being a man, you think you can steal a woman’s story and make it your own.” The words roll off my tongue, filling up the empty, shocked space between us. If I’d had any inkling that stepping in a pile of dog crap was going to lead to this shit show, I would’ve stayed in the apartment this entire trip.
Alexandre grabs his book and tosses it into his backpack, anger and confusion in his eyes. He stops halfway to the door, and his shoulders relax. It seems like he’s going to turn to me and say something. But he doesn’t. He walks out without looking back.
Leila
There is a great scurrying about on the ship, but the action moves around me in muffled silence. My rose in hand, I stand at the rail watching my homeland slip away, my eyes focused far in the distance at the blood-soaked earth where my Giaour fell. The dark sky above his body gives way to a halo of light that softens the gritty air.
“What is that?” The poet walks up behind me. His voice incredulous, eyes filled with wonder and despair on my behalf.
I raise the rose to my lips and breathe it in. “It is the last promise of love.”
“Perhaps you are the poet.”
“I am no poet. I am nothing but an orphan and a concubine.”
The poet clasps my arms and turns me to him. “You are all that is beautiful of this night sky—the brightness of the stars, the deep stillness of the dark. And all that’s best of those meet in your aspect and your eyes.
“My God, what your eyes have seen. What they have shown me. I hope you may find it in your heart to explain to me what I witnessed, though I fear it lies beyond words.”
I smile at him, but there is no promise in it. For what could he understand of this? Of what I have witnessed? As all men, he sees truth as his own creation, a clay figure he can bend to his will.
“I’ll leave you to your remembrance.” He takes two steps away from me but turns back, touching my shoulder. “Though your heart may be broken, yet brokenly can you live on. And the privilege of being a poet is the ability to make beautiful that which the world has distorted.”
I don’t turn when he walks away. I don’t mock his lyrical, na?ve words. What he does not see, what he cannot see, is that the only privilege, the only freedom in my life, was the secret I kept in my heart. The secret that lies bleeding on the sands of my home as I drift away to another world.
Khayyam
Lying in my bed, I watch the bright stars fade into the liquid rose gold of dawn. I spent the night staring at my cracked ceiling, pondering the million tiny white veins and arteries in the centuries-old plaster that no one has bothered to cover up. A crisscrossed tangle of paths that lead nowhere. The birds are singing, but after hours of no sleep, their joy feels like an affront. Their symphony, a cacophony. But the truth is, they don’t know I exist. They only sing for themselves.
I grab my phone off the nightstand. Julie hasn’t responded to my earlier email; she’s still cloistered with no Internet. No texts from Alexandre, either. No surprise there, but my hope deflates. Maybe I should apologize for some things I said yesterday, but so should he. I’m exhausted—tired of doing the wrong thing, stumbling over obstacles I’ve laid in my own way, believing in people who take me for granted. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. My path is a circle with no way forward, and every well-worn step is a little soul crushing.
That line Leila wrote keeps haunting me: The heart is the singular miracle God gave to each of us—an organ that heals itself. I wonder what she would say about my predicament—two guys I can’t seem to communicate with, two countries that don’t always feel like home, and an uncertain future I can’t seem to control. I chuckle out loud at the irony. She actually might have good advice. A Muslim woman alone finding her way in the Paris of the 1840s. Brokenhearted, but not broken. Knowing that fate dealt