Love from A to Z: List 5

Some degenerate fast and furious. Some take a general, slow decline. Some experience symptoms sporadically.

Her straight-shooting talk would be welcome now. And the way she said things so resolutely. I needed that sense of bravado.

You’re lucky I’m turning the crass down, ’cause I like you.

I sat on one of the pair of white rocks right at the entrance to our pathway and just looked at the back of his car as he drove away, down the avenue of sprawling white houses, “Spanish villa” type houses, as Zayneb had called ours.

Like a face that you’ve seen so much—but when you try to conjure it to hold in your head, it’s too ethereal to stay still and clear.

The first thing we saw was the dazzling mosque, covered with geometric designs and calligraphy in dark and light blues, interspersed with gold.

I try to keep myself away from that bin of sin. Sometimes I lapse.

It was just me and a few stragglers lining up for tickets, and I realized something.

She nodded and turned to look at the dark water, twinkling with the lights of numerous boats moored in the distance.

“And you know what? I’m not going to let your prejudice, your outrage, or fake kindness, either, change one bit of me, of how I look, of who I am. Your resistance to my existence is futile, okay?”

It felt weirdly amazing to hear him say “my water” so effortlessly like that.
I tried to continue rolling nonchalantly.

“Sorry. To say what I did. Like the mama’s-boy thing. Like alluding to you under your mom’s thumb when she isn’t even...”

"...When you go to Vancouver, see if you can catch a flight to Berkeley. I want to see you, and maybe you can meet her. Nancy.”
“Adding California to the jet-setting itinerary.”

I smiled at his benevolence.

She flipped through her journal. “But that’s not me. So we don’t have something in common. Because reams and reams of pages in this thing are about the awful things in the world. And I’ve got six more of these journals at home. Mostly full of crappy happenings in my life.”

“Today, my girl Janna joins me again. And we're going to continue our interview with my ex-brother-in-law, on how he escaped getting captured for abusing my sister. Who, as you dedicated viewers know, is BACK HOME in America finally! But, inexcusably, the villain is at large, the one who kept her locked up. However, friends, never fear—he lent his alter ego, his thorny alter ego, for our interview.”

The video went dark then came back on to reveal the cactus wired with a lapel mic clipped to one of its thorny branches, a donut stuck on another branch.

I paused the video and found the comments. They were mostly glowing and So happy you’re doing this and Expose him! and other such things until I got to one that had a lot of likes, that veered off from the sentiments previously expressed.

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.

My reconnaissance mission yielded 87 posts from this account, 12 of which give us details connecting him to Fencer the teacher.

The entire room, except for the floor, was made up of blues, ranging from the lightest white blue near the floor to the darkest, inkiest blues swathing the ceiling.

There was even a potato in a display box on a pedestal in the corner. A plastic potato, yes, but I’d painted over it with a matte-brown acrylic and rubbed dirt into it.

Do they not look at the sky above them, how we have built it and adorned it, and there are no rifts in it?

Everyone else drifted in, and I studiously avoided their gazes, choosing not to see their curiosity or, worse, their animosity.

Everyone else drifted in, and I studiously avoided their gazes, choosing not to see their curiosity or, worse, their animosity.

“My speech wasn’t as eloquent as yours. I said something like, Suck it, Fencer. I'm done with your Islamophohia.”

The world is a mysterious place. On the one hand, its size can be measured and recorded and verified. Its marvels and oddities captured in complex, empirical detail.

Four years of faraway togetherness, with brief, exhilarating glimpses in between getting a political science degree at Northwestern (Zayneb) and working on six art installation projects around the Middle East (Adam) and through visits to MS support groups (Adam and Zayneb).

She’d also been talking nonstop since we woke up, sharing her eagerness to start our excursion today.

There was no one around, just us two in this desolate location, so I sank into him, and he stretched his arms to engulf me, his kisses covering my own tears.