A Tasbeeh

I have a Tasbeeh in my possession. It has 100 big round wooden beads. Occasionally I use them to do my chants. I do the Dhikr exactly as I was taught when I was a child. I go through the chain repeating the chants 33 times. I do not do them less or more. I do not question the logic behind it. I am just glad that I have something to do during the times I cannot recognise myself. During the times I stand failed in my own rationality. During the times when it is only the air I breathe that has any meaning.

The Tasbeeh I have, the one I carry along everywhere with my migraine and anxiety medicines, belonged to my father. It belonged to my father during that period in my life when I could love him and before I lost that ability. Before I stopped needing his hugs to calm to me down after a bad math test paper. Before I learned that love entails hate and pain. Before he turned into someone else under the weight of his failed marriage and ambitions.

I constantly play spot-the-similarity with the new and old him. The failure stomps on my heart. Maybe if I talk to him, I will get a better glimpse of the similarities that still exist deep down, having endured the weather of his life. But I no longer know how to talk to him. The woker-than-thou liberal is busy judging him. I miss the girl who found peace and solace to the problems of her life in his words. I am sure she would have done a good job understanding him. Better yet, she would have just loved him.

Stripped of that innocence and the love that defined her past, she holds onto a Tasbeeh to calm her down from life. She holds onto it to save herself and he knows of it as something that he lost somewhere, somehow.