I am going to be honest about something that most people in long distance relationships do not say out loud.
There was a period of about three months — somewhere between the eighteenth and twenty-first month of Suhail Khan and Mehreen being in different cities — when I genuinely did not know if we were going to make it.
Not because the love was gone. The love was not gone. The love was very much present, sitting in my chest like something heavy, reminding me of its existence at inconvenient moments — during work calls, on the metro, at two in the morning when I could not sleep and Hyderabad was quiet and Chandigarh was fifteen hundred kilometres away and the distance felt not like a number but like a physical thing. A wall. Something with weight and texture that I could not move no matter how many times I drove to the airport on a Friday night with a bag packed in twelve minutes.
The love was not the problem.
Distance does something more specific than remove love. It removes the texture of a relationship — the small daily moments you do not notice when you have them and cannot replace when you do not. The chai made the specific way she makes it that no one else makes correctly. The way she sits at the edge of the bed reading something on her phone before sleeping, not talking, just present. The particular silence of being in the same room as another person who knows you completely.
Distance takes the texture. And when a relationship loses its texture for long enough, even the people in it start to lose their grip on why it is worth the weight of it.
That was those three months. Both of us still there, both of us still calling, both of us saying the right things — and both of us, I think, quietly wondering if the right things were still enough.
What Was Actually Happening
Mehreen and I started dating in Delhi — same city, same friend circle, the specific ease of a relationship where proximity does the work that effort would otherwise have to do. We were together for fourteen months in Delhi before her company transferred her to Chandigarh and I got the Hyderabad opportunity at approximately the same time.
We sat in her car in a parking lot at one in the morning and decided — we are doing this. Long distance. We are doing this.
That conversation was nineteen months ago. We were brave in that parking lot. We meant everything we said.
What we did not know, sitting there at one in the morning being brave, was what month eighteen would feel like. What the calls would start to sound like when both people are tired and have used all their good energy on the day and have nothing left except the low-quality version of themselves that arrives after eight in the evening.
We started having the same argument about nothing. The specific recurring argument that long distance couples have that is not really about the thing it appears to be about — but is actually about this: I miss you and I am tired and I do not know how much longer I can do this and I do not know how to say that without it sounding like I am giving up.
I was not giving up. I want to be clear about that.
But I could feel us losing the thread. The specific thread that connects two people to why they chose each other in the first place — before the distance, before the tired calls, before the weekend visits that had to be perfect because we only had two days and could not waste them being ordinary with each other.
Our anniversary was coming up. Two years. I could not go to Chandigarh — a project deadline I could not move. I explained it three times. She understood. And the understanding itself felt like part of the problem — the way we had both become so good at understanding each other’s limitations that we had stopped pushing back against them.
I needed to do something. Not a phone call. Not flowers by courier. Something that would reach her across fifteen hundred kilometres and remind her — remind both of us — what we actually were before the distance got its hands on it.
Three Weeks of Looking for the Right Thing
The problem with gifting in a long distance relationship is that everything feels inadequate against the backdrop of the actual problem, which is the distance itself.
Flowers — she has received flowers from me by courier before. They arrive, they are beautiful, and they are also a reminder that I am not there. Jewellery — too formal for what I was trying to say, which was not I love you in a grand gesture way but I remember us. I remember who we were. I want you to remember too. A trip — I could not go to Chandigarh. That was the whole problem.
I needed something that could carry two years of a relationship in one object. Something she could hold and read and sit with on a Sunday afternoon when the apartment was quiet. Something that was not about the distance but about everything that existed before it and in spite of it.
I found the Personalized Couple Magazine on a Tuesday night — a custom 16-page A4 magazine built entirely around your love story. Your photographs. Your messages. Your memories — designed like a real magazine, printed on premium matte paper. Cover that read “You & Me — It’s a Forever Kinda Thing.” Back cover: “And in the end… I still choose you. Every day. Every time.”
Sixteen pages. A magazine. Our story.
I sat with that on the screen for a long time.
This was not a gift that gestured toward what I felt. This was a gift that could contain it. Sixteen pages of photographs and words that I would have to actually write — actually find the language for — but that would then exist permanently, in print, on premium paper, in something she could hold and come back to on any ordinary Tuesday when she needed to remember that someone had been paying attention all along.
I thought about the parking lot at one in the morning. The airport arrivals. The Metro photograph. The three bad months when the thread got thin and I held onto it anyway.
These things deserve a page each. These things deserve to be written down somewhere she can find them when I am not in the room to say them.
I started writing that same night.
It took four evenings. I went through two years of photographs — not the posed occasion ones, the real ones. The Delhi Metro photograph at rush hour — both of us standing, both holding the overhead handle, her head on my shoulder because she was tired, both looking in different directions. The one from Shimla last October — our only trip in nineteen months, both of us on a ridge in early morning fog, looking out, not at the camera. A video call screenshot her friend had taken once without telling us — both of us talking to a screen, both smiling in the specific way you smile when you are talking to the person you miss most.
I wrote what I had not been able to say in the tired calls. I wrote about the parking lot. About the Metro photograph. About the airport arrivals. About the three bad months when the thread got thin and I held onto it anyway because there was no version of this that did not include her.
Four evenings. Sixteen pages. Everything Suhail Khan had not been able to say in a year and a half of trying to be fine.
I submitted the photographs. Waited for the preview. When it came through — our story, our faces, sixteen pages of it — I looked at it for a long time without doing anything.
Then I confirmed the order. It arrived before our anniversary. Packed carefully. Exactly right.
What Happened When She Received It
I called her when the courier notification said delivered. She picked up already holding it.
She opened it on the call. I watched her face on the screen — the same face I had been looking at on screens for nineteen months, the face I knew better in video call lighting than in any other kind of light.
She read slowly. I watched. She did not say anything for a long time.
When she got to the page about the parking lot — where I had written what I had actually been thinking that night, not the brave version but the real version, the version where I was terrified and chose her anyway — she stopped.
She looked at the camera. She said — Suhail. You wrote about the parking lot.
I said — I have been writing about the parking lot in my head for two years. I finally put it somewhere.
She said — I thought you had forgotten about that night.
I said — I have thought about that night approximately once a week for nineteen months.
She laughed. Then she stopped laughing. Then she looked at the magazine in her hands.
She said — why did you not just tell me this.
I said — I am telling you now.
What Has Changed Since
The distance is still the distance. Fifteen hundred kilometres is still fifteen hundred kilometres. The project deadline was real and the Chandigarh transfer is still real.
But something shifted.
She called me the day after she received it — not the scheduled evening call, the middle of the afternoon, from her office. She said — I read it again this morning. And again at lunch.
I said — which part.
She said — the parking lot part. And the Metro photograph part. And the part about the airport arrivals.
Then she said — I forgot that this is what we actually are. I think I needed to remember.
I said — I needed to remember too.
That is what the magazine did. Not solved the distance — nothing solves the distance except not being in different cities, which is a problem we are working on. But it reminded us both of the thing we had built before the distance got its hands on it. It gave us something to hold when the tired calls made the thread feel thin.
A relationship in long distance does not need grand gestures. It needs to be reminded of itself occasionally. It needs someone to say — this is what we are. Not what we have lost to the distance. What we have kept in spite of it.
Sixteen pages. Our story. Exactly that.
If You Are Also in the Long Distance Version of Something Real
If you are somewhere between the brave parking lot conversation and the three months when you do not quite know — if the calls are getting tired and the weekend visits are feeling like pressure and you are both still there but the thread is getting thin — this is what Suhail Khan would tell you:
Remind her of what you actually are. Not in a call that ends. Not in a message that scrolls up and disappears. In something she can hold and read on a Sunday afternoon when the apartment is quiet and the distance feels like its actual weight.
Sixteen pages is enough to hold two years. It is enough to hold whatever you have built. It is enough to remind both of you why the parking lot conversation was worth being brave for.
The distance is the distance. But the story is yours. Put it somewhere permanent.
Written by Suhail Khan, who has been looking at the same face on a video call screen for nineteen months and still considers himself the luckier one.