sighed. “Yeah, maybe you’re right, but...I just find it really hard to believe.” I pressed my lips into a thin line and shook my head, looking down at our joined hands resting on the prince’s knee, my eyes following the soft, slow and soothing motion of his thumb over the back of my hand.
He’s a Muslim, of course he’d say something like that…I thought.
I’d been told all of my life the exact opposite of what he was telling me now. Removing all of that and just replacing it with what he was saying wasn’t the easiest thing to do, not at all. The prince was an honest and noble person, so he couldn’t just be fooling me–but, it was still so hard to believe him. It was just me.
“I know,” he said. “I know it’s hard, but I hope that someday you can believe me.” He didn’t sound disappointed in me or anything like that. He was actually very patient, like always, and his lips held the soft smile that I’d grown so fond of over the past few days.
I rested my head back on the back of the couch once again, but this time my face was turned toward the prince, my eyes gazing at his, my fingers tangled with his own, and my thoughts busily trying to figure him out–or at least trying to make up my mind on all of these feelings I was having about him but didn’t like to admit.
One more time, his hand pushed a lock of my hair out of my face and behind my ear, his eyes staring deep into my own for a moment too long before he said, “I’m sorry I said you were judgmental and prejudicial. I guess I needed to find a black key myself.”
His words reminded me of the ones he’d said to me the night before last, right before I fell asleep.
“May you find the black keys, Troubled Princess.”
“What do you mean by a black key? What does ‘Black Keys’ mean?” I frowned slightly.
“You don’t know?” he asked.
“Not really, no,” I admitted.
“Knowledge is the key, Princess,” he said. ‘‘The mind has blank, dark and empty spots when it doesn’t know about something, and knowledge is the key that opens the door to fill this empty space. Once you find that key, you see rooms and rooms in your head brightening with the knowledge you just found. That’s why people say ‘I was in the dark regarding this or that’...meaning they didn’t know about it,” he explained.
Huh!
“I see. But...what makes them black?” I wondered.
“Knowledge is all around us, keys waiting to be found. They’re easy to see and use, but not when they are black, because in the darkness, you can’t see black items. Only if you know in your heart that they’re there you might find them, and to find them, you have to work hard. Those keys are there, and at some point they were easy to find, but assuming and judging made them black. The kind of knowledge that those keys give you has to make it to your heart first to be able to pass through to your mind.”
“Wow, that’s really...wise.” I said for a lack of better word, and got lost once again in my thoughts, thinking about what he said now and before, about the black keys and if I really needed to find them myself like he’d told me the other night when he thought I was asleep.
Was it really true that I had black keys around me that I needed to find? But if it was true, why would I need them? Would they give my mind peace? Would I then be able to be friends with him? With any Muslim? Would I be able to accept them? And Arabs? Did I even want that? I didn’t know. I just wondered, always coming up with something that meant, to me, that I didn’t want them. I didn’t want those black keys, maybe I didn’t need them at all, maybe I didn’t even have them. I was just as confused as ever and I didn’t like the feeling.
I had to admit that since Janna had told me about what Prince Fahd did to her, slapping her across the face and wanting to kill her, I’d only thought of him as that bad, illiterate savage who didn’t care about his sister’s safety and well-being as long as his country’s traditions remained obeyed. But after Mona told me the truth behind his