Love

At the beginning you start learning her culture, her language, she gets shy from trying to teach you, sort of ashamed and you start walking a rope that is very unsteady.
So when she falls asleep you tell her a white lie.
You tell her you’re going to sleep but you end up staying up the whole night.
You stay up, you learn patience slowly.
Waiting for the five apps that have really good ratings and carrying a really good feeling inside because of the desire to connect with her in every way.
The five apps that were to help me learn her language.
But not only her, to connect with everyone around her and try to communicate with her blood.
In the middle your hand starts cramping up from all the times you’ve practiced on college ruled paper. You forget that you
write backwards and now I feel like my life is going backwards.
You start to try and see how you would
look like wearing clothes from her culture because she is already planning your
marriage. Or maybe it’s just yourself. Maybe she doesn’t know how hard it will
be to try to explain that you’re unsure of your religion that you’re trying to
discover. She says she isn’t religious. My voice roars with Surah’s and I
practice saying them trying to memorize at least some. My voice always cracks.
Not like the sidewalk cracks but when the earthquakes shatter households and
the glass breaks and it’s all over the floor and you accidentally step on it
type of crack. Your hand starts sliding and the lead of your pencil is shaking
you’re trying to figure out where the dots go. My voice is raspy and all you
can hear is Alhamdulillah, as I try to write the lines as straight as possible.
It’s not that I’m embarrassed of speaking Urdu.
It’s that I’m afraid of not sounding good enough.
Eventually, you get people who make fun of you and think that I laugh along.
I don’t know what to do when I see a hijab
that speckles on many heads through the outskirts of the mall.
When I directed my eyes towards the girl behind the hijab. At that moment many eyes
opened up to her and not her cloth. People think that her cloth is splashed
with war and speckled with strength. The media and people make it rain with
sterotypes.It is a pattern that makes the world storm with xenophobia.
People need to acculturate by complimenting
her mind and not her body.
Her values and beliefs are dripping down in tears with disparage. It’s too late. It’s not late.
The rain keeps crashing in. Weighing her soul, mind, and body. This is not a love poem.
This is to the girl with the hijab she barely wore, to the girl who wasn’t forced to wear one, to the girl who I fell in love with but our love became like Ramadan. This is to the girls with hijabs
that carry their own colors, patterns, and ways of life.
One day the world will soften with biased
assumptions-
With islamophobia.
Khuda Hafiz

Goodbye.
Khuda Hafiz= Goodbye
Hijab= head covering usually worn by Muslim women
Surah= Chapters of Quran