That night she didn’t sleep until after the dawn call to prayer, the first of the five prayers, sounded. She stayed up filling her journal with war plans and rules of engagement that she vowed not to break. She felt she needed them for the days to come in case that heart of hers threatened to stray off the path. That was her usual way: to write down her thoughts and ideas on paper so that she would stick to her decisions.
In her journal, she wrote down everything: her general observations about men; the various pitfalls and misfortunes suffered by herself and her girlfriends and relatives; and snippets of advice she had heard or read at some time or other that remained perched in her mind waiting for the right moment. All of her instructions to herself began with “I will not…”
I will not allow myself to love him until I sense his love toward me.
I will not become attached to him before he proposes!
I will not let go of my guard and open up to him and I will not tell him about myself; I will stay vague and mysterious (men prefer that in women, an open-book girl is no challenge to them); and I will not let him feel that he is aware of every detail going on in my life no matter what the urge is to spill out everything!
I will not be Sadeem. I will not be Gamrah. I will not even be Michelle.
I will NEVER be the first to get in touch, and I will not answer too many of his phone calls.
I will not dictate to him what he must do, the way every other woman does with every other man.
I will not expect him to change for my sake, and I will not try to change him. If he doesn’t appeal to me with all of his flaws, then there is no good reason for us to stay together.
I will not give up any of my rights and I will not overlook anything wrong that he does (because he must not get used to that).
I will not confess to him my love (if I fall in love with him) before he tells me he loves me first.
I will not change myself for his sake.
I will not shut my eyes or ears to any signs of danger.
I will not live in a hopeless fantasy. If he does not tell me outright that he loves me within a period not to exceed three months, and give me very clear indications concerning the future of our relationship, I will end the relationship myself!
36.
To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: November 12, 2004
Subject: Michelle Frees Herself of All Constraints
May God accept your fasting, your night prayers and all those good deeds you’ve been doing during the holy month of Ramadan. I missed all of you, my allies and my enemies, and I was touched by all the messages I got inquiring about me. They kept on coming right through the entire month of virtue. Here I am, I have returned to you like the fasting person returns to food in the month after Ramadan. Some of you thought that I would stop at this point and not continue the story after Ramadan. But friends and foes: I will carry on. The wick of confessions coils long. And the longer it burns, the more my writings blaze.
Michelle adapted to her new life more quickly than she had expected. She welcomed the fresh start and worked hard to put her former life behind her. It was true that all her deep anger and resentment at her world still lay crouched inside of her, but she was able to make enough peace with it so that she appeared undamaged to people around her. It helped that Dubai was prettier than she had expected, and that she and her family were treated far better by everyone there than she had anticipated.
At her new university, the American University at Dubai (AUD), she met an Emarati girl named Jumana who was about the same age and was also studying information technology. The two had several classes together, and each noticed the other’s good looks and perfect American accent right away. Jumana’s dad owned one of the biggest Arab satellite TV channels, and Michelle’s father was delighted to find that his daughter had made friends with the daughter of one of the most successful men in the United Arab Emirates, if not the whole Gulf. Meshaal would tell Jumana every time she came to visit them that she was a carbon copy of his sister: same height, same figure, same hairstyle, even same taste in clothes, shoes and bags. Meshaal was absolutely right. The two girls also had the same outlook on many things, and that helped them become close quickly. Their similar attributes freed them from the nasty issue of jealousy between girls who feel inferior to each other.
At the beginning of the first year’s summer break Jumana suggested to Michelle that she work with her at her father’s TV station on a weekly TV youth program. Michelle agreed enthusiastically. Every day they surfed Arab and foreign Internet sites searching out breaking arts news, which they presented in a report to the program’s producer. They were enthusiastic and thorough, and the producer gave them responsibility for handling the entire arts section on their own. As it happened, Jumana had planned to spend the rest of the vacation traveling with her family in Marbella, so the task fell on Michelle’s shoulders alone.
Michelle threw herself into her new job and continued it even after her fall term started. The program reported news and gossip about Arab and foreign celebrities, so Michelle’s job required her to contact PR managers around the Arab world to confirm this rumor or that or to schedule interviews. She got to know some of the people she reported on personally, and they began to include her in their plans when they visited Dubai. She got invitations to their parties regularly.
A few months later, Michelle was officially made a producer of the program. Then she got her own show to produce. They asked her to be the on-air presenter, but Michelle’s father refused to allow her to host a show that would be broadcast in the homes of his relatives in Saudi Arabia. They ended up using a young Lebanese woman instead.
Working in the media opened up new horizons for Michelle, and for the first time she felt truly liberated from all the restrictions that had always been imposed on her. As she came to know different sorts of people and her network of friends and contacts grew, she began to feel increasingly confident and ambitious at work. Everyone there adored her, which motivated her to produce even better work. Jumana remained her close friend, but she wasn’t particularly fond of the work, so after graduation she took an administrative job at the station.
37.
To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: November 19, 2004
Subject: A Man Just Like Any Other?
Live your life fully, the sweet and the bitter,
and who knows? A new darling might come along
someone who would treat your sores
so your joy comes back
and you forget old love and me
and move outside the circle of my grief—Bader Bin Abdulmuhsin*
Brother Adel—who, I will hazard a guess, is a statistician—sent me a message criticizing my e-mails for being of varying lengths and not symmetrical like the hems of dresses in vogue this year. Adel says that in order for the lengths of my e-mails to be even, they must show evidence of natural distribution. According to him, natural distribution means that 95 percent of the data contained therein will center around the mean (taking into consideration of course the standard deviation), while the percentage of data outside the area of normal distribution on both sides of the mean does not exceed 2.5 percent in either direction, such that the sum total of standard deviation is 5 percent.