Love from A to Z(85)
I told her about the time we made French fries together, when she allowed me to cry.
“Wow. Adam.” She sat back too. “That’s unbelievably hard. Mine is like a first-world problem compared to that. My fight with my mom.”
“But wait, I’m getting this new idea from that time. The Time of the French Fries.” I sat up and leaned forward to get her attention, to get her to understand that what I was going to say was serious. “See, this is what I do. I go over my times with my mom and get ahas. Like I have a new one about the French fry memory: What if she was trying to tell me that in order to be strong, you have to be weak first? Like, feel your weakness?”
She nodded, her eyes on me and sparking with interest. “Go on.”
“Like we can only get to our strongest to face stuff after we’ve felt the lows?” I indicated her journal. “And your journal is all your lows, but now you’re ready to be your strongest? Take Fencer down? Speak up about your grandmother’s death? Stand strong, no holds barred? Win?”
I looked to see if her eyes were still sparking, but they weren’t. They were tear filled.
She opened her journal and flipped through and said, “Can I read you something?”
ZAYNEB
THURSDAY, MARCH 21
ODDITY: HEART PAIN
I READ HIM THE PARTS that hurt. The not-angry parts.
The parts where things felt confusing, like I would never ever figure out this world. A world that didn’t seem to work.
Because the moment you’re feeling secure, someone hates on you.
Like being happy on the plane, headed over to Doha, and then the hateful woman shows up.
Like coming to class to learn and instead being served hate.
“It makes you distrustful. Well, it makes me distrustful,” I said, closing my journal.
He reached his right hand forward and placed it on the teapot. “I’m going to pretend this is your hand. Because I want to touch it, but I’m not gonna, okay?” He drew his hand up a bit, then rested it again on the teapot, but lightly this time, almost hoveringly. “How’s your hand so hot?”
I laughed, grateful for his corniness taking the edge off what was happening inside me.
“You know what my mom would say here? She’d say be up-front. Be Zayneb. Tell your mom everything. About the woman on the plane, the man in the pool, everything about your teacher.” The way he looked at me, I knew he was being serious. “Like I said, that was the thing about my mom. She liked knowing stuff.”
“Maybe that’s the thing with moms in general.”
“Yeah. Maybe it is. So do it. Just tell her. What you’re thinking, why you’re doing the things you do. That’s what this mama’s boy says.”
I nodded and ate the rest of the cookie. “I am going to. After I leave here. Because I don’t think I’m ever going to stop getting in trouble, like she wants me to. Even if I never win.”
? ? ?
Before we left, we went and stood in front of the Marvels of Creation and Oddities of Existence manuscript again. Without fighting like last time, without talking much even, except to read bits of the caption out loud to each other in documentary-style voice-overs, his impressions more funny than mine, because he actually did a posh British accent, while I pretended to be an old, grave man and ended up sounding like a talking walrus, according to Adam.
Then we asked someone walking by to take a picture of us beside the exhibit, using both our phones in turn, and right then and there we made the pics our lock screen and wallpaper images.
It was the best, because we were both holding our journals, with the inspiration for them right between us.
And we have the happiest expressions in our eyes.
Even though we were going to be continents apart in two days, we knew we weren’t going to be apart.
? ? ?
Adam called his friend Zahid to drive us home. As we waited outside, he told me about this friend, how he’d helped him when he’d needed it. “It was one of the worst moments of my life,” he said, running his fingers forward through his hair to stay it against the slight breeze. “But then Zahid was there like a guardian angel.”
“Do you think you should get some sort of a medical bracelet or something? So you can get help fast?” I put my hands in the pockets of my jean jacket. It worried me. That he could just be struck with something suddenly. “Also, can I call you at any hour of the day? If I get a sudden gut feeling that I need to check on the onion in my life?”
He smiled, and with the sunlight he squinted into and the symmetry of the museum behind him, it was an image I didn’t want to forget. “That’s why I’m going to the neurologist on Friday. To figure that out. But yeah, you can call me whenever, H2O.”
Zahid pulled up, and when we got in the car, he weirdly seemed to know me, shooting Adam a knowing glance when he heard my name.
Adam sat in the front and chatted with him, and I sat in the back and looked at the beautiful palm trees streaming by and thought about the long arc of things.
Of how I’d begun this journal when I was sixteen, and now I’d beyond-this-world connected with someone because of it.
But then Adam had a longer arc with his journal. He’d started his at fourteen, a few years after his mom died.
But then there was an even longer arc here—with Al-Qazwini, the author of the original Marvels and Oddities, how he wrote something so long ago, trying to figure out the world he lived in.