Building love
350 Words
Sam looked at their joined hands, her brown fingers intertwined with his darker ones, and he felt the rightness of it like gravity, like the earth's own logic. "Because, Halima, I have been alive for nineteen years, and I have never once felt awake. Not until I saw you standing in the dust, looking at me like I was real. Like I was possible. If this is all we ever have, these moments, these words, then I will take them. I will hoard them. I will build a life inside them that is better than the life I live outside."
She leaned her head against his shoulder, just for a moment, the contact so brief he might have imagined it. "You are a fool, Sam of the other faith."
"I am your fool," he said. "If you will have me."
She did not answer in words. But she did not let go of his hand until the darkness forced them to separate, to return to their separate worlds, to maintain the fiction that they were simply two strangers who happened to walk the same streets.
That night, Halima lay awake and made a decision. She would not marry the man her parents chose. She would not accept the life that had been prepared for her like a meal she had not ordered. She would find a way to be with Sam, or she would find a way to be alone, but she would not surrender her heart to anyone who had not earned it.
She did not know how. She did not know when. She knew only that the vow she made to herself in the darkness was the truest thing she had ever spoken, truer than any prayer, any promise, any words of loyalty she had ever given to the world that claimed to own her.
In the workshop across the ghetto, Sam carved her name into the underside of a drawer he was building. Hidden. Secret. Permanent. A vow of his own, written in wood instead of blood, waiting for the day when they could both stop hiding.
- Writer
