Once We Were Starlight

Heat infused my face. “I . . . nowhere,” I squeaked, not able to meet her eyes. Would she dismiss me now? I had put my uncle’s address on the application I’d filled out, and now she knew that was a lie.

“You’ll stay with me then,” she said, her expression softening. “I won’t have an employee who doesn’t get a regular shower.” And though her words were semi-harsh, her eyes were kind, and her offer was generous. I began gratefully sleeping on her couch.

At night, the squeal of sirens—which seemed to be the constant background noise of New York City—would fade away, replaced by the distant bleating of goats, and the quiet cries of the night birds rustling in the trees. I would smell the almond oil I’d once worn, and feel the hot, dry wind waft across my skin. Then, inevitably, some sound would bring me from my trance, the real world rushing back in, and I’d become aware of the warm tears tracking down my cheeks and the emptiness next to me where Zakai had always been.

I began to bleed a week after moving into Ayana’s apartment and I sat on the edge of the bathtub crying into my hands. I hadn’t taken the birth control pills Haziq had once provided for me since leaving Sundara and in the back of my mind, I had worried about the consequences. What a terrible thing it would have been to realize I was carrying Zakai’s child. And yet the proof that I was not, felt like the last bit of hope I hadn’t admitted to myself I was clinging to, had just been torn away, leaving an even deeper chasm of desolateness in its wake.

After a time, I had risen to my feet. Whether I wanted it or not, and regardless of the desperate nature of the desire, I had no means of compelling Zakai to remain in my life. I had only myself to rely on.

I opened my first bank account and began depositing my checks and almost every penny of my tips. I ate once a day, either the free meal provided by my workplace, or on the days I had no shift, the cheapest fast food I could find—meat patties squeezed between two squishy pieces of bread, or a pie made with round disks of meat over a sweet and salty tomato topping. My stomach still wasn’t used to this new and unappetizing diet in the country I now called home. But I wolfed it down anyway. I was always hungry. The feeling made me think of Zakai. He lived in a castle now, one made of steel and glass. Now I was the one who felt like a beggar.

The season changed. Snow melted. Buds began appearing on the trees, and the temperature turned mild. I’d never known such drastic seasons before and I marveled at the way nature moved from one extreme to the next and wondered how it knew when it was time to change.

I purchased a new cell phone. I’d saved up enough paychecks that I could rent myself a room, and I did so at the end of April with Carly to assist me.

“It’s a shoebox, Karys. But it’s clean. And it has a garden view.”

A married couple owned the building and lived above the one-room basement apartment. The woman who Carly told me was from India, had planted what looked like hundreds of bright tropical flowers in colorful planters and was taking them outside now that the weather was warmer. “The term garden might be generous. God, it’s a mess out there,” Carly said, wrinkling her freckled nose at the myriad of colorful pots covering every surface of the concrete slab so that there was barely room to step between them, letting the curtain drop back into place. “But at least you have a source of sunlight.”

I pushed the curtain aside again, taking in the already-trailing vines and vibrant flowers spilling from their pots. My mood lifted and for just a moment, I felt a long-lost sense of . . . vibrancy. I reached for it, not managing to hold on, but it’d been there. For a heartbeat, I’d felt its warmth before it had slipped through my grasping fingertips. “I’ll take it,” I murmured.

My English teacher assigned The Prophet, but I stayed home on the day of the discussion, curled up in bed. I’d never skipped a class, but it was too painful to listen to the book I’d first read under the bright sunshine of Sundara. I knew they were Kahlil Gibran’s words, but in my mind, they were also Ahmad’s and I felt his spirit in every memorized line, and every moving passage. To hear others speak the words that in my mind belonged to that time was an agony I could not bear.