,
his smile a fracture in the dream’s bright glass.

Ronda turns—
not with fear,
not with reluctance—
but with warmth that was once Faro’s alone.
Her laughter rings again,
but now it bends toward Flint’s ear.
Her hand slips,
not into Faro’s,
but into his brother’s.

The mansion trembles.
Pillars bend like reeds,
marble drips into mud.
The chandeliers collapse into a swarm of black birds,
their wings scattering the light.

Faro reaches, but his arms are stone.
He screams, but the air is water.
He watches as Flint and Ronda disappear
into a corridor that stretches forever,
their laughter echoing, echoing, echoing—
until it is all the dream holds.

He awakens gasping,
the stars above colder than glass,
and the earth beneath him
harder than betrayal.