WATTPAD FINALLY LET ME UPLOAD OH MY GOD! YES! Okay, so it has been quite a while so I want to thank everyone who has stuck with me. Please vote and comment so that I'm not disheartened by the lack of response lol.
"I know a lot of people complain about their family but there's something special about the idea that out of the billions of people in this world, only a few were written in your destiny." -- Ash
Even with the ten-year age difference between me and Harun and Zubair and Zaid, we’ve been a pretty tight knit family. My parents made sure the five of us were close despite the fact that we’re all at drastically different points in our lives. I mean, Juwariyah’s a mother of two twin boys, one of whom is autistic, for God’s sake. Zubair and Zaid are both finishing up their residency and my mother’s been poking at the marriage talk with them lately. And Harun and I are babies in comparison to them, just getting our feet wet trying to decide what colleges we want to go to (or college, if my parents have their way).
Even though now that we’re all busy doing our own thing, there’s this innate bond I feel with all my siblings—which, the older I get, I realize a lot of people don’t have. But the thing about having something your whole life is that you don’t know what it’s like to not have it, meaning you never truly appreciate the value of what you have.
My appreciation for family is basically through two people: my parents and Nathaniel. I mean, with my parents it’s obvious but the story behind Nathaniel is an interesting one.
I was fifteen when I met Nathaniel’s mom. Nate and I had been friends for a very short time back then—he spent most of freshman year harboring an acute dislike for me and Hamza because the two of us would banter incessantly in math class every day without fail. We became friends the following year—sophomore year, when Nate realized that I wasn’t as vapid and superficial as the girls Hamza usually surrounds himself with.
I don’t even remember the context of the conversation—I was at the Indian store with Juwariyah picking up some stuff for Mom and I saw a figure who looked like Nathaniel in the Chinese store next door. Juwariyah was taking forever, so I went by next door.
He didn’t see me immediately, and I was glad. Behind the counter, I saw a stack of boxes that a frail, middle-aged woman was trying to move herself. Nate came up next to her, and I’ll never forget what he did next, how he gently put his hands on her shoulders and took the boxes from her thin arms. How he moved them himself and allowed her tired body to relax for a minute, take a break from a rough day.
It struck me because for the first time I saw him as a man, not a boy. And when he finally noticed me and looked startled at the sight of me watching him intently, I found out why. Why he acted like a man when he was a boy in age.
“My dad ran out on my mom five months after we came to America.” He said it so pointblank that I didn’t know what to say or do for a second. After he caught me observing him help his mom, I flashed him an awkward smile and started browsing the aisles (or pretending to, because frankly, as a Muslim I have no interest in buying pork rinds or anything of the sort). He came over and we made conversation for a few minutes—awkwardly, cans of soy sauce enveloping us in the narrow aisle, the toes of our boots scraping speckled linoleum floors. And then he just said what I’d been wondering, subconsciously.
“My dad ran out and he left my mom to raise me and my little brother. She didn’t know English or anyone in America but she managed to start a business and built a life for us. So she has this shop and my brother and I help her out as much as we can.” He said the last part with a shrug, so unpretentious and casual and matter-of-fact like he was describing an extracurricular activity he casually picked up.
And that just did it for me. It kind of affirmed why I was and wanted to be friends with him. He just got it. He just got that life doesn’t stop to consider what it’s giving to who. It just happens and you roll with it without complaining about what you’ve got.
Nathaniel didn’t tell me much that day. We still weren’t at that level to be completely open and descriptive, but I think that day was the catalyst to what made us closer as friends. If not closer, but just more…understanding.
After that day, I made sure my parents brought their business to Nate’s mom’s shop as much as possible, but it also got me thinking about them. My parents, I mean. And my family. My oddly mismatched family, all of us different ages and stages of our lives.
Harun had to do a project on family once, and he had to define it himself. He defined family as the people you’re bonded to either by blood or what you’ve gone through—or both. That stuck with me because it’s true about our family, all my siblings. Despite how different we are, we have the same root, the same struggle that’s molded us into what we are today.
I always think of Nate when I think about my family because he doesn’t have his entire family around like I do. But sometimes, even with my family physically there, I feel like they’re not, because under the surface there are still cracks and fissures that threaten the foundation upon which we’ve built our lives. And that scares the hell out of me, how the strength that makes this family is the same thing that could potentially break it.
I was five when Harun came down with bacterial meningitis; the two weeks he was in the hospital were awful and even though my memory of it is spotty, I remember bits and pieces that still make my insides clench.
The hospital smells weird. Juwariyah is sitting next to me and Zubair and Zaid are sitting across from us. No one is talking and I wish JuJu would tell me a story but she’s being very quiet. Finally, Daddy comes out.
He looks really tired. Under his eyes is all dark and he looks sad. “Come on, kids, let’s go home.” We sit there for a little bit longer because Zubair and Zaid are packing up the homework that they had been doing while we were waiting.
In those two weeks, my mom stayed with Harun constantly and my dad was in charge of shuffling us back and forth from the hospital to our house back to the hospital. I was in kindergarten at the time, the same class as Harun, so I would provide our teacher with updates on how he was doing. Zubair and Zaid were sophomores in high school and Juwariyah was a freshman.
Finally, after so long, the doctors said that we could see Harun because he wasn’t ‘tagious anymore. As we were walking to the room where he was, I asked JuJu what ‘tagious meant. For the first time in a long time, my sister smiled. “Con-tagious, my love. It means he can’t get us sick. He’s in stable condition, meaning he feels well enough to have people in his room. He’s been sleeping a lot lately which is why we haven’t been able to see him much.”
I was proud that I made Juwariyah smile.
I thought—think—Juwariyah is absolutely gorgeous. And seeing her smile like that, I remember being so proud of myself that I could do that. After she explained what contagious was, she gave my hand a squeeze, the last thing I remember before what happened in that hospital room that day.
“He looks so tiny,” Zaid says. His voice is quiet and my dad puts his arm around him. I run to Mama’s lap and bury my face in her shirt. I haven’t seen her much because she’s almost never home. Daddy gets me ready for school now and drives me to school before he goes to work.
“Salam, baby,” she whispers. She strokes my hair, which JuJu put in a ponytail. I settle in her lap to face Harun. He looks so small in the bed even though he’s a little bigger than me. His eyes are open but he’s not saying anything. I smile at him but he doesn’t smile back.
“Harun,” Juwariyah calls. He doesn’t look at her either.
A man in a white coat comes in. He says hello to us. “Is this the whole Suleiman family?” He asks. My dad says yes and that we’re Harun’s brothers and sisters.
Juwariyah once told me that Dr. Bransfield—that was Harun’s doctor’s name—gave my parents the option of having the rest of us leave so that he could give them the results of the effects the illness had on Harun. My parents, in turn, gave us the choice of staying or leaving. “We stayed,” Juwariyah told me, “but I don’t know if things would have gone differently if we had left.”
“The tests for the scans came back. Harun doesn’t have brain damage or anything of the sort.” Everyone sighs happily and I can feel Mama’s heart beat get faster and faster.
“Oh, thank God” she says.
“Will he be able to lead a normal life once he recovers?” My dad asks.
The thing is, I don’t remember much about the exact details of what Dr. Bransfield said. The best I can do is paraphrase and fill in the blanks of what my parents actually said. But I will never forget his face when my dad asked that question, because in that moment I was in my mother’s lap, my head resting against her chest, on her heart. And when Dr. Bransfield’s face fell, this expression of torn sadness—a flicker before his professionalism set in again—I felt my mother’s heart race and her breath catch.
Because she knew, but she didn’t want to confront the possibility that it was true.
“Bacterial meningitis can cause varying degrees of…hearing loss.” He begins. I begin playing with Mama’s wedding ring as the doctor keeps talking. Suddenly, Mama’s arms aren’t around me anymore and I’m sliding off her. “Aah!” I hit the ground and my hands hurt from hitting the floor.
Juwariyah grabs me off the floor and rushes me out the door. “Shh,” she keeps whispering as I cry from how it hurts.
I was confused, too. Aside from the pain from hitting the hard floor, I couldn’t figure out why my mother didn’t immediately rush to pick me up and fuss over me like she always did. Juwariyah, my superhero, the one who’s everybody’s savior, is the one that got me out of there, calmed me down.
What got me to stop crying was seeing tears in her own eyes. And that’s when I knew that something was terribly, terribly wrong. Juwariyah wouldn’t take me back in the room, not even when the doctor walked out, giving us a small smile as he did, almost like an apology for telling my parents what he had just told them.
We stood outside the room, me in Juwariyah’s arms, impatient when she wouldn’t take me back to my mom. We were reduced to watching through the crack of the door, just listening to my mom’s agony from afar.
It’s silent in the room for a little bit. I see Zaid sit down on the floor, his face in his hands. Zubair puts his arm around him. I can’t see Daddy anymore. Juwariyah holds me tighter. “JuJu—”
“No.”
My mom sounded like she couldn’t breathe. Her voice was so strangled, so tormented and disbelieving as if anything else was better than reality at that moment. I didn’t think heartbreak had a sound until I heard her voice.
“No. Harun?” I can’t see her because the door’s in the way but I can see Harun on the bed and he’s looking the other way, at Zubair and Zaid. He doesn’t turn.
“Harun! HARUN!”
Her voice grew louder and louder and my brothers stood there and watched, haunted as they watch her unravel with every second that Harun continues to not turn.
Juwariyah kicked the door open and we walked in. She had me facing the wall as she held me in her arms, but I turned around. I needed to see my mom.
Each time she says his name, he doesn’t turn.
Zubair and Zaid were frozen as Harun kept staring at them, so unaware of my mother calling his name from the other end of the room. Each time he didn’t respond to his name, my mother was reduced to hysteria.
She could barely sit still in her chair, her knuckles white as she clung to the arms. My dad had his hands tightly on her shoulders to keep her in place, tears running down his own face. Zubair and Zaid weren’t crying, I don’t think, but by this time they had both stood up and walked over to where Harun was lying.
I remember how tightly Zubair had his hands balled up into fists and how tightly he was clenching his teeth. Both my brothers had tears in their eyes.
My mother was the only one sobbing. She flew out of her chair and sat onto the bed where Harun was lying and just hugged him as she wept, the sobs racking her body in a way I’d never seen a body shake.
“Harun,” she says.
He looked at her when she said that, but we could tell it wasn’t because he had heard her say his name. And when my mom realized that, it was obvious that it broke her heart all over again, along the same cracks.
The months after Harun’s illness were the worst for us collectively, as a family. I think more than anything when it came to adjusting to Harun’s newfound deafness, it was how it affected the small details of our daily lives.
Like when Zubair, Zaid, and Juwariyah would back home from school and they would yell our names before realizing that Harun couldn’t hear them when they called. Or how I stopped asking my mom to sing us a song goodnight because Harun couldn’t hear it. Or how we had to watch Harun scream in frustration whenever it became too difficult for him, covering ears that couldn’t hear in the first place, rocking back and forth as the tears ran down his face, his silent world maddening, for him, for us.
I don’t remember many specific details of that period, but Zaid once confided in me that seeing Mom fall apart on the inside was the worst. How they would come up from school and find her curled up on the sofa, her face blank. How she was zombie-like for so long, doing what she had to do to keep the house running but not speaking or saying much to anyone.
The next few years after that were awful for Harun, for my mom, for all of us. I’ve never seen my father cry, ever, except during that period when we were all trying to adjust to life with Harun’s deafness. We don’t talk about it much now but it lingers in the corners of our house, in the mood of the last days of December upon the anniversary of when Harun got sick and a new life started for us.
It was Juwariyah who played a large part of pulling us together, I know that. She was the passionate one, the trail of fire that got everyone enrolled in ASL classes, the one who would pick my mother up when she fell back into the darkness of what-ifs and what-could-I-have-done-different.
And thirteen years later, I don’t think our family has healed fully, but the wounds have kind of just turned into these scars that you notice only when you run your fingers over them. They’re there, just not a constant pain like they used to be.
The funny thing is that it was strength that helped our family get back up. But like all good things, too much harms you more than it helps. And now it’s like we’re all so geared towards what we need to do that there is so much we don’t talk about. And the greatest irony? What built us up threatens to tear us down.
The average person doesn’t see that. I don’t expect them to, honestly, because all they see is the outside and not the hell that it took for us to get to where we are. Back when Omar, Harun, and I used to be good friends, Omar’s family would come over a lot. Zayd’s family too, actually, because Omar and Zayd are cousins and were therefore together a lot (and Zayd idolized my brother Zaid because they had the same name and Zaid is ten years older and apparently very cool).
Omar’s sister is older than me by a couple of years, so she and Juwariyah talked more than I talked to her. One time, she was over at our house because she and Juwariyah were okay friends or something for a while. During one of the times they hung out, they were making something in the kitchen when I came in to get something to eat.
I can’t remember exactly what she said, but Omar’s sister said something to Juwariyah about how none of us—my parents, my siblings—were alike, but somehow we all fit together as a cohesive unit.
That I don’t remember as well as how Juwariyah responded. She was getting something out of a cupboard, and she didn’t take a second to contemplate what to say in response. She just went “That’s how it looks. The differences between us just make it easier to get past the friction.”
I know she didn’t mean to say that, that she would have taken it back if she had given it a second’s more thought. I saw the startled look on her face, which is why I remember so clearly what she said. Juwariyah never slips up.
Well, that, and the fact that years after this happened, I said the same thing to Hamza about our family. One slip up, years apart from Juwariyah. It’s proof we were cut from the same cloth, no matter how much it seems otherwise.
The first time that my family and Hamza’s family interacted is probably Juwariyah’s wedding. My parents invited the entire Muslim community in our area, I’m pretty sure, and after I made my speech about Juwariyah, I ran into Hamza. I wonder how I would have reacted if I knew then that this was just the beginning of our lives intermingling.
My mom loves event planning. Juwariyah’s wedding was done beautifully and I remember people talking about it for months after the event, coming up to my mom at the mosque, at the grocery store, everywhere they ran into her just to compliment her on how beautifully it was done.
Hamza’s parents own a landscaping business, I think, and they wanted to host a formal holiday party for their business contacts and partners. My mom invited his family over to our house (I think this was a couple years ago, around the time Juwariyah got married, so when I was twelve or thirteen) for dinner to discuss the affair.
Houses are personal places. Okay, houses aren’t. But homes are. There’s something intimate about seeing where someone spends most of their existence, their refuge from the rest of the world. That’s why I never have people over, because once you’ve shown that part of you to someone, there’s no turning back, no way to go back to pretending like they haven’t advanced levels with you or anything.
That’s what was running through my mind when the doorbell rang that night that Hamza’s family came over. I was in my room but I heard he familiar ring and the flash of light (to indicate to Harun that someone is at the door) and my stomach completely flipped. Of course, everyone was apparently too busy to answer the door so I opened it. The surrealism of the situation set in when Hamza handed me the chocolate tart his family had brought for dessert.
Oh my God, why is he in my house? That’s all I can think as I take the bakery box from him and usher this family into the living room. At least the entire family is here today—Zubair, Zaid, Juwariyah, and Jamal, my new brother-in-law, included.
My dad comes in then and greets Hamza’s dad. The men sit down in the living room. Both our dads are sitting in the big chairs that face the sofas. On the sofas, it’s Zubair, Jamal, and Hamza. Hamza’s little brother, Harun, and Zaid are on the adjacent couch. I shudder at the weirdness of Hamza meeting my brothers and Jamal (who is a brother now) but I don’t have much time to dwell on it because I’m leading Hamza’s mom and his sister (Hidayah, I think her name is) to the family room where the women will be sitting.
Hamza’s mom is asking me questions about school and I feel awkward answering them. Juwariyah comes out of the kitchen into the family room and greets Hamza’s mom like this isn’t the first time she’s met her. “Salam, aunty, how are you? Hi, what’s your name?” She tucks a piece of hair behind her ear as she smiles down at Hidayah. Hamza’s sister immediately smile.
I have to say, even though Juwariyah and I don’t get along, I greatly admire her ability to make people feel special. That’s how she wins over people so quickly. And she actually cares about the people she comes in contact with so you can’t exactly hold it against her.
“Salam!” My mom finally comes in and I’m so relieved because if there’s one thing my mom is good at, it’s getting past how awkward some situations are, like this one. At least, for me.
I head into the kitchen so that I can be alone. When I open my eyes after closing them for a second to wrap my head around the fact that the most annoying guy in the seventh grade is currently at my house, Harun is standing next to me, tapping my shoulder. “Hand me a glass,” he asks. I’m standing right in front of the cupboard. “Hamza wants a glass of water,” he explains.
Ugh. Of course. I hand him the glass and then check on the food that’s on the stove. “Eiliyah, can you open up the patio? I think it’d be nice if you kids ate outside.” My mom says.
“Wait, why can’t we eat in here?”
“It may be easier for the younger kids to eat if they’re at a proper table,” she explains as she shuts off the stove. “And this way you get to know them better. They’re nice people.”
“Please, Ma, Hamza is not nice.” My mother being won over by Hamza will completely diminish my validity when I complain about how awful he is in school.
My mom just gives me a warning look. “Keep your voice down. Open up the patio and set out some place mats.” I internally groan but I do what she tells me to before heading out to the living room where my brothers and Hamza are. I sign to Harun that we’re going to be eating on the patio and then relate the message to Hamza and his brother.
After we get our food, Harun, Hamza, Hussain (which is apparently Hamza’s brother’s name), Hidayah, and I sit on a table in our patio. The weather is gorgeous tonight, not too hot or humid, but the nice kind of cool that doesn’t require wearing warmer clothes. We still have Christmas lights strung up from all the pre-wedding events that we hosted at our house, so it just feels so nice and pretty and wonderful to be out here.
Sitting with Hamza and his family, though, not so much. It feels so awkward. I don’t know what to say. I kick Harun under the table and give him a pleading look, hoping he’ll say something. “So you and Eiliyah go to school together?” Harun asks out loud.
At this point, Harun still went to a different school than I did. It wasn’t until eighth grade that he switched to the middle school I was at. Up until this point, all he’d heard about Hamza is what I said about him during my rants at the dinner table.
Hamza seems startled that Harun is talking. He recovers quickly and says “Yeah, we have a lot of the same classes.”
Harun has to watch his lips closely to see what he’s saying and I’m about to translate but he seems to have gotten it. “Yeah, Eiliyah’s mentioned you before.” Hamza shoots me a look and he looks…disgusted? Weirded out? I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter, because I want to kill Harun for saying that. He can’t have thought that was okay to say, right? Oh, wait, of course not, because he smirks at me as I stare him down.
Clearing my throat, I get up with a now-empty plate. “I’m going to get more food,” I say before racing out of there. Zubair is getting food at the same time I am.
“How’s it going out there? The kid is the same one who gives you a rough time at school, right?”
I clear my throat. “Yeah. He’s just really annoying.”
“Guys are like that at that age. You’re too cool for him,” he smiles at me as he puts more rice on his plate. That makes me smile so I give him a sideways hug before trying to get through the narrow space between him and the wall. I’m almost out but I stumble and trip.
As I try to catch myself, my plate of food goes forward, and I know it’s flying in a way that all the food is falling. I feel some of it hit my feet but what tips me off is the quiet stream of curses coming out of Hamza’s mouth.
The entire contents of my plate are pretty much on the top half of his shirt. The ordeal attracts the attention of our fathers, who look on, perplexed. “I’m sorry, oh God, I’m so sorry” is all I can come up with.
I remember being torn between wanting to cry at how embarrassed I was and laugh at how great it worked out. Hamza kind of getting what I thought he deserved. Zubair saw how embarrassed/amused I was and stepped in.
“Oh wow, it’s everywhere. Here, come on upstairs so we can clean your shirt.” Zubair’s awesome like that. He doesn’t throw you under the bus. He actually helps you out.
Hamza glares at me as I move over to start cleaning up the mess. I bite my lip to stop smiling (or crying). When I finally clean up everything, I head upstairs to change my jeans which had gotten splattered with sauce.
When you go upstairs, there’s a hallway that leads to my room and Harun’s. There’s a bathroom in the middle and there’s a light on in the middle. “Hey, did you find the washcloths? They’re down under the sink.” I say. I mean, I feel like I kind of have to say something to show that I’m sorry for spilling my food on Hamza (I’m not).
Hamza is still wiping his shirt so he’s looking down but I catch Zubair’s eye and he cracks a grin as he wets a paper towel to hand to Hamza. I bite my lip again to hide my smile at how much Hamza is scowling.
Oh God, I’m a horrible person for enjoying this so much. “I found them. Hamza, I’m going to ask Harun to give you one of his shirts so that we can dry that shirt.” Zubair takes off, his footsteps creating loud thuds as he heads down the stairs.
“I’ll be right back.” I say it because I feel like it’s sort of rude to leave him by himself and shut my door without an explanation.
“Okay? Whatever.” The way he says it makes me feel kind of stupid but I roll my eyes and head into my room. After I change, I come back out and look to my left, expecting him to be in the bathroom but he’s not.
I see him across the room, looking at the pictures on the wall. Juwariyah’s good at that kind of creative stuff. Like framing pictures, arranging them. Her posters for school projects were always awesome, mashallah.
“Is that you?” He points at one of those studio pictures with the dark lighting and the cradle thingy in the middle. It’s a picture of me and Harun sleeping on a pillow. We’re holding hands.
“Yeah. The one right here.” I point to where I am, half-wondering why he’s asking. He only nods, and then scans the other photos on the wall, a series of photochemical reactions that create the map of my life, a map of me.
“That one,” I say after I clear my throat, “is from when we surprised Zubair and Zaid at college for the first time.”
“How much older are they?” He frowns at the photo of me and Harun in the hallway of a freshman dorm.
“Ten years, why?”
“I think my cousin went to school with them. So wait, you guys surprised them at their dorm?”
I look at the photo, of my brothers holding each of us, both Harun and I elated that they picked us up. “Yeah. We were eight, I think. They’d both gone off to college and we really missed them so one weekend my parents just piled us all in the car and we drove all night to see them.”
It’s quiet for a second until the silence is broken by the sound of approaching footsteps. Harun smiles and signs to Hamza that Zubair told him he needed to borrow a shirt and that he’d be right back. I translate out loud as Harun signs.
Harun comes back with the shirt and Hamza steps into the bathroom to change. When he emerges, Harun catches his soiled shirt with one hand and heads downstairs to put it in the dryer. “Your brothers are really cool.” I think that’s his way of complimenting me indirectly. Huh. He’s never this nice to me at school.
“Yeah, they’re pretty awesome.”
“So what’s this one?” Hamza points at another photo. It’s one of the five of us at the airport with my father, who’s in a black coat and plaid scarf that was a gift from my mom.
“He was on a business trip to Chicago and he could come back two days early, just in time for Juwariyah’s birthday. That’s at the airport; he called us and said he was there and we went to go get him.”
“That seems nice,” he comments, his eyes scanning the collage of pictures Juwariyah has clustered and arranged.
“What does?”
“Family who are also the first people you can go to.”
The way he said it was so simple, such an anomaly for a boy whose essence was written with complications. In hindsight, I should have read deeper into the way he said that. I can picture his face now, having replayed that conversation so many times in my head. It was the second time I noticed how his eyes were actually a dark green and the first time that I wondered if he didn’t have what he thought was so nice, a family who doubled up as the first group of people he could go to if he needed something.
I turn to look at his side profile, his comment not anything that I was expecting. “Yeah,” I finally manage to get out. “Yeah, it is. I guess at the end of the day, regardless of what happens or how we feel about each other, we’ve got each other’s backs.”
He makes a funny face. “Your family doesn’t look like it has problems.”
I know he probably wouldn’t think that now. The world looks a lot different when you’re twelve, because then things are still simple. But when I heard him say that, I wanted to laugh. I mean, I wanted to cry as well, because of how nice it seemed. To believe that we didn’t have problems. The fact that someone actually believed that about us.
“That’s how it looks. The differences between us just make it easier to get past the friction.” It’s not until I blurt that out that it sounds awfully familiar. My eyes widen when I remember it’s something that Juwariyah said to one of her friends a long time. Please forget I just said that, please forget I just said that, I think.
Thank God at least he doesn’t say anything. He just turns to me, stares at me for a minute. “We should head back downstairs” is all he says, silence following us as we both head down the stairs.
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Thoughts? Ideas? What would you like to see next? Let me know, loves!