Roses

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always loved roses.

Their vibrant crimson petals and the defiant, protecting thorns. 

And the fact they always grow in a bush;

Together and unified.

I’ve always felt that people are like roses. 

Fragrant or dark or blooming or wilting.

I’m free. I know that I’m free, that my story may be a full and happy, growing rose.

But every rose has its thorns. Every rose grows in light but has its shadow.

And for me, that shadow is growing.

I never really knew what it was like to bleed. 

To be hated for what I believed, what I was. 

One day I asked my older brother, the light of my life:

“Why are they… killing the people? The innocents?”

He turned to me.

“They’re heartless.”

I tried to laugh it off.

“Why are they killing the kids?”

Any smile he had evaporated.

“They’re heartless,” he repeated.

I didn’t know what he meant. 

What it was like for someone to be entirely heartless.

I tried to let it slip from my mind.

One day I went to school, the usual.

But there was a crowd in the hallway.

“What’s happening?” I asked my friend.

She looked at me differently and laughed a little.

“Nothing.”

People were looking and chuckling.

Uneasiness coursed through me 

As I tried to see what was happening.

There was a girl, pushed near the lockers. 

She wore a beautiful scarf around her head, covering her hair.

She was like me. 

And then a boy, years senior to her, grabbed her and threw her to the floor.

Dread coiled in my gut. 

I backed away as soon as I felt pairs of eyes slowly laying on me.

And I ran.
 

Because I wore that scarf too; the hijab, 

the marking of a believer, a wanter of peace.

I ran home as fast as I could,

dashed straight to my brother, sobbing.

He slowly held me and stroked my hair, 

like Mom used to do.

“What happened?”

I trembled. 

“Some boy pushed a girl to the floor.”

His hand stiffened as he understood, and

He looked at me.

“No matter what, Layla,” he said, 

“Never think low of yourself, of what you are, of what you believe.
People are cruel everywhere. But you’re going to stay firm, alright?
You hear me?”

I nodded at him and smiled.

“Yes. Yes, I hear you.”

Looking back at my memories of my brother Hasan,
I can always laugh.

I remember the times we argued and chuckled together 

when Mom and Dad were here.

There was this one time when Dad got obsessed with making these ridiculous puns, 

and it rubbed off on Hasan too. Once Hasan was doing math homework, 

and he got frustrated, and then he turned to me and said, 

“To the guy who invented zero, thanks for nothing!”

I told him it was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard.

But then time passed and the car crash happened. 

Mom and Dad were gone.

Despite what had happened to the girl in the hallway, I kept going to school

as if nothing had happened.

But I was still afraid.

One day I was running home, excited to tell Hasan about my math test.

I orchestrated the conversation in my head:
“Hasan, I aced my math test!”
“Did you now!”

“Yes! Look!”

“Great job. Mom and Dad would be proud.”

I expected it to happen just the way I thought it. 

Hasan is so predictable, I laughed to myself.

He would be proud of me, and then I’d ask him how his day was, 

And then maybe we could go watch some movie together–

“Why are there police everywhere?”

I stopped dead.

ran inside the house, ignoring the screams and the sirens and the lights. 

“Hasan?” I was nearly hysterical. “HASAN? HASAN!”

Our small house was empty.

Empty, dark, suffocating, no one there, nobody there, I was dying–

A few days later, or weeks, I don’t know,

I touched the newspaper in front of me. 

Every word I read was like a knife to my heart.

“Hate crime analysis experts say…” the headlines yapped. The print on the newspaper grew bold and screaming.

“HASAN ABDUL-GHANI, 19, STABBED NUMEROUS TIMES IN VARIOUS AREAS. MOTIVE UNKNOWN… LAST KNOWN APPEARANCE…”

My heart drowned as the last tendril of hope I nurtured betrayed it.

Hasan was truly dead.

My brother, the last remaining light of my life, was gone.

I didn’t know who the lady in front of me was. All I knew was that she kept trying to make me talk.

“I’m your therapist,” she repeated, in that same wretched, gentle tone. “I’m here to help you battle what you have been through.”

“I don’t care,” I said bluntly.

“Tell me,” she said, raising an eyebrow, “why do you think–”

“IT’S NOT JUST ME!” I screamed at her.

“IT’S PEOPLE EVERYWHERE!”

She blinked. “What do you mean?”
 

I stared at her, my throat suddenly sealed. I couldn’t talk, but I thought,

What about the girl who was thrown down in the hallway at school?

What about that six year-old boy who was killed by his own landowner? 

What about the little girl who called for help but blew apart in a fire, back in Gaza?

What about those thousands of children in Gaza so deprived of life that they starved to death?

How are people so blind? It was all torture,

and murder,

and injustice.

The rose was withered, wilting and dead. The thorns of self-defense were cut and the petals were drifting, drifting away in the wind.

But I said nothing. I looked at her and managed a smile, and the biggest lie I would ever utter slipped out from my lips. 

“It doesn’t matter.” 

I held on. I held on to life because of the one thought: those suffering people were holding on, too. 

And because of that tendril of faith, because of that little spark of hope, 

I thought I could see a light in the midst of the darkness.

A little bud 

Emerging

From the depths of the withering rosebush.