The Perfect Girl

29

"She's never been alone so long, Or ever felt so strong,"

"See you soon, inshallah," Shuayb said, hugging me as him and Ami and Amar crowded at the door of our apartment.

"As salaamu alaikum!" I said, smiling.

I went over and hugged Ami, who whispered an, "I love you," in my ear before leaving, and then hugged Amar.

When they'd all left, I sat down on the couch, Khalid beside me, and turned on the TV.

"Hey, Hiba," Khalid murmured.

"Yeah?"

"I have to go to New York tomorrow for work," he said softly, "Is that okay?"

"I mean, I guess," I was too surprised-- unpleasantly surprised-- to form a proper answer, "Sure."

There was silence a moment.

"Is this why you volunteered to start cleaning today?" I asked, trying to laugh, "Because you knew you were leaving?"

He smiled, "Maybe." then, gentler, "I don't want to go."

"I don't want you to go," I said, without thinking, then tried to cover it up with a joke, "See, I don't want to you to go, you don't want to go, nobody wants you to go. You should stay."

He just looked at me, "You said it was okay."

"It is," I sighed, "It's okay."

"I don't usually have to go on work trips," he said, "I promise, this won't be a common occurrence."

I nodded.

"I'll miss you," he said, staring at me.

I nodded again.

He laughed, "This is when you're supposed to say you'll miss me too."

"You'll miss me too." I echoed, smirking.

"Love..."

"I'll miss you too," I mumbled.

He put an arm around my shoulders, chuckling at the look on my face, and pulled me close.

***

When Khalid left the next day, I felt a surprisingly large amount of loss.

I'm not sure why it was surprising, but it was. I hadn't been expecting the hole in my chest to be so big, or to hurt so bad.

I knew he'd only be gone a few weeks, which wasn't technically that big of a deal. In the grand scheme of things, what was a few weeks? But the thought of feeling like this for every day of few weeks seemed incredibly daunting.

But in the end, I didn't feel that way everyday.

Somedays, it was worse. Somedays, it felt like I was the hole in my chest.

Other days, it was better.

Mostly, it was better.

Maybe part of it was that I didn't go out much. I stayed at home, alone, doing nothing but reading and thinking and watching and working and writing. The only time I left the house was for groceries and met shifts at the cafe.

I wrote a lot.

I'd never kept a diary in my life, but I wrote fiction a lot. In some ways, the fiction was my diary. I could look back on my books and know exactly where my head had been when I wrote them. But in other ways, I found myself yearning to be the character I wrote about. This was largely because, although the protagonists often had my feelings, they had entirely different personality's and being's, ones that seemed infinitely better than my own.

But from writing about emotions so much, I'd developed a sort of ability to put my own emotions into words. That's what you have to do when you write, after all. You have to break down a character's feelings into words and syllables and sentences.

And with all this time on my hands, I started to analyze myself.

By staying home so much, I had pulled myself out of the situations in which I felt judged and found myself comparing myself to others. I started to think about what my looks effected anyway.

I could get a good job, ugly. I could have friends-- real friends who liked me for more than my face--, ugly. I could be successful in my religion, ugly.

And then I started to consider how the type of thoughts I was having would effect my religion. Wasn't Allah perfect? How could I be ugly when I was His creation? Was I saying that if it was my choice, I would be able to make myself more perfect than He had made me?

And slowly, things began to fall into place.

Logically, I stopped being insecure.

Emotionally, however, I was still not exactly confident.

I was not happy with myself, but I did not hate myself.