This book is a sequel to Khalifa and cannot be read as a standalone. To avoid spoilers, description and excerpt are added inside the book.
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Started: May 2, 2022.
Completed: December 3, 2022.
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cover by @xniftykayx
Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you?
— Alain De Botton
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Him
Some people are ink on paper, a fragment of time, an endless memory. Like air, around you. But like air, never in your hands. And what is human desire that urges one to touch, to feel more deeply, to see before one surrenders. Yet there is an agony in what you cannot have but ache for-- what once was but can no more be. What remains in memory.
The letter under his belt is a painful reminder of it. The letter dearer to him than the treasures of the world. The paper and ink his mother once touched. If he touches it, can he feel her touch upon it, he wonders. Can he feel touching her too?
And he would've suspended himself somewhere in time, not moving forward neither dying, but then there is her. And he lives for her. He has to. For love is something he was stripped of, starved for, until it became a word unknown to him. Until she taught him what it means again.
So how does he leave her? And how does one leave the heart out of body? For what good is a man without the heart? And what good would be life without love-- without her?
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Her
"There's not something I should tell you. There might actually be many things that I should. But I keep them in my heart so your heart doesn't weigh too much from the burden. And no, that doesn't mean I intend to keep secrets from you, but that to tell you when it will trouble you less."
"Does it not worry you if I learn them from someone else? Does it not trouble you the damage it can cause?"
"Do you want to tell me I should trust you less?"
"Do you want to say you trust me enough to assume nothing will change if a secret comes to me from another mouth than yours?"
"Yes."
Noura sighs and looks up at the sky. She doesn't know if the stars are smiling upon them or if they're merely tears of the sky. She certainly didn't expect the night to turn out like this.
"Keeping me out of your life isn't how it works, Adam."
"I know." He looks up at the sky as well. "But my life isn't of a regular man. When I learn something, I've to calculate its impact on the people around me first than upon myself. I think about you first. If all my secrets are bare to you, it doesn't make me vulnerable to you, for I trust you with my heart. But it makes me vulnerable to my enemies, for they can get things from me through you that otherwise they cannot if you're oblivious to those secrets."
"Where does Tamara fit into this?"
She turns to him, and he turns to her. There's a lapse of a seconds before he satisfies her curiosity.
