DAULAH

Hidden Secrets, Shared Knowledge

If you wonder how you will get through this new heartbreak, just think back. Remember all you've been through in the past. And how each time you swore, you'd never get through it. But you did. And look where you're at now. This too shall pass

Yasmin Mogahed

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DAULAH

~~~

Two weeks later

Bivah whimpers from where she sits on Sushi's bed, gazing wretchedly at her phone's screen. I silently observe her, taking another drag from my Shisha, refusing to let her spoil my high over something as baseless as a relationship squabble.

"Oh God! Why is he doing this to me?" She laments, wrapping her tear-streaked face with her palms, succumbing to her agony.

"Oh God Bivah, please pull yourself together." Sushi retorts irritably from where she is lying on her back in the middle of the bed, pressing her phone. "This is not the first time Eczo is ignoring you. Just do what you do to get him back whenever he shuts you out."

"I don't know what to do Sush. I have called him countless times I have sent him countless messages but he isn't responding to me." She confesses.

"That is because he does not want to, plain and simple. How hard is that to grasp?" Sushi stated, the vexation audible in her voice but Bivah is deaf to reasoning about that, judging from her response,

"I must have done something to him, I definitely did something to offend him. I just wish he would tell me what I did so I can apologize and we will move past it." She admits. Sushi simply lets out a resigned breath and goes back to her phone, choosing not to say another word to her because she knows that pattern just as much as I do. The girl's pathetic state is on another level. She is eagerly willing to accept a nonexistent fault just so that she can pose it as a reason to excuse the behavior of her jerk-like boyfriend. I am sure she will come up with one if she has to, and apologize for it. I feel sorry for her, in a very disgusting way.

The room falls silent, and I don't know what suddenly triggers the thought of HIM in Sushi's mind because abruptly, she leaps from the bed and confronts me on the couch. "Daulah, you still haven't found that guy's phone number?"

"Which guy?" I respond icily, openly feigning ignorance about whom she's referring to.

"Come on, you know exactly who I'm talking about," Sushi insists, her expression turning mushy, a familiar look she adopts whenever she bombards me with chatter about him – a routine that has been rather frustrating for the past two weeks.

"I told you to dead his thoughts Sush," I assert emphatically.

"But why?" Sushi questions, clearly displeased with my statement.

"Because I have a friend who is interested in him," I state firmly, though I'm not entirely sure if my position genuinely roots in that fact or if I'm just using it as an excuse to keep her at a distance.

"Then she can have him when I'm done with him. I'm not looking for a relationship or anything. I just want to enjoy some fun with all that hotness. Oh God, I can still picture him standing..." She says dreamily. "His posture, his eyes, his height, his voice. Lord, that man is incredibly attractive."

I take a longer shot which keeps up with the insufferable breath I take as Sushi transports me back to the image I have forced shut in my mind. Because it has made a habit of popping up ever since my last encounter with him at the hospital. And it has no right to, just like it has no right to think he will show up at the hospital the next morning and feel a pang of dismay because there was no sign of him until I got discharged. And has no right being peeved that he didn't bother to check on me, and most irking, has no right wondering why he will meticulously care at one point, and callously discarding at another.