peace.

I woke up one April morning to find the roofs and roads blanketed in yellow flowers and thought it was the most beautiful thing ever.  I got caught in the rain back home from class and enjoyed every minute of it. "You actually like getting caught in the rain ?" they asked incredulously. I was brought up in a desert, I thought, you will never hear me complain about the rain.

I found home with girls who had lost mothers, faces that had lost colour and eyes that refused to see the light and hearts that knew nothing but darkness. People found smiles marked in me where they should've found sighs and I learnt to be grieved for the right reasons, because up until now I'd been doing it all wrong.  The spot on the ground where my breaths ended and began in prayer knew all my secrets. and tears found my eyes when I didn't want them to and disappeared when I needed them the most. Burdah became my favourite tune and my fingers found the replay button every time Mesut Kurtis was on. I rediscovered human insensitivity, and I told my heart that this was home now, and it beat like it wanted out of this body.  My skin resigned in flakes that covered the floor and my hair receded to a brittle consistency, refusing to accept change. This is home, I tell myself even though my dreams are discontent here and even though I know back there isn't really home anymore.

The first time I left everything I called home, I was eleven years old and I believed that my favourite places and faces would never forget me. But years later the tides still washed up remnants of broken bodies and the wind still whistled even though I wasn't there to hear it and the corners of my house were home to somebody else's fears and dreams and echoed somebody else's footsteps.  I became a distant memory to the corridors I had lived in and loved and when I was done weeping the world didn't recognise me anymore and I didn't belong, but I had long stopped wanting to.

When I was sixteen, I felt my heart break for the first time , and I was convinced the pain would never cease. When nothing was familiar anymore and the only path ahead was shaky and insecure, I found my self frozen in place, afraid of moving ahead and falling, and yet not wanting to be left behind.

So when things are unfamiliar again, and the faces blur into strangers, when the world has erased my space,  I convince myself with quotes and phrases; until the answer comes to me so clearly, I wonder if it was there all along and I refused to see it. No place here is ever meant to be mine. Nothing in this world truly owns me and I will never belong to anyone or anything here. I do not own this body , this soul, this heart, they answer to Someone else and no place in this dunya was ever meant to be home.