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➳ sporadic updates
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❝pray tell, young lass,
what do you know about hell?❞
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For Aala AbdulMalik, her hom...
“weariness was me, woe was me, wistfulness was me, and me alone.” –Ellis, Queen Of Death
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Vetë keqardhje; Albanian
Self-pity, mother of insecurity
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Aala had always been a night owl.
Even before she crossed oceans and left behind a land of myths to come to the land of greenery, she remembered enjoying the moon-lit, midnight walks she always took with the woman that appeared in her dreams, during the times that her father was not around, with the chirping crickets and the Ionian Sea as their companion.
She’d often re-live those nights, and surround herself with the softest of her pillows, trying to re-create the feel of her mother’s arms wrapped around her, lulling her to sleep in a language only they and the land she left behind knew.
When she was eight, the night before her ninth birthday, her siblings locked her out of the house, forcing her to sleep outside with a cold rock as a pillow and the night as a blanket; she slept on the floor, where scum like her belonged. The next morning, when her father found her outside, shivering and blue from the cold, she kept mum and didn’t out her siblings when he’d asked, thinking, in her naïve, childish way that just like her favourite characters from her favourite cartoons had done several times, her siblings would finally forgive her of the sin she had no hand in, if she took the fall for them.
She got hospitalised and was diagnosed with hypothermia, and throughout her stay in the hospital, she practised her lines and imagined her siblings forgiving her, welcoming her into their fold and they’d live happily ever after.
Thinking of the memory now, as she sat atop a hill overlooking the part of Abuja where she lived, she scoffed at her innocence, for what she’d expected was a world away from what had occurred.
She remembered how she’d been fidgeting with nervousness throughout the ride from the hospital back to her luxurious cage; how her father had made the doctor sign a non-disclosure agreement regarding her, how she’d gone up to their playroom and stared at the space they had never allowed her to enter prior to that day, how she’d gone up to Haidar, their ring leader, for her elder brothers— AbdulMajeed and AbdulRahman— were not one to get their hands dirty by involving themselves with her; and Ayesha would settle for a disdainful look spilling with hatred for her, punishment for an ancient crime, one she never partook in.
