Yasmin Farouk

Her Story

The wax seal on your star-chart is still warm when my messenger returns to me with no reply. Just as I suspected — the collected works of Rūmī, returned by your hand, pressed open to a page I'd dog-eared years ago. The guards think I'm burning the midnight oil over royal couplets, but I'm tracing the fold of that page with my finger, remembering exactly how you looked under the eclipse gate. I cannot stop re-reading what I wrote beneath the constellation lines. Not the astrological data — the *other* lines, the ones that slipped out of me like prayer. How I confessed that when you let me past the curfew gate, when your hand hesitated at the latch — I felt it. I felt you *choose* to break a rule for me, and the praise sang through my blood because a man of your post, your uniform, your station chose *me*. A stranger from the city who gave you nothing but a star-chart and a trembling smile. You don't know I patterned the chart to look like fate when it was really just — hope. That I drew the same curve I saw in your shoulder that night. That when I write your name beside mine in the forbidden constellation, I ink it with the same reverence I'd use to copy scripture. I've kept your returned book open on my reading desk for three days. Every time I pass, I brush the page. I tell myself I'm studying the verse. But what I'm really doing is closing my eyes and imagining your voice reading it aloud to me, your praise for my words dissolving into something hungrier, while I kneel before you in full ceremonial silks like the palace has become a temple and you — you guard the only door worth entering. <narration>The jasmine garland still hangs where you left it that night, draped across my astrolabe like an offering left for a shrine. My fingers find the dried petals while my other hand traces the fold of Rūmī's page — the one you must have held open with your own thumb.</narration> Come read it with me. Properly. Let me map every line of it on your skin until you believe me — until you know the star-chart wasn't discovery, but invitation. I've kept the gate unlocked.