Love from a to Z

MARVEL:
ANGER
You cut me
Now I sit, sharpening my blade
One day I will loom, a shadow no more
Silence your hate, leave it shredded
Strewn around your feet
The only sign I’ve roared my pain:
You
Cut
Down.
I sent this poem to Kavi too, with the subject line I’ve started writing
poetry.
• • •
Kavi called and cried with me. She, too, had felt Daadi’s loving hands.
• • •
As I was going to bed, I finally looked at the new messages from Adam.
We prayed again for your grandmother, at Maghrib.
Then: 
Hope we can clear this up before you leave.
Then: 
I swear I’m not trying to bother you, just not leave it like this between us.
Then: 
I’ve never met anyone like you before.
Then finally: 
It’s like we were meant to meet, but then I ruined it somehow. I’m sorry.
Lying on my pillow, I shook my head.
Because he didn’t ruin it somehow.
The circumstances of our lives did.

---

ADAM
TUESDAY, MARCH 19
ODDITY:
IMAGINING THE FUTURE
T
HE EXPERIENCES OF
MS 
PATIENTS
vary considerably. Some degenerate fast and furious.
Some take a general, slow decline. Some experience symptoms
sporadically.
Mine seems to be the latter. And that makes me fearful.
Maybe it’s because mine is at the beginning stages, but it’s like waiting
for the ax to drop, the other shoe to fall, the tension of not knowing where
you’ll be, ability-wise, the next day, next week, next month.
It’s stressful. And right now it immobilizes me.
• • •
I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling beams, thoughts gathering at the back of
my head, some telling me to get up and get downstairs to work on the room
while I could, to use my hands to bring it to life.
And then there were other thoughts, cautioning me to preserve myself, to
not make a movement, to wait for the inevitable.
For the first time in a long time, I wanted someone to talk me out of these
crippling thoughts.
I glanced at my phone and saw that Zayneb hadn’t replied to any of my
messages.
I wanted her around.
Her straight-shooting talk would be welcome now. And the way she said
things so resolutely.
I needed that sense of bravado.
I also wanted to just see her.

---

I sighed and scrolled through my messages to find Connor. 
Hey, you up to
anything?
Just about to play. League of Legends.
You want to play here?
You ok?
Yeah.
I’ll be there in a bit.
• • •
Connor brought his gaming laptop and set it up in my room.
I’d attempted to make myself look less pitiful. So I was sitting up, still in
bed, and scrolling mindlessly on my phone.
Connor tried my desk chair out, giving it a spin. “Wait, let me see if
Jacob’s getting online. We’ve been playing together. Duo.”
He put his phone on speaker and dialed. Madison picked up, groggy
sounding. “Hello? Connor?”
“Hey, where’s Jacob?”
“In the shower.”
“Tell him to give me a call. You guys have plans today?”
“No, just hanging out. We’re at the Hyatt. You know how Jacob’s parents
don’t like us staying over at each other’s?”
“Oh, right.”
“So we’re spending the last days in Doha together at the Hyatt.” She
laughed. “They think we already flew back to college. Think we left last
night.”
“You guys are baaaad.”
“Hey, my parents know.”
“Okay, then forget about telling your man to call me. I was just checking
if he was getting online for League.” Connor hovered his finger over his
phone to end the call. “Bye, talk later, have fun in that room.” He laughed
before hanging up.
I looked at the guitar on the floor by the bedroom door. The one I’d made
sure to bring to Doha because Hanna had wanted me to play at her birthday,
coming up in a few days, but that I hadn’t touched except to check its
journeying condition. “Pass me my guitar, by the door?”
“I don’t know how those guys do it, Madison and Jacob. The way they
can’t see each other when they’re at school, different countries, and then
they can’t see each other, if you know what I mean, when they’re together

---

here, either. Summer’s going to be brutal for them, when everyone goes
back home. Jacob’s family to Spain and Madison’s to Australia.” Connor
handed me the guitar and sat back down in my chair. He laughed wildly.
“And now they’re banging for all its worth.”
“Okay, relax.” I strummed a few notes.
“Why? It’s one of the best parts of life, man.” He turned to his laptop and
activated it from sleep.
“Didn’t say anything about it.”
“You told Emma P. you weren’t into her, huh?” He tilted his head to
consider me. “That there’s someone else?”
I began to play the opening notes of “Seasons in the Sun,” Mom’s
favorite song. Then paused. “Yeah.”
“Who’s the someone else? Because you told me there wasn’t anyone
else.”
“I wasn’t sure she liked me, too. I’m still not sure.” I picked up the
chords again from where I’d left off.
“What’s she like? I don’t know her anyway, so fill me in completely.”
I played a bit more, then stopped. “She’s sure about herself, who she is as
a person, and just cares about stuff. And is an activist. And cute.”
“And is she Gryffindor and Slytherin and Muslim?” Connor twirled in
the chair and faced me. “The Zee person. Forgot her name again.”
“Zayneb.”
“Oh man, I thought so from the moment I saw you look at her at your
dad’s party!” he said, snapping his hand at me, excited he’d gotten it right.
“You were a goner from then.”
I shrugged in acceptance. Maybe I was.
“What’s holding you back? Is she available?”
“Yeah. I mean, I don’t know. We’re just talking to each other. Me more
than her.”
“Why isn’t she falling for Adam, the wonder kid?” Something dawned on
his face. “Wait. It’s not because you’ve got MS, right? That she’s not into
you?”
“No. Okay, stop. You’re making a story in your head. She’s mourning her
grandmother. Change the subject.”
“Forgive me. I just don’t want you to stay a virgin all your life, dude.”
“Ass.”

---

“You’re lucky I’m turning the crass down, ’cause I like you. Only ’cause
you used to save my math grade all the time.”
He laughed and turned to his game.
I finished playing “Seasons in the Sun.”
• • •
After a couple of hours of him gaming while throwing out song challenges
for me to play on the guitar, he packed up to leave.
I made myself walk downstairs with him, walk him to the door. And then
out the door too.
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.
The sky Connor drove off toward was a vivid, distinct blue, and I stared
at it, wondering if I noticed everything blue suddenly because of the blue
scarves she wore. Zayneb.
I wondered what was under the scarf.
What she was like, completely at home, somewhere.
I could almost imagine it, but it was like a dream that you wake up and
try to remember but only have the wispy fringes of.
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.
Maybe it was Connor bringing up sex before, about Madison and Jacob,
them in their hotel room, but I couldn’t stop thinking about her.
I went inside and back to bed.
• • •
Hanna had been at her friend’s house down the street, but the minute she
got back home, I knew it. My door was closed, locked, so she knocked a
pattern on it, politely—first. I knew it would get incessant soon, so I
immediately called out to get her to stop. “Yeah?”
“Can you open this thing?”
“What is it?”
“I wanted to see if you’re okay. Because, you know. The MS thing.”

---

Dad and I had talked to her last night about it. And though she’d reached
for Stillwater and one of Mom’s photos while listening, she’d been
surprisingly strong on hearing the news.
But then the checking on me started. Like this morning when she woke
up, then before she went to her friend’s, and . . . now.
I sighed. “I’m okay.”
“Can you open it?”
“Hanna, I’m okay. I’ll come down soon.”
“How soon?”
“Soon soon.”
“Okay, I’m waiting then.”
She left and I sighed again.
Maybe she was spoiled.
Or maybe she just cared too much.
There are two ways to see everything, I guess.
Maybe lately I’ve been seeing things only in one way. Only in the
hopeless, helpless way.
I grabbed my Marvels and Oddities journal off my desk and flipped
through it.
Yeah, sure enough, everything had become oddities.
I went back farther and saw that I’d always been a marvel-heavy
observer.
Maybe that’s how I’d kept myself afloat, all those years.
Everyone told Dad that he was “lucky” that I was so “good.” How he’d
done a “good” job, given the circumstances.
Of Mom passing away.
And being in another country.
And converting to a new religion as a family.
What they’d meant was that I was easy to handle, didn’t talk back or
push limits.
But maybe it wasn’t that I was just good or that Dad had done a good job.
Maybe it had been this journal.
This way of noticing that even during the suckiest moments in life there
was something marvelous to be seen, heard, touched. Or just a tiny awe felt
in the heart.
Maybe it was going out of my way to try to notice something, this
noticing, that had saved me all along.

---

And now I couldn’t see anything good.
Because I had stopped trying.
• • •
Before I went down to show Hanna I was okay, I picked up a pen and wrote
three marvels to make up for the ones I’d missed the last few days.