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It felt weird – not having a roommate to pester you to get some sleep or take care of yourself. Silence is often peaceful, but it feels so... lonely. Maybe it was the time that they always spent on bantering over small things, arguing over the rent, sometimes even the memories they shared together in that specific dorm.
The endless amount of portraits of the same man yet every single one seemed to lose its essence, as if its liveliness kept slipping away from every new drawing Kaveh continued to make. 'Alhaitham,' yes, that was the man's name. The rhythm of his name felt so familiar yet so distant. Years passing by every time that only his name remains a fragment in Kaveh's memories.
"It's maddening," Kaveh muttered to himself one gloomy evening, his voice trembling with frustration. He stared at a sketch of Alhaitham's face, his pencil hovering over the paper. "I used to know every curve, every line of your face, Alhaitham. How can I forget?"
Each stroke of each portrait looked so similar but different. The hair, his features, his eyes, and his face looked so different. No matter how hard Kaveh tried to replicate each detail, it would feel empty – as if it paralleled a blank canvas with only the portrait as decoration.
Kaveh's gaze remained fixed on the incomplete portrait, and his voice wavered as he continued to speak to the fading image before him. "Damn it, Alhaitham, why do you keep slipping away from me? Wasn't our time together supposed to mean something? Wasn't it supposed to last?"
From each day that passes when Kaveh's roommate, duo, partner – lover, his memory of Alhaitham continues to fog and blur. His only prominent feature he could remember was his smile that he rarely gave. The same smile that his heart once pounded for each time a grin would appear from the corners of his mouth.
Yet, the portrait Kaveh tried to copy over and over again in order to feel the same thing when he saw his lover got lost over time. Each attempt was like chasing a fleeting shadow, and as the sketches piled up, so did Kaveh's sense of frustration and despair. The lines on the paper, once so purposeful and filled with longing, now seemed to mock him, as if they too were trying to escape the memory of Alhaitham.
In the quiet of his empty apartment, Kaveh would sit, his sketchbook open before him, staring at the pages filled with imperfect replicas of the man he once loved. He longed to capture the essence of that elusive smile, to feel the warmth it used to bring to his heart. But with every new attempt, it slipped further away, leaving him with a hollow ache in his chest.
Kaveh knew that time was erasing the memories of Alhaitham, and it terrified him. The apartment felt emptier without the laughter, the arguments, and the shared moments. He missed the way Alhaitham's presence had filled every corner of their space, and he yearned to hold onto the memory of that elusive smile, even if it was just a fading image on paper.
As the days turned into weeks and then months, Kaveh continued to sketch, hoping against hope that one day, he would capture that smile and the feeling it once brought him. But in the lonely silence of his apartment, the memory of Alhaitham slipped further away, leaving Kaveh to grapple with the bittersweet ache of a love that had become a fading portrait in the gallery of his heart.