iman | hakim ziyech

.12

please pray if you haven't already yet.

—

she didn't want to mope around overthinking hakims bipolar behaviour from earlier, so decided that overhauling her room would be a good idea. if she was going to stay here then she was going to get her room to resemble her one in her parents house as much as possible.

she was mostly left to her own devices, but she never left the front door. occasionally looked out of the balcony, but the weather was so dreary it made her homesick rather than comfort her. she didn't know just how much she would miss the sweet sights of morocco until the dust settling in the evening was a picture far from her present.

hakim came and went, as he pleased. he would occasionally bring groceries, but iman noted that they weren't always to her liking. he didn't get the nice mint, it never looked as fresh as the one she grew in her garden. she sighed, realising just how boring life had gotten when she was just left to her own devices. she needed a distraction and she needed it now.

she marched into her room with a newfound determination having decided on what she wanted to do. she was going to rearrange the room and change it's layout but stopped in her tracks once she found her husband walking in the hallway towards her, head down focusing on his phone. he annoyingly stood in the middle, and when iman coughed to get his attention, he looked up far too late for her liking. she indicated that she wanted to get past, and he raised a suspicious eyebrow at her before shrugging and moving past her.

iman tried not to let her heart sink. she was used to noise and people always talking. the suffocating sound of the dreadful silence that seemed to engulf all of their encounters painted a dreary picture of the life that lied ahead.

her brain countered her points fairly quickly though, unhelpfully telling her she should be grateful he ever agreed to marry her in the first place. iman was an imposition onto him, in her opinion, and she accepted it. but that didn't mean she was very fond of it.

he was also imposed on her. of course everything was consented, but nothing had gone the way either of them would have liked. not that iman would know what he liked, but the feeling was underlying.

iman looked around her bedroom, and bit her lip, wondering what she would do to make it more like her own. she loosened the hijab she had been wearing ever since she had entered hakim's house, and repositioned it so it was behind her ears instead. she shook her head before sliding it off completely.

she needed to start pushing the furniture around, and a hijab would not be suitable attire for all the sweating that was coming her way.

—

this was a big mistake. iman confirmed her own thoughts once she felt the pain emerging in her lower back from lifting the unnecessarily heavy chairs from one end of the room to the other.

the room looked like a mess.

there were boring western cushions piled on the floor, picture frames with pictures of random people lying on the table, bedsheets sprawled on the door after iman lost the war to pushing the bed to the other side. the mattress was helpfully perched on its side against the only free wall, to decrease the load on the bed. but it had failed.

she stretched her arms and legs, reaching down to her toes as well to hear the cracking her bones were doing in satisfaction. she was not going to cry. in fact she was going to deal with this like an adult who knows what she is doing. besides, this wasn't a new process. she had done this a million times before.

except obviously the furniture wasn't as heavy and the room wasn't as crowded.

iman looked outside and caught the glimpse of the near evening in the window, and sucked in a breath. she had been here all day and there was minimal progress. she made her way to her overall abaya that she would wear to pray maghrib in. she hated how early it got dark in the netherlands.