The Wishing Flower

Chapter 17

For the next few days my only solace was my bed because my anxiety threatened to engulf me in an ocean of darkness at a moment's notice. I couldn't find the motivation to get up or eat, or really doing anything for that matter. The truth had really hit hard when I came face to face with my past at that restaurant. That's when I truly realized I had no family and or friends. Everything Adam had said to me that day was meaningless, his words like an empty black hole. Nothing really mattered to me at the moment. Not Adam, not Sajal, no one. I was numb from the heartache.

I peered outside the window as my head rested on my pillow. The sky was covered with a dark blue veil decorated with hundreds of shiny pearls, behind the veil millions of other galaxies hid. The vastness of the universe, reminding humans of their own fragility. When I was younger, Sajal and I used to lie on the bedroom floor and watch the thousands of stars twinkling in the black night. One night as we gazed at the stars Sajal asked me something,"Zee, you want to know something Mumma told me when I was a little girl, just like you?"

My eyes lit up at the mention of my mother. It's true I barely had any memories of her, but just the thought of her being alive at some time was enough to soothe me.

"She told that God created the stars so that humans can look up to them and try to live like the stars"

I looked at Sajal confused. How was a human supposed to be like a star? That didn't make any sense.

"Because you see", she continued, even when the night is at its darkest, the stars will continue to shine as bright as ever.", she said.

She turned to me and ran her fingers through my wild hair, "Zee, that's how you should live, okay? Even when things are the toughest and it seems like nothing is going right, don't you ever let your light burn out. You gotta keep shining no matter what, because you are my little star"

I pressed my face against the window, and my eyes grew wide with excitement. The stars were so bright and beautiful, I was very happy that God created stars. I turned around again to look at Sajal and noticed she was also looking at the stars, her eyes lost in the magnificence of the galaxies.

I checked my phone beside me to look at the time, it was two in the morning. Before I put my phone away, something had caught my eye on my lock screen. My lock screen was completely black except for two words in the middle, written in white. They were two words in Arabic, which mean"Indeed I am near". The text was from our Holy book, the Quran, and it was a message from God to all His people. He says indeed when we are looking for Him, He is near.

I looked back to the black sky and its vastness seemed to go on forever, stretching further without an end. You couldn't tell where the sky began and where it stopped. The sky went on for infinity. I was always preoccupied with my own sadness that I never gave my own existence any deep thought. I felt afraid, but this time it was a different type of fear. Under the blanket of the night sky, for the first time in my life I heard the yearning of my soul. Life was hard, and I knew it would continue to be so, but did I need to let that weight shatter my very existence ? I always accepted anything that had happened to me, and called it my fate, but now I realized that was just an excuse for me to sit back and do nothing. I wanted to have a say in how my future turns out, and the only one who was in the way of that, was me. Even if I had no one else by my side right now, I needed to be the star that lit up the dark sky.

I pulled the covers off and got out of bed. I brushed my knotty hair and washed my tired face. I wanted God to be on my side so bad, but I needed him to know that I was on his side as well. So I did something I hadn't done in a long time. I prayed to God. I prayed until the sun came out the next morning.