Carefully Folded Socks

“Okay, you’re coming with me.”

It was the day after we’d met. She stood there at the door of my room in her leather sandals and faded blue jeans, her sleeves carefully folded at the elbows, a smile on her lips. In her smile there was stubbornness, and in her stubbornness love. You’re coming with me, Hayat said. Where? Home, Fatima.

She said it with a maternal tone, mixed with mild rebuke. She rushed into the room with long steps and headed toward the closet. She opened the doors, took out a knotted pile of sleeves and legs and socks, and occupied herself pulling a pant leg from the sleeve of a dress, untying a mismatched pair of socks, looking for the button that came off the gray shirt, as if the chaos that swept through my room like a flood wasn’t cause for surprise or reproach. She gives her love with absolute mastery, while folding socks.

I followed her as instructed and started to gather the pieces scattered around the room, searching among the ruins of my heart after the bomb. The mirror is the mirror, my face is my face. The witch has disappeared, and the apple remained.

“This will stay here.”

She was holding a package of alprazolam in her right hand, heading toward the garbage can, stepping on the pedal to open the cover. The garbage can opened its mouth hungrily, the saliva dripping from its teeth.

“I need my medication.”

“This isn’t medication. You get medication by prescription. Do you have a prescription?”

“I already told you . . .”

“You don’t need this poison.”

“I can’t sleep without it.”

“Then we’ll sit up all night together.”

The package fell from her hand, into the dragon’s belly. Hayat was silent; my heart broke.

We latched the suitcases, gathered up the madness of the place. I put on my shoes and said to her, You go ahead.

I was thinking of the white package that pulls me gently from my reality, my medication that protects me from the world, vanquisher of epilepsy and depression and the only friend I had during the bad days and darkness. How would I leave it here, alone, to be devoured by the stomach acids of the iron dragon, along with the thousands of tissues and bad poetry.

“You don’t need it, Fatima.”

“You don’t know the truth.”

I wanted to add: We’re in love and thinking of getting married. But before I could, she said, “Do you know what the problem is?”

“What?”

“The problem is that you’re strong, but you think you’re weak. You ran away and lived alone in this room—for a week, alone with your poems! Someone, a woman especially, would need supernatural strength to rent herself a room alone and fill it with poems. You don’t need this drug, Fatima—you’re out of the tomb. Anyone else would be happy to have a husband who confines her under layers and layers of black, to bear a dozen children and spend the day peeling truffles, but you. . . . You crossed through the gates of hell, and wrote many poems. They have taken nothing from you.”