I remember the phone call like it was yesterday.

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My heart stopped the moment I heard his voice, the panic already rising before he even said a word.

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“They’re deporting me,” he whispered.

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I couldn’t breathe. My world tilted sideways. The person I loved, the one I’d been holding onto through months of lockdowns, court cases, and endless waiting — they were taking him away from me. And I could do nothing about it.

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I tried to keep it together, tried to speak, but my voice cracked and tears ran down my cheeks. He told me he’d be on a plane in two days, sent to a country that wasn’t home, where he didn’t know anyone, where our life together wouldn’t exist.

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I wanted to scream at the unfairness and the cruelty, but all I could do was listen and cry in silence.

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Every day after that was torture. I waited for calls, texts, messages — anything to hear his voice. But even when I did, it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t hold him, couldn’t comfort him, couldn’t stop the system from treating him like a file number instead of a human being.

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Then one morning, I got the news. He was being released.

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My stomach flipped. I couldn’t believe it — after months locked away, after all the uncertainty, he would be free. I ran to meet him, and when I saw him waiting at the exit, my heart exploded. I grabbed him, held him tight, and for a moment, the world made sense again.

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We cried, laughed, clung to each other, and for a few precious months, we believed we had a future.

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I thought we could breathe, that maybe the nightmare had passed. But it hadn’t.

Three months later, without warning, it all fell apart. The High Court reversed the decision. The freedom we had tasted was ripped away.

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One morning we were walking, talking, thinking we were safe, and suddenly PSOs were ordering us off the train. Officers appeared, surrounding him, ignoring my desperate pleas. I watched helplessly as they took him. Just like that. Gone.

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I called him from the detention centre the next day. He was on the next flight to France. I couldn’t stop crying. Everything we had just started to rebuild — our dreams, our hope, our life together — was gone. And for what? He hadn’t broken any laws. He hadn’t done anything wrong. Yet the system treated him like a criminal, and I was left to pick up the pieces, powerless, devastated.

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Those three months of freedom were a cruel joke. They let him hug me, hold me, feel what we had, and then snatched him back. I still can’t wrap my head around it. I still wake up wondering how something so unjust could happen to someone so innocent.

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I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat properly. I couldn’t stop thinking about him, about what he was going through, about the helplessness of loving someone and watching them be ripped from your life for no reason.

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I felt the grief in every cell of my body, the weight of loss pressing down, suffocating.

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He’s in a country that isn’t home, living a life that isn’t ours. And I’m left here, carrying the heartbreak, carrying the knowledge that the system doesn’t see the people behind the numbers, doesn’t care who gets hurt as long as the rules are followed.

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I loved him. I still do. And that love is now threaded with pain, injustice, and the memory of what was stolen from us.

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Freed, then taken.