Free The Others by Siba al-Harez

your list of numbers or answer any of your phone calls or play around with your messages. It’s not a big deal, I said in English. She told me to send Salaam over tomorrow, when she would give him the phone along with a few other things for camouflage, and I left.

9
    I am not a water-based creature. Weeping is not one of my distinguishing features. Between the two of us—moisture and me—there is no particularly intense, intimate relationship that one can depend on. It is true that I am the water’s child, and my feet carry the flavor of salty sand. I am like as can be to a seashell as I move along the ground; in my cupped palms I conceal the reverberations of the Gulf. If you were to scratch at my memory, you would see nothing but astounding blue and boats and the splash of the tides. But it is true as well that I have inherited a superabundance of weeping that goes back to an ancient era. Ever since Karbala, ever since the death of that young man so long ago, we Shi‘is have been weeping, and our tears never have dried up. And since Karbala we have come to understand our weeping as an ongoing, never-ending daily act, a deed that is always there. It is not seasonal, selling us its goods and leaving town. And so, I do hold inside of me a profuse reservoir, tears that exhaust me every night, but I do not cry.
    Ever since I was a semi-boy or a sexless child, I have gotten used to the idea, never challenged, that children do not gain the qualities of their sex until after marriage, when the girls give birth to children and the boys go out to work. Because I was so naughty, and because I always brushed up against a handful of devilish boys, I was used to not crying. Weeping gave a pretext for sarcastic lashes and yielded an especially painful quiver of jokes and heart-jabbing jeers. I certainly had no need for a tattoo of shame that would stick to me like a buzzing insect. When I got a little older, I told myself that it would be best for me to continue my abstinence, allowing only a few pure white tears for the black days—and at that point in my life, I had not seen a black day. It was Hassan, and only Hassan, who changed my crying habits. He left me a map washed clean of any features and a broken compass, and then he said to me, Go on!
    I awoke in a very troubled mood. I was not going to give in to all of the weeping that was accumulating inside of me in a terrible hard lump of melancholy and oversensitivity (not to mention the closed doors—my mouth, my phone, and likewise, the door to my room). It was Saturday, and even my face exhibited an enormous question. Where and how would I come up with enough endurance to get all the way through another day, so that I could fall asleep once again?
    Overwhelming feelings of loss toward Hiba blanketed me more heavily than did the comforter on my bed, and my heart remained cold. The night before yesterday, a long, sharp blade had pierced my body’s midsection. Yet I could not stop scolding myself harshly for its self-centered reaction. Why should I not be the happiest girl in the world, because she was the happiest? Didn’t we always feel the same way about things? But I was not marrying that American Fadil. He had not encircled
my
right ring finger with an engagement ring. No one had released their celebratory trills on my behalf.
    Oh, I was not angry at him, nor at her, not at all. It was just that I felt so very alone, and for the first time. And to make it worse, Hiba was so completely preoccupied with other things that she did not even notice! She now had someone who filled her completely, so what use did she have for me? My problem lay not in Hiba’s engagement, but in how cheaply she could replace me with somebody else, and how completely, to the point where she did not even have enough sympathy for me to grant me a decent separation period in which to become accustomed to her absence. Or, barring that, time in which I could at least learn to claim that I had forgotten