The Woman With The Headscarf

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••

There were still two weeks more until she could visit Gunner again and Lamees was desperate for someone to just talk to.

She took to her journal that morning and flipped through the pages, sitting on her bed. She recalled how she'd felt back when she thought that she had lost it and Gunner had returned it to her later.

After they'd been together for a while, he finally told her that he had seen a couple of the pages inside. She had been furious with him and refused to talk to him for the next four days. On the fifth day, he revealed a little secret of his own to make up for prying into her stuff.

He told her about his previous relationship and how much it had meant to him, that in some ways it still affected him. She was the first person he'd ever fallen in love with. Not like, but the actual real thing. Love.

Lamees wasn't able to hide the pain and mild jealously on her face but Gunner scooted closer to her. "Hey," he said in a low voice, "I know what I'm telling or going to tell you won't exactly make you happy but I've... Ive never really talked about this with anyone. And I'm only telling you this because I trust you. And I don't ever want you to feel like you can't trust me. I'm really sorry about going through your journal."

"No, you're not."

A faint smile. "Okay, fine, you caught me. I'm not sorry. But I won't do it again. The only reason I did it was because I was curious about you. And you were always so shy around me. I mean you still are..."

A light punch from her caused him to burst into laughter. And she did too.

Lamees smiled at the memory and opened her journal to the page where she had erased Gunner's face drawing. She hadn't been able to draw anything else over it so she simply kept it the way it was. Empty with a few faint lines which indicated that a drawing had existed on the page.

Getting up from her bed, she grabbed a pencil and went to work on her table. It was almost two hours later when she straightened up in her chair and managed a satisfied smile as Gunner stared back at her.

The younger version that she'd sketched years before resembled the one that looked at her now. His eyes no longer had that carefree glimmer in them and there were slight shadows under his eyes, like they were telling a story of a boy turning into a man. And the burden that comes with it.

A stubble covered his jaw and his mouth was set. Not smiling. Not anymore.

The smile didn't waver from Lamees's face though because she knew that she was drawing again. Finally.

••••

The next two weeks didn't seem as long as they had before because Lamees always found something to draw or to sketch. She spent almost all her time inside her room, filling her journal with more of her works and when that journal finished, she bought another one the next day and went to work again.

Her dad stayed mostly out of her way because of his own work and meetings but her mother was almost always questioning her, like she was sensing that something was off. Lamees always denied her suspicions and worries, claiming that she was "too free" due to which she got such ideas in her head.

Her mother seemed visibly offended but hadn't said anything as she walked away, muttering to herself in French.

Lamees filled the pages with drawings of flowers, from complicated roses to wild lily flowers. She drew her parents, imagining them at a younger age and was thrilled at how good her mother's sketch came out. Her mother loved to tell stories and she used to tell Lamees about her teenage days when she had a short bob hair cut and used to smoke, not because she enjoyed it but because she thought that it made her look cool.

She quit though soon after meeting Ali, her father, who had visited France with his parents.

Lamees found it amusing how her parents had two different versions of the same story of their meeting. While her mother, a secret romantic at heart, said that it was meant to be when Ali came and sat down from across her at a table in a cafe. Meanwhile, her dad claimed that he had been too absorbed in a video game on his phone to even notice where he was heading. It was after a few seconds that he looked up and found that he was sitting at the wrong table - with a girl around his age staring back at him in surprise.

He had abruptly mumbled an apology and confessed that he was a bit flustered because as Lamees's dad quoted, that Lamees mother's had a boyish prettiness to her that even she was unaware of. He had gotten up, apologised again, his French quite clearly touristy and unclear, before making his way towards his parents' table.

"He had ze cutest round ears and when he blushed, hiz ears would turn pink!" Her mother would chuckle fondly at the memory, every time she would tell the story.

Her father loved hearing her tell it even though he never really said it out loud. "That's the first thing that you noticed about me? My pink, blushing ears?"

"Well, you didn't exactly haf a flattering azz to stare at."

"Oh my God, Ella, you're such a great example for our daughter!"

Lamees didn't deny the fact that even she believed her parents were destined to be, even when they had been born miles away from each other. They had still found a way back to one another and had kept coming back, despite their cultural differences. But even then, she couldn't expect either of them to understand what she was currently going through. Because Gunner was a non-Muslim and both her parents, despite coming from different places had been born and raised as Muslims. It was all they'd ever known and accepted and falling in love with a non-Muslim wouldn't be something that they'd accept.