Love from A to Z

Maybe that's what living is--recognizing the marvels and oddities around you.

Make sure that you make the beginning of whatever you begin beautiful.

I'm not a violent person. I'm not advocating violence. But I am an angry person. I'm advocating for more people to get angry. Get moved.

The world is a mysterious place. On the one hand, its size can be measured and recorded and verified. Its marvels and oddities captured in complex, empirical detail. On the other hand, its size is relative to our mind’s perception of it. Its marvels and oddities only extending to how far our vision goes. For some of us, this means the world is small, including only those we see as belonging to it. People related to us, people who look like us, dress like us, think like us. For others, it’s medium-size and includes those we connect to through some similarity, some trait that pings familiarity within, which then allows us to overlook the differences between us and them. And then there are those who see the world as huge, as the actual size it measurably is. Huge enough to include vast differences, people with nothing in common with one another except a beating heart and a feeling soul, these two—heart, soul—being the strongest connection between us all.

Never, ever quake in the face of hate, Zayneb.

Your resistance to my existence is futile.

She believed in such a world, where everyone got a turn, a season in the sun.

This is a love story. You’ve been warned.

I was in this weird space of wanting not to be alone and wanting not to be crowded, either.

Human rights. For everyone. Because that was the only way the world made sense. When the arc of care went far and wide, it journeyed and battled to exclude none.

They say friends are the family you choose

Life goes on, even if love doesn't.

I’m someone who gets consumed by stuff. It engulfs me, wraps me up in its embrace, and doesn’t let me be until I’ve deal with it.

Girls like me who see and feel the pains and problems of the world don’t make sense to people. So maybe we’re meant to be alone, or only with people exactly like us.

I just wanted the right mix of being with someone I connected to, who cared, but also let me be.

One of the reasons Ayaan said she loves being Muslim is because it makes her feel like a natural feminist. "Like hello? Our queen Khadija didn't wait for the man she had her eye on to ask her, to get on his knees. Nope. Instead, she said, 'I like you, oh employee of mine. Will you marry me?' And then, after they hitched, she just kept her job as his boss. Mad respect.

We're allowed to cry.

But it's not smooth sailing" "Life isn't?

There was a reason love was a round sounding word. It completed you and then some, like treading a circular path, the way it was immemorial. Whole. But also... infinite. It went on and on as long as you went on and on, to meet it, keep it, treasure it. And I would.

And now here we were, almost a thousand years later, still doing it. Trying to make sense of what was happening around us. Maybe that's what life is, really.

You need to have a way to take care of yourself. A way to recharge. Otherwise the world will get you down so fast, you won’t be able to hold your head up. I learned this the hard way.

Here's one thing I CAN figure out and that's how much I don't know. How I don't know what you went through at school. With your teacher. I don't know about the extent of the Islamophobia you've faced. I don't know what it feel like to be you. But here's another thing: I DO want to know.

Imagine if I transformed this room into the place where someone would want to escape to?

Because the moment you’re feeling secure, someone hates on you.

This way of noticing that even during the suckiest moments in life there was something marvelous to be seen, heard, touched. Or just a tiny awe felt in the heart.

The clearest feeling I remember is this: the way that it felt like the space between us folded and folded, and kept folding until the distance shrank, until we made sense to each other.

Since the news was out about my MS, out with my Dad, my friends, and soon with Hanna, it emerged in the real world. Like a boggart from Harry Potter's world, it took shape in front of me. Unmoving, but relentlessly forcing itself into my thoughts. My MS, it was real now. I didn't want to climb the ladder to finish painting the room. I was scared to. I wasn't part of any Hogwarts houses, because there wasn't a house for people who'd rather tuck away, overwhelmed with fear.

Me not caring, nobody caring that I was crying. Nobody caring that I wasn’t going to be okay.

Exhibit A TO Z: The root of everything that has gone wrong in my life. Like falling for people without thinking things through.

Anger isn't wrong. What we do with it is what matters.