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Henna and Homesickness.

My hand over her knee, she hesitated on lines that were meant to be straight, all while it didn’t matter. If the scent of toxins in the henna hadn’t made it clear, the separation of the joined lines into dotted ones would have made it clear the next morning. 

I was sick that morning. Homesickness had hit when I least expected it. I had been home in February. I had spent far more months apart than those few weeks. What was it? Why was my heart so miserable looking at the beautiful statuses of everyone celebrating Eid? 

Their hands stained with a deep maroon in gorgeous designs, adorned with new jewellery. You could smell the perfume and oud. The earthy smell of the mehendi, and the fresh scent of the eidi money I was too old to ask for. 

Most of all, the heavenly food I took for granted. Meat falling apart at the touch of our hands. The aroma of my mother's biriyani, the sweet scent of her 'payasam'. I missed it all. Deeply so. 

Why weren't my hands maroon? Why wasn't I at the dinner table in the family photos this Eid? 

I was bitter. I don't remember how it came to be but I was in her room and the henna cone was there too. With our hands free, the decision was made before we thought of it. The universe had planned it. 

We drew each other's names, her writing my name on the side of my pointer finger, and I writing hers on the start of her arm vertically next to the ghost I took too long to complete. It was cute nonetheless. 

The names in Arabic—I almost wrote "haywan" instead of "Hanna," and we laughed about it. Arabic, being the medium to unknowingly gloss over the years spent in the Gulf, brought a sting to me then. It softened with her, like the edges of the crescent moon she drew on my hand. It was meant to be sharp, the edges and that Eid.

Yet, in the unseriously drawn image of a JPG and a rice cooker in an attempt at Japanese letters on the side of her leg, the yearning for pain and its escape disappeared in our laughter. I loved it—the hesitancy in the lines, the dotted lines, the unskilled art, the love and laughter of it all.

That morning, I thought it didn’t matter. I had given up. Now, four months later, I still think the same: it doesn’t matter. I have given up on the pain.

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