An emotion of great delight

He took my face in his hands, pinned me in place with his eyes and I, I was so desperate to exhale this pain that I could not bring myself to break away. I was shaking, my heart trembling in my chest. Even now I was trying to push it all back, pretend it away, pull myself together, but there was something about his skin against my skin, the heat radiating from his body—that broke the last of my self-control.

The heat would not abate. It was ravenous again, hungry and terrible, pooling in my gut, my throat, behind my eyes. I’d tried for months to keep everything inside, to say nothing, speak to no one, soldier through. For nearly a year I’d held my breath, stitched closed my lips, devoured myself until I could not manage another bite. I’d not known the limits of my own body at the onset, had not known how long it would take to digest pain, had not realized I might not be able to contain it or that it might continue to multiply. I spent every day standing at the edge of a terrifying precipice, peering into the abyss, wanting, not wanting to plummet.

I turned to face him and realized he was sitting close to me, much closer than before. I nearly jumped out of my skin. We locked eyes and he made as if to speak, his lips parting for the briefest moment before they froze like that, a breath apart. He was just staring at me now, looking into my eyes with a startling intensity. I felt fear skitter through my blood.
His voice was different—almost unrecognizable—when he said, “Were you crying?”

I should’ve seen it then, that our friendship was fast approaching its expiration date. My problem was that I didn’t know friendships could have an expiration date at all.

But I could not understand those people who disregarded the essence of faith—love, compassion, forgiveness, the necessary expansion of the soul—in favor of a set of rules, a set of rules they declared to be true divinity.

My friendship with Zahra had long been imperfect.
She’d been cruel to me in a thousand small ways for years, had proven herself a fickle, disloyal friend many times over. I should’ve been the one to walk away, should’ve done it long ago. But she’d been one of the few solid things in my life, and I hadn’t been ready to let go. I clung with the tips of my fingers to the fast-crumbling cliff of our friendship, and when she finally kicked me down, into the chasm, I experienced a strange, disorienting relief.

Death demanded we question the privately held, still-forming philosophies that shaped our hearts. We studied one another’s weak flesh and festering minds in the harsh, unflattering light of a midday sun, and when the moon rose, we’d found ourselves alone on different quadrants of the earth. I stood as far away from my sister as my mother did from my father, and I’d spent the last year trying and failing to bridge those distances.
The trouble was, I was often the only one making the effort.

It was easy to dismiss our strained relationship with a shrug and a platitude about how she and I were just different, but I knew it was more complicated than that. We’d never been very close, but our paths had only recently split in earnest, and only because we couldn’t agree on a single matter of great importance.

Dear God, I thought. Help me.
My tears made no sound.
I didn’t know how long I spent there, my body poorly heated by a weak showerhead, didn’t know how long I’d been crying. I’d gone back in time, turned into a fetus, laid there on the shower floor like an infant unclaimed. Soundless sobs wracked my body, tore open my chest. I did not know what to do with all this pain. I did not know whether I wanted to be born.

(…) but my heart and mind were so full these days they were stretching at the seams, leaving little room for the efforts I’d once made to participate in my own life, in my own interests.