The Perfect Girl

14

"One moment leaves her reeling, Now she loses feeling,"

Hiba's POV

Ever since I was young, I was bad at dealing with strong emotion.

Usually, I just distracted myself from it, something that I had been told was not an effective way of dealing with pain. I did it anyway.

As a child, it was books. I had stacks of books that I knew well enough to open up to any page and follow the story from there, and every time I was upset or got into a fight, I'd open one up and start reading. And then I'd begin to cry, sob, scream into my pillow. I cried much too easily.

Eventually, I'd stopped. I realized I couldn't weep my way through life, and instead, I simply pulled myself away from the world.

There were people like Amar, who screamed and raged when they were upset, and then there were people like me, who obsessed over the issue, then fell inwards. He exploded when something bad happened, I imploded.

As I got older, my habits of constantly both reading and writing about emotions allowed me to evaluate my own feelings in a fairly logical way, even when they weren't logical.

So when the rain of emotion had poured down, I'd imploded. I'd been stuck in my thoughts for a long time, but now I had become objective. I was pulled myself out of my whirlpool of emotions to consider them like an author would consider the emotions of their character.

In the books I'd read, mostly, self-loathing was described as a constant torture. That had not been my experience.

Hating myself was not a stab to the chest or a punch to the gut, hating myself was numb, repetitive thrumming, or hammering. It was sort of like when you rub your finger along a particular part of your skin over and over and the friction irritates it, and every time you run your finger against it again, it tingles uncomfortably. Every time I thought how useless I was it hurt the way the touch of my finger hurt against my skin.

Or it had been, anyway. But the night at the pool, for some reason, had broken through the damn between me and my own feelings.

Now, the damn had begun to go back up, leaving me to break my feelings up into words and syllables and letters and numbers like any good writer.

A part of me felt like my life had been in slow motion my whole life, and now, all of a sudden, someone had pressed the fast forward button. It was terrifying.

And then, as I was going through all this, I found out about Khalid.

I was flabbergasted.

Khalid was a good person, and I liked him as a human, but the thought that he liked me the way he was implying he did, or that he saw a potential for liking me that way shocked me. How could someone ever consider me, someone so ugly, for that?

I knew I should love myself, I'd been told enough times. The catchphrase, though, was something I'd memorized and learnt to spit back at people who I thought needed it without actually believing in it myself. I'd never loved myself, and I never thought that was a problem, I didn't understand how I could love something so, so ugly.

When Ami and Abu asked me about Khalid, I nearly had a heart attack. I still wasn't sure why I had said yes.

I thought about it for while, and somehow, in a spur of the moment decision, I'd whispered a yes to Ami.

"Lina and Ishaaq want you and Khalid to meet this weekend to talk, is that okay?" Ami asked.

I nodded in reply, internally hyperventilating.

Shuayb was studying me quietly, "Do you like him, Hiba?"

"I don't know," I replied, honest.

"He's good boy," Shuayb murmured, "I trust him."

"I know."

"But you should only continue with this if you seriously think there's potential."

I nodded.

I was starting to realize that I wasn't rejecting Khalid because I was waiting for him to reject me.