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A storm was brewing in Bangladesh. I remember staring down into the clouds from the plane’s window en route to a country I hadn’t seen in twenty years. My eyes followed each turn of the lightning. The piercing white lines flowed through the clouds like a river. This storm has been waiting for me for a long time, I thought. In Islam, the dead are cleansed and then wrapped in a single, white, cotton sheet and covered above ground. Bodies are buried as soon as possible, a prayer is held, and those who hear or witness the death say: inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un. They accept that all things return from where they came, and that life is a cycle that comes to a completion, just like stories. My story began before I knew it was my own. For eighteen quiet, but confusing years, I grew up with curiosity. I knew things around me were different, and it led me to believe that there was something strange about me. Buried pictures, hushed conversations, forbidden questions, and years of not knowing brought me to a gravesite on the other side of the world. Mounds of earth – some filled with plants that had grown over the years – lined the rows of the cemetery. My long-lost uncle stood to one side of me and my cousin on the other. We’d only just been re-united but I sensed their comforting presence surrounding me. Though I was twenty, I felt like a five-year-old girl and the world seemed much larger than me. I walked slowly, unsure of what the next moments would bring. They led me to one of the mounds where a prayer card was stuck into it - this was it. They left my side. I had come a long way since the day my stepdad broke the news to me two years ago. “Your father is in critical condition and wants to see you.” The words froze everything for a moment and I stood outside the pizza parlor bawling over the inevitable loss of a relationship I never had. My mother’s protective hold of me kept everyone silent, including my father. No one on her side of the family spoke of him. An entire half of my identity was severed. When I saw my father for the first time, he couldn’t speak. I couldn’t contain myself as I watched him through a Skype video call. One “I love you” croaked out of my mouth and the tears began rolling down my face uncontrollably. This man, my father, couldn’t move or even breathe. He had a tube connected to his mouth as he lay in a hospital bed in the ICU. He waited 18 years for a chance, his hopes high and heart set on reconnecting with me. The birthday passed, as many others before it, quietly. We all felt it in our hearts: me, my mother, and my father. We were all silently waiting for something. His heart gave out four months after that. He suffered a stroke and his dying wish was to see me. From a hospital bed in Bangladesh, he mustered up just enough strength to lift his arm, as if to stroke my face on the screen. The image of him lying there helpless yet still trying to reach me is etched into my mind. But when I reached the foot of his grave, my entire story vanished. I was living it, everything else melted away. A wave of relief washed over me as I realized I was finally in front of my father, regardless of life and death. All the years of missing an important piece of my life was contained and released in a single second. It was love that transcended it all, and in that moment, our hearts were in the same space, at the same time. I didn’t shed a single tear that day, but the sky instantly flooded Dhaka in a cleansing downpour after my heart spoke to his for the first time. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”