when-ali-met-honour

Do you have a girlfriend?''No,' I said quickly.Deny Honour again. Peter only denied Jesus three times. I must have denied Honour like three thousand times.

My heart was in my mouth. I realised that I had no desire to know any more about her past. What was behind her made me feel sick, petrified. Only the future mattered now.

Her voice was erudite, interesting; the voice of someone who straddled two cultures with a surety and style that I wished my boyfriend could find. She was smart, funny, and, above all, completely capable of controlling her life and what happened to it.

The fires of hell were seventy times hotter than the fires of the iron.

They say some couples are joined in heaven, and on Earth they look for their partner soul to be with.I knew I had found mine in her. And who can fight heaven?

The alternatives in my life went through my mind. Unemployed, alone, despairing, watching daytime TV. That couldn't end well.Or helping people, like genuinely making a difference. Imagine waking up and doing that every day?

People don't really change, they just adapt to circumstances.

Honour, in her modern self-confidence, had grown up never having to face actual raw, passionate, drop-down-dead-hostility. She didn't really understand what was going to happen,

There is something so special in the early leaves drifting from the trees - as if we are all to be allowed a chance to peel, to refresh, to start again.

When I was a child I burnt the back of my right hand on a hot iron. I can't recall the pain, but there's an eye-shaped scar as testament to it. As a teenager I used to think it was the all seeing eye of the anti-Christ and that I was the devil incarnate. Or at least a minion. It was my right hand, innit?What I do remember though is my father, or Dad as we called him, abandoning the polite Abbu, telling me not to cry and to be patient because the fires of hell were seventy times hotter than the fire of the iron.

I steadied by guitar against the table, and steadied myself with it.And forgot every rule I had ever known.

The evening that Al and I met became the night that we met. By the time we fell asleep at daybreak we were different people

I drank in his smell, I'd missed him so much more than I'd realised. Despite dreaming of him every night, besides my secret habit of writing Honour Hussain in curled scripts on every scrap piece of paper, I surprised myself by how much I needed him.

9/11 forced us to build another identity, to look deep and say who are we and what do we believe and is killing in the name of Islam part of that religion?No. No. No.

It was things like that I remembered about Ruby, the incongruity, the struggle to find herself.No matter what she wore though she was always Ruby, always herself.

Do you ever look up at the stars and try to contemplate the ends of the universe?

I needed a fresh start, away from the memories that we had made for him, away from the home that didn't feel like my own anymore.Away from the people that had been ready to welcome him. Away from Honour and Ali.