nonfiction

By zainab khamis

Sitra Secondary School

Gloomy september

You sat on the edge of my bed.

Like we were still twelve and whispering about the future like it wasn't already chasing us down.

Your shoelaces were untied. You always left them that way, like you trusted the ground too
much.

I wanted to say something. But the words kept getting stuck behind my molars. There are things
you can't say out loud when you're seventeen and full of goodbye.

Like: I miss when you used to braid my hair without asking.

Instead, we talked about the weather. The kind of talk that feels like holding your breath in a
room full of smoke.

I noticed your scar.

You spotted the poster I'd taken down, the one you gave me in ninth grade.

I think girlhood is made of pauses. Half-sentences and glances that beg to be decoded. We learn
how to hold our sadness like it is a fragile pet. Smile for the yearbook. Say: "I'm fine." when the
truth would flood the room.

You left without hugging me. Just a wave through the window, a blur of movement like the last
page of a book.

And I sat there, counting every word I didn't say and every syllable of the silence between us.

The things we didn't say in September still echo in the corners of my room.

we were always leaving

In eighth grade, I started counting the times people said goodbye without saying it.

1. My grandmother with her quiet hands and lavender soap.
2. The girl in my class who used to braid my hair but stopped sitting next to me at lunch.
3. The boy who drew galaxies in the margins of his math book then moved to Texas without
telling anyone.

There are ways people leave without doors closing.

My body was leaving me, too. I was growing in ways my thirteen-year-old brain found it hard to

fathom.

At night, I sat in my room and lay in my bed. It made me feel like a ghost. Like something

paused mid-becoming.

My mom would knock on the door. "You okay?"

"Yeah," I'd say like it was a fact.

But I was always trying to leave something behind. A version of me. A bruise. A silence. The
half-finished friendship bracelet on my dresser. The text I never answered. That sweatshirt that
smelled like someone I missed.

The truth is, I don't remember the last time I felt like me.

I don't know when I left me.

We were always leaving, even when we stayed.

The sky is mine

I started memorizing skies when I was eleven.

My village didn't have many places to go, so I went upward. The rooftops became mine like an
unofficial observatory, a silent classroom, a place to ask impossible questions. I'd lay on my back
on the cool concrete, arms behind my head, watching the sky shift colors like it had secrets to
tell. Some girls collected stickers or earrings. I collected sunsets.

The thing about watching the sky is that it doesn't ask you who you are. It doesn't care if you're
too much or too quiet, if your dreams scare your mother, or if your thoughts can't stay inside
your chest. It just keeps moving. But always, always there. Constant. Expansive.

When I began applying to writing competitions, I'd sit under that sky with my phone light and a
notebook, drafting lines that didn't sound like anyone else around me. I wasn't trying to be
different. I was trying to be honest. And honesty, I learned, is a kind of risk, especially when
you're young, especially when you're a girl, especially when you're both.

That sky became my rehearsal stage. I practiced being brave under it.

The first time I won a writing prize, I didn't tell anyone. I just looked at the sky and whispered,
"You saw me first." Because long before judges or panels, there was just me and that sky and the
words I was too afraid to say out loud.

I still watch the sky, even when deadlines crush my lungs and when I feel like I'm not doing
enough or being enough. The sky doesn't flinch. It reminds me to expand. To take up space. To
keep showing up even when no one claps. Especially then.

It's a strange thing to grow in one place but belong to the world. To feel your roots and your
wings arguing inside your chest. I don't always have the answer. But I know where to look when
I forget who I am.

I look up.

Peeling oranges

There are two kinds of people: those who slice their oranges and those who peel them.

My mother peels them. Slowly, deliberately, as though removing something sacred from its
armor. She sits on the kitchen stool with a plastic bag on her lap and works her fingers around
the rind like she's unlocking a secret. The peels come off in thick spirals, curling like question
marks on the floor.

I never had the patience. I slice mine into quarters and bite in. I once told her it was faster this
way. She said, "Speed is not always the goal." Then she kept peeling.

That was years ago.

Every time I try to write about change, I think about oranges.

Not the clean kind of change, the graduation-postcard, study-abroad, big-acceptance-letter kind.
But the slow kind. The quiet, intimate shifts no one claps for. For instance, realizing you're not
angry anymore at the friend who stopped texting. Or that, somehow, the sadness that used to live
in your body has grown tired and left.

It's the kind of change you don't notice until one day you're washing dishes or scrolling through
someone else's good news, and it hits you: I've become someone I wasn't last year.

Some days, I still rush through life with sticky hands and cut lips, chasing speed. I still bite into
moments too quickly. I say yes when I should say maybe. I forgive before I understand. I dream
without resting.

But on the best days—the real days—I peel.

I sit with things longer and read the same paragraph twice. I listen without trying to fix it. I call
my mother and ask her when she boils her rice because it makes her feel needed. Most
importantly, when I eat my orange, I peel it slowly and deliberately.

There's no applause, just the soft sound of citrus and the quiet knowledge that this, too, is
becoming.

Returned things

In the back of the village bakery is a girl who returns things.

She doesn't work there. She's just always around. Sitting on upside-down crates, peeling
sunflower seeds with her thumbnail, watching people come and go. Her hair smells like sugar
and smoke. Her eyes are tired, not from lack of sleep.

People give her broken buttons, unpaired socks, and apology letters they never sent. They hand
her these things without a word, and she nods like she understands.

She never asks who it belonged to or what it meant. She takes it.

And somehow, weeks later, months even—it finds its way back.

A man finds his wedding ring tucked inside a bag of rice. A teenage girl hears her mother hum a
lullaby she hasn't sung since her father left. A boy who never cried at his sister's funeral dreams
of her sitting on the bakery roof, smiling.

No one knows how the girl does it. Or where she lives. She's always at the edge of the story, at
the corner of your memory.

And if you ask her why she does it, she'll shrug.

"Someone has to," she says. "Otherwise, things stay lost."