inching closer to me. Dust and paint fall around us. If this were a movie, Alexandre being pressed up next to me as motes of dust waft down on us from above might be full of romantic tension, but in reality it’s a little gross—a potent brew of adrenaline and endorphins and sweat and dust amidst the mouse droppings.
Alexandre draws his arms down and gently grips my shoulder. “Ready?”
I nod. I’m not ready, though. This little hobbit door could be another empty promise, but my heart races anyway. I may still be uncertain about sharing Leila’s story with the world, but I can’t deny how desperately I want to know all of it—know her.
We step out of this small space to give the door room to open. Alexandre fits his finger through the doorknob hole and tugs. The door creaks and groans and gives way. It scrapes against the floor, swollen from the heat and from being shuttered for decades.
The door stands ajar, and we peer into the space. It’s a dusty, cobwebby old storage room.
We have to duck our heads to squeeze through. There are cardboard boxes stacked against the walls and an old wooden trunk with what looks like drapes piled on top. A wooden table with two chairs stacked on top is pushed up against the back wall. We step farther into the space, making sure we don’t trip on anything, and shine our phone lights into the darkness.
I spy a set of wooden frames leaning against the wall beneath the windowsill and step over to take a look. The canvases are grimy, and some are damaged. They’re mostly amateur portraits and scenes of the grounds in bloom. Some of the wooden frames are cracked and empty. As I flip through them, cobwebs stretch and break between the frames.
I turn to Alexandre. “I wonder how long this stuff has been in here?”
He’s investigating the trunk, which appears to be filled with old textbooks. He shrugs, then sends a beam of light from his phone across the space. It catches on an object on the wall, hidden in a shadowy corner.
“Oh, merde alors,” Alexandre whispers, almost reverently.
I reach toward a small rectangular painting inset in a simple but substantial wood frame.
I suck in my breath. It’s her.
Leila
I write these words years hence, as time seems to fold in on itself. Where once the images of your red lips and dark curls and the feel of your rein-coarsened palms against mine faded into the creases of my mind, I find those images renewed, that touch reimagined. Time is funny in this way, a fickle master. But I can only believe it means that soon I will join you, my love, in the jannah of our dreams. Will I find you there? Did you wait for me? Does time pass achingly as it does on earth, or is there no time at all?
Each of these decades apart has felt like centuries, nay, an eternity of days, each one ending in the same way, as I looked for the last time upon the shores that were once home. On the land where our love blossomed. On the dusty earth where your blood fell. Each night when my eyes closed, there was the old heartache, made new again. Each night the wound, refreshed, in the stillness of my room.
I will away now to quieter shores, where I hope the lapping waves will carry you back to me as they once carried me away. I will admit I am afraid. For though I trust in the life after this one, I have moments of doubt that perhaps we shall not be reunited. Yet I try and keep my faith like the damask rose you once gave me, ever in bloom.
Khayyam
I am frozen in place, even as Alexandre inches ahead, awestruck. It’s too impossible to be real. Like a character has walked out of a book, out of my imagination, and into real life.
A wooden frame the size of a cookie sheet showcases a canvas with a dark-haired woman, her raven tresses falling in waves down her shoulder. She’s standing to the side of a fountain, her face in profile. Even in this poor light, I can make out her dark scarlet