From Aliya to Hafiz

Thirty-nine.

Aliya.

It has been a week since Malissa's death and Hafiz had been abnormally quiet. He did spend his time with Jasra, Ya Unais and I, but even though he was there with us, he wasn't there.

We've all made an effort to make him feel our presence, and although I found it extremely uncomfortable, I slept on the same bed as him for the past week. Most nights, he jerked awake from a nightmare, forehead drenched in cold sweat.

Honestly, I didn't think her death would hit him this much. I thought they just messed around with each other but as I heard him talk about their time together every night before we went to sleep, I realised he considered her a very good friend, something he only had with Ya Unais and Jasra.

He said he couldn't ever put down his guard with the people he considered his friends because they were all waiting to stab him in the back. I told him it must be exhausting living such a life, to which he gave me a rueful smile.

The door to the balcony opened and I turned to see the subject of my thoughts walking out in white sweatpants with his hair tousled. "I told you to stop praying out here. Isn't it cold?" He said, voice groggy from sleep.

I looked at the clear sky littered with stars before dropping my gaze back to the Quran I was holding. "It's not that cold, I enjoy the breeze," I said. "Did I wake you? This is why I come out here, I don't want my recitation to wake you up."

He walked over and sat beside me, gazing out into the dark fajir sky. "I always wake up when you leave the bed. Have you started yet?"

"No, I just finished my morning Azkar."

"Hm," he muttered, leaning back against the potted plant by the door. "Don't mind me."

I didn't have to look at him to know he had his eyes closed as he waited for me to start reciting. The first fajir I prayed in his room, he had woken up and sat beside me, observing me pray and then recite. From then on, he always woke up to listen to me recite, much to my surprise. When I asked him why, he said whenever he saw us reciting the Quran, we always had this calm and peaceful air about us.

"I want some of that as well."

I had asked him to just recite himself since he spoke and understood Arabic well. He had stared at me for a long time, so long that I ignored him and started reciting. He then spoke, shocking me into a deep silence.

"I can't recite the Quran. I can say the words individually and even decipher their meanings, but I can't read them as a sentence."

I couldn't put my mood into words back then. I just thought that indeed it was Allah alone who inspired how to recite the Quran in us. Why else would someone who spoke, wrote and understood a language fluently be unable to read it?

When I reached the juz I was to stop, I closed the Quran and made dua for my late father, family and the Muslim ummah. And then I asked for guidance for Hafiz, it was something I had started doing these days. And from what I was seeing, maybe, and just maybe, we were making progress.

Hafiz drew himself up and gave me his hand. "Let's go back in, aren't your feet numb?"

I grabbed his outstretched hand, it was getting easier to accept his touch. It no longer felt foreign and wrong and invasive. As usual, we laid on our backs with a respectable distance between us.

"How are you feeling?" I asked, the question a routine at this point.

"I'm shaking it off now," he said. "She's gone and I've accepted that. I think it helped a lot that her family didn't blame me."