Days of Ignorance by Laila Aljohani Read Free Book Online Page B

to see herself giving him time to say what was on his mind. She would deliberately prolong their conversations, invent reasons for him to call her again, or do other silly little things that she was puzzled to see herself doing, simply because she sensed what was going on inside him.
    She’d supposed that, as soon as he finally said ‘I love you’, she would smile and lean back into her chair. But she hadn’t. The spoken words had seemed different than they had in her imagination, and when they became a reality, she, too, became someone different from the person that had existed in her imagination – a person who wasn’t able to smile or lean back in the chair. All her limbs went cold, and she felt as though her neck was paralyzed. When she looked into his face, she knew for certain that he hadn’t slept for several nights, and that he’d resisted for a long time before speaking. Then at long last he’d sat across from her and said, ‘I love you, Leen. I’ve tried, but I can’t stand to keep it to myself any longer. There isn’t anything around me any more that doesn’t remind me of you. A couple of days ago I thought about you when I was stopped in front of a traffic light. I think about you all the time, actually, but when I was in front of that traffic light, I remembered your laugh. Why? I don’t know. In any case, I didn’t notice that the light had turned green, and I didn’t hear the cars behind me honking. Imagine! I swear to God, I wasn’t on Planet Earth. I was in some other place I don’t know anything about. I’d been completely ignorant of it until I met you. Would you believe it? I’ve started running away from people, from everything, so that I can be alone with you. I feel as though life is making fun of me. You know why? Because I used to make fun of love as it’s described by lovers in movies, soap operas and Arabic songs. And now here I am, doing and saying the things they do and say. So, make fun of me, Leen. Go ahead. Mock me. Maybe God will punish you and you’ll love me back!’
    She bowed her head, suddenly gripped by loneliness – how she hated that feeling – and all sorts of sensations and thoughts began churning deep inside her. But nothing frightened her as much as feeling suspended alone in the heart of a storm. She remembered how, a few days after that evening, she’d looked into his eyes for a second, and in them she had glimpsed every moment she had ever passed through alone: the moment she’d stood atop the remains of Bab al-Majidi as bulldozers plied the site; the moment she’d received her high-school diploma; the moment when, looking out through the window of a Boeing 747, she’d glimpsed the lights on Airport Road as the airplane took off with her for Jeddah where she would begin her studies at King Abdulaziz University; the moment she’d first walked into the girls’ dormitory; the moment she’d surrendered to a peculiar fit of weeping on the night before January 17, 1991; the moment she was told that her grandmother had passed away; the moment she’d stood with her classmates, decked out in a graduation sash and smiling even though she was thinking about her grandmother buried in the ground and wondering what remained of her after all those years; and the moment she’d seen Sharaf’s body being consumed by flames, so paralyzed by the shock at what she was seeing that she hadn’t done a thing.
    She’d lived through every one of those moments – and many others as well – alone, without there being anyone nearby to talk to about them. She hadn’t wanted anyone to tell her that what she felt was good or bad. She’d wanted to be heard, but she’d never been able to get the words to come out. It terrified her to think of anyone – anyone at all – knowing of the turmoil she experienced in the face of her feelings and the vulnerability they left in their wake. Consequently, she’d resisted to the point where she was convinced that she didn’t need