That morning, Humaira decided not to go to the shelter. She messaged Hana, saying that she wasn't feeling well. That wasn't really the problem. The real reason was that the day before, she had accidentally overheard Hana's conversation with Mr. Harun.
The woman who chose to speak only when absolutely necessary wasn't angry. Instead, she found herself turning over every sentence Mr. Harun had said. Though she didn't completely agree—some of his points had nothing to do with her situation—others touched the deepest corners of her heart.
“How long am I supposed to keep holding on?” she asked herself. Holding on didn't always mean being strong. Sometimes it was only another way of postponing a collapse. Humaira opened her book, wanting to write something, but her thoughts only went in circles. The wound she'd fought so hard to keep closed had never truly healed.
The wound might be covered, but its scar never truly disappeared. It stayed, eating with her, sleeping with her, surfacing every time a sense of safety tried to take root.
Her relationship with Anjar might be able to survive mistakes, but the soul often couldn't. Because the soul didn't live on promises. It lived on a sense of safety.
And when every day was spent staying on guard, suspicious, and holding her own breath, what slowly died wasn't love, but peace. That was what she'd felt most lately: unease, every time she returned to her own home.
She realized that, in the end, the risk of holding on wasn't losing her partner, but losing herself—silently, without drama—until one day she realized that holding on had only saved her from his mistake, not from its consequences.
Humaira closed her eyes, then leaned back against the headboard. Something roiling inside her constricted her chest. She wanted to be honest. She wanted to end it all. But her courage always fled whenever she faced Anjar.
Humaira still remembered every word Anjar had spoken that night with perfect clarity.
“Learn to let go!” It was a short sentence, but Humaira felt that her husband didn't know—or perhaps pretended not to know—that his words that night hadn't immediately healed anything. After he left and his footsteps faded beyond the bedroom door, she had remained sitting alone on the same side of the bed, her chest still tight, her thoughts still tangled, her life still feeling like a room without windows. Only now there was a small hole in its roof, just enough to make her realize that all this time, she hadn't been dead—only out of air.
The woman wearing a wide hijab often hated people who came bearing hope, as though hope were some light object that could simply be slipped into someone else's pocket. But her husband hadn't done that. He hadn't given her any promises. He hadn't said, “Everything will be all right.” He hadn't forced her to stand and take a step, either. He had only left behind one strange command that kept circling through her mind like an echo that refused to fade: look up.
The night before the two of them spoke, Humaira had come home with slow steps—not from physical exhaustion, but because every step felt like she had to convince herself that she was still worthy of walking. That the ground beneath her feet hadn't rejected her yet. That the world hadn't completely surrendered her to the void.
In her room, she turned off the light and lay there without truly sleeping, staring at the ceiling whose cracks she had long since memorized. And for the first time in a long while, she didn't immediately drown herself in thoughts of how much she'd failed, how far behind she'd fallen, how wrong the order of her life felt. Instead, she thought about one thing she'd said in a voice far too calm for someone like her: that Allah swore by the positions of the stars.