by Nura Maznavi
Blushing furiously at my father, I watched as he led the others outside. We sat quietly in the living room and looked at each other. Kashif looked as uncomfortable as I felt. Was our earlier conversation a fluke? I wondered.
Finally we began speaking, making small talk at first but falling quickly back into the easy rapport that had captured my interest four weeks earlier. Later, over lunch, I listened to the sound of laughter and saw the smiles on my parents’ faces. Our two families seemed to blend together seamlessly; I could see myself considering Kashif’s parents family someday.
Over the next few weeks, Kashif and I continued to talk on the telephone. Like any newly dating couple, our conversations ranged from light topics to serious ones. One minute we were talking about our favorite movies, and the next about how many children we wanted. I was amazed by my own comfort level and how naturally I found myself sharing personal information with him. All my life I had thought I would detest this process, yet I found myself waiting eagerly for his phone calls and the hours we spent discussing life.
A few weeks into our weekly conversations, I had just taken my earrings off and placed them on the dresser, when the phone rang. It was Kashif, calling at our usual time. I smiled as I answered the phone. I had had an interesting day at work and hoped to get his take on it. But as soon as I heard his voice, I knew something was up. He sounded different.
He began our conversation by mentioning the first photo he had received of me and laughing. “I saw your expression, and I knew you were being forced to stand there and pose,” he said. “You seemed so uninterested that you interested me!” I laughed, too, as I shared the story behind the photo. Then he grew quiet. His silence unsettled me. What was going on?
Finally, he cleared his throat. “I wanted to talk to you about something,” he said finally. “These past few weeks, I have really loved talking to you. I feel like we have a connection. I know we met just that one time at your parents’ house, and I could say that we should meet again and talk for months or years before I say this. But the truth is, I don’t need to meet you again to know I want to marry you. I wanted to ask you—will you marry me?”
I sat down on the bed, letting his words settle over me. I had met him once. Spoken to him a handful of times. And now here he was, proposing we take the ultimate leap of faith, defy the logic and the norms of the world we lived in, and commit to spending our lives together. I should have been feeling trepidation, anxiety, or doubt. Before meeting him, I had thought with certainty that I would be unable to answer this question from someone I barely knew. But the truth was, I did know him.
I knew all I needed to. I knew he was kind, that he promised to support me and my dreams, and that we shared common goals and interests in life. Yet what I knew above all these things, a knowledge I could not then articulate, was that somewhere deep inside me, I knew I wanted very much to know him—and grow with him—for the rest of my life.
“Yes,” I said into the phone, tears welling up in my eyes.
I had never been more certain of anything in my life.
We have been married nine years now, and I feel even more certain today than I did then that I made the right choice. What I did not expect, however, what I completely underestimated, was that I would continue to fall more deeply in love with him as time went on. Alhamdullilah.
Love in the Time of Biohazards
Melody Moezzi
There are few things less sexy than having the word “biohazard” plastered across your arm.
It’s a predicament I’ve found myself in on more than one occasion, thanks to an annoyingly recalcitrant pancreas. Last time I was in the hospital, I spent three less-than-fun-filled weeks there, and “sexy” was the least of my concerns. There’s nothing romantic about needing help stumbling to the bathroom, nor is there anything attractive about catheters, bedpans, or central lines. It’s a pretty foul state of affairs for me, and it’s a terrible time for witnesses.
Matthew and I were married in 2002, and in the decade since, he has always been my primary witness and assistant in such scenarios. He’s learned from prior experience that it isn’t always best to heed my directives. Leave me alone; I don’t want to shower; I don’t want to go for a walk; I don’t want to get up to pee; I don’t want to move.
I’m extraordinarily sedentary by nature, so it’s hard enough getting me to move on an average day. Leave me in a hospital alone, and my indolence can reach lethal levels.
The first stint Matthew spent with me in the hospital was in the summer of 2004, and it lasted a little over a week. In his compassion, he respected my refusal to shower. Showering was torture for me, and required more energy than I could muster. After several days of Matthew’s empathy, however, a strange smell began to permeate the room, and it didn’t take long to notice that the stench was emanating from me. I have never before nor since stunk that badly. I knew I was wrong to ignore it, but, since I was frequently unconscious, it didn’t affect me much. For those around me, however, it was all but intolerable.
Thank God one of the nurses was finally kind enough to give Matthew some advice without insulting me to my face. “You can’t listen to her,” she told him. “If you don’t do something, we’ll have to. And you don’t want that.” Water had to be involved, as fumigation was apparently not an option. So Matthew at last familiarized himself with one of the many uses for a biohazard bag.
After procuring one such bag from the nurses’ station, Matthew cuts the bottom out and slides it over my arm, taping it around whatever mess of tubing happens to be there. He tapes it so tightly that I temporarily lose circulation, as even the slightest moisture can lead to infection. Matthew then helps me undress, undresses himself, and prepares for my torture chamber. Not exactly the stuff of romance novels. There’s nothing like the smell of bleach and a surplus of handrails to kill the mood. He proceeds to do whatever my hands would do themselves in normal circumstances, and I follow his instructions (arms up . . . back to me . . . lean back, etc.). By the end of the hour-long ordeal, he generally has the added honor of having to support my body weight as well, since by that time I may have lost my balance and ability to stand. He helps my limp, exhausted body out of the shower and dries me off.
Back in the room, he pulls my hair back into a bun or a ponytail, holds up a fresh hospital gown for me to walk into, and finally reattaches all of my tubes to the IV. Then I generally ask for my next dose of Dilaudid and pass out in the bed.
I met Matthew in the fall of 1997, less than a year after I first got sick. I was seventeen and he was eighteen. It was my first semester at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Going there was the smartest decision I’ve ever made—not just because of the stellar education that I received, but because it brought me to him.
I was walking home from the library one early autumn afternoon and had nearly made it back to my dorm, when Matthew popped up out of nowhere. Trying to look nonchalant, though he had clearly been running to catch up with me, he immediately pled his case. He said he had noticed me and “noticed me noticing him,” which was a total crock of shit, as I’d never seen him before in my life. Then he asked me out. His stealth tactics and physical resemblance to Harry Connick Jr.’s serial-killing character in the film Copycat, which I had just seen the night before, freaked me out somewhat. Still, his audacity was impressive. I gave him my number, and though I must have had fifteen pens in my bag, I told him I didn’t have any, so he would just have to memorize it. This was the first of many tests I put the poor boy through.
He said he wanted to cook for me on our first date, and I told him that would be fine, but that he would have to cook something fat-free because I had a bum pancreas that was unable to digest too much fat. I told him how overindulging could easily destroy my pancreas, which could result in organ failure, which could then kill me. Talk about high maintenance! All of this was a true possibility, though admittedly unlikely and melodramatic. But if it scared him, he didn’t show it, and either way, I didn’t care. It was just
another test.
He cooked some sort of chicken, and later that night when he tried to play with my hair, I told him that there was no way I would ever date him. I told him that if I did date him, it would last maybe two weeks, and then I would lose interest. I also told him that as a good Iranian American Muslim girl, I planned on staying a virgin until I got married—always a shock to white American boys. It didn’t seem to bother him, though. I said we could be friends, fully expecting this to end as every other such encounter had ended for me, and believing that I would never hear from him again.
As it turned out, however, he actually did want to be my friend, and we kept it that way for more than two years. Matthew spent the year after we first met studying abroad at the London School of Economics, so I didn’t see him again until my junior year. Email wasn’t too big in 1998, so we wrote letters and talked by phone. Our exchanges remained platonic, but the more I learned about him, the more I thought that if I ever had to be a man, I’d want to be him. I’d never felt that way about anyone before. It was sincere admiration.
I had to take a leave of absence during the second semester of my sophomore year in order to finally have surgery on my pancreas. It was becoming increasingly painful since the mass had been discovered days after my graduation from high school. Matthew was happy for me, especially because I told him that if I had to live on that damn diet any longer, I’d have to kill myself by eating a jar of peanut butter.
It was a risky surgery, however, and the doctors weren’t prepared for what they would find. While they had originally thought I had a cyst, it turned out to be a tumor. The first few days, they told us it was malignant. My family was devastated. Pancreatic cancer has a less than 5 percent survival rate, so this diagnosis was nothing short of a death sentence. And at twenty years old, I wasn’t ready to die.
My mother, a pathologist, fought the diagnosis, emphasizing that I had lived for two years with this mass. Had it been cancerous, I should have been dead already. So the doctors took a closer look and found that my mother was right: I had a very rare tumor that looked malignant but was in fact benign. I didn’t understand all of the medical details then, and I don’t understand them all now. I do, however, understand that this experience was the greatest gift God has ever given me. Few people have the privilege of facing and defying death at such an early age. It changes you.
I remember walking into a religious shop several years later and meeting the owner, a jovial, middle-aged Indian man who was missing several front teeth. As I browsed through the prayer beads, rugs, Qur’ans and other Islamic books, and paraphernalia, the owner approached me and asked, “What happened to you?”
I was confused. “What do you mean?” I asked him. He explained that I was young, and young people aren’t interested in religion without some sort of serious impetus. He told me that he had had a near-fatal car accident, and that was what had brought him to God. I understood him immediately and told him that my pancreas was like his accident.
Shortly after my surgery in April 1999, I spent a summer in Montana. I had wanted to go there for years, and with my new lease on life, I was determined to make it happen. I headed out to Glacier National Park, where I worked in a gift shop and a café when I wasn’t climbing mountains. I set out to do all the things I had always wanted to do, and I was in a rush to do them—the kind of rush I’d be in if I were running late for an important interview, but the interview was with myself. I had to figure out what I wanted to do with my life and how I was going to do it.
When I first called Matthew from Montana, I must have sounded crazy, and in many ways, I was. I had seen God in everything there—the people I met, the lakes I swam in, the glaciers I slid down, the wildflowers I couldn’t pick, even the bears and moose that terrified me—and I had fallen in love with Him. It helped that I was reading the Qur’an and beginning to pray regularly, but what really brought me closer to God was this love and gratitude for creating a place like this for us humans to play in, however briefly. And just as northwestern Montana was in many ways the place that brought me to God, Matthew was the person.
I left Montana and headed back to Wesleyan with an entirely new mentality. Up until then, most of my education had been through books. Over that spring and summer in Montana, however, I had learned more from experience than I had ever learned from books. Drunk with a new love for life and for the God who had given it to me, I was ready to meet Matthew again. We were soon inseparable.
One night, we went to Staples looking for office chairs and ran into this crackhead, high as a kite, trying out the chairs as well. He was spinning as fast as he could on as many different chairs as he could find. Having failed to secure the perfect chair, and losing interest in the crackhead’s new take on the Sit ’n Spin, Matthew and I proceeded to chase each other around the store and were nearly kicked out. Somewhere between the aisles of Post-its and highlighters, I realized that I was in love with him. I had never been in love before, but I knew this was it, and I prayed that God would never take him away from me.
I had seen so many of my friends fall prey to love. But this felt different. I knew that God would never give me more than I could bear, and I knew that after all that I had already been through, I couldn’t bear to lose Matthew. Still, the probability of marrying my first love seemed painfully low, especially at the turn of the twenty-first century. Somehow, though, this reality didn’t faze me. I fell.
Matthew and I were married in the fall of 2002. He converted to Islam in the spring of that same year. Though he was brought up Catholic, he had never been religious. He grew up to become a curious agnostic, and when he saw what Islam had done for me, he became interested. He’s always been a voracious reader and delighted in embarking upon a close read of any book. So, when he did this with the Qur’an, I didn’t think anything of it. I didn’t expect or want him to convert; I wanted him to be who he was and to use whatever religion or philosophy he thought he needed to get him to where he wanted to go. It turned out for him, however, that Islam was a part of that religion and philosophy. I have to admit that I now consider his conversion a sort of bonus, but at the time I just thought it was unnecessary. Some of the best “Muslims” I’ve known have not identified as such, and some of the worst have pigheadedly insisted on doing so.
What I love most about Islam is its focus on actions. We are or are not Muslims on the basis of our intentions and actions, not on the basis of our words. And no one is fit to judge those actions and intentions save God Himself. So calling yourself a Muslim doesn’t make you a Muslim any more than calling yourself a goat makes you a goat. Likewise, simply saying you’re in love, with God or any of his creations, doesn’t mean that you’re in love. You have to act on it, even when you’re not feeling particularly loving, lovely, or lovable. More than anything else, Matthew has taught me this, not by telling me, but by showing me.
Toward the end of my last hospital stay, after that final shower, as I was walking into the gown that Matthew was holding up for me, I had enough energy to pull off an imitation of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. Arms held up in front of me, walking toward the gown, rolling my eyes into the back of my head, I announced, “I’m alive! I’m alive!” And I felt it. While these showers are always draining, they never fail to bring me a sense of rebirth in the end. My hospital memories tend to be vague, thanks to the fog that accompanies a stream of steady IV narcotics, but I have a clear memory of my last shower in the hospital.
Matthew laughed at my pathetic parody, then tied up the strings on the back of my gown and helped me back into bed. As he was reattaching the dreaded tubes, ignoring my persistent pleas for just a few hours of “freedom” from the rolling IV contraption, I looked up at Matthew and realized that this was love.
All the romance in the world couldn’t match that moment. Overcome with devotion, I pulled his head toward mine. I told him that he was my favorite human and that I loved him more than anything or anyone else on Earth. He kissed me, laughed, and told me that
maybe it was time to lower my dose of narcotics.
A Prayer Answered
Tolu Adiba
I suppose I’ve always known that I am gay. That did not deter me from converting to Islam when I was eighteen years old. Nor did it prevent me from becoming engaged twice to men I barely knew. Thankfully, both of those engagements fell apart. One wanted to move overseas, and the other was a married man who asked me to be his second wife. I was open to both options—I thought I might be able to improve my Arabic by living abroad, and being a second wife would ease some of the responsibilities of marriage. But when neither situation worked out, I was reflective, not heartbroken. I immersed myself in learning and practicing my faith. Given Islam’s seemingly stern textual prohibition on homosexuality and strong emphasis on marriage, I uncritically accepted that I would eventually get married to a good man.
But my earliest and most innocent crushes, going back to fourth grade, were on girls. Although it didn’t seem strange to me then, I did not yet have the vocabulary to describe my feelings. My attraction to women became clearer to me in adolescence, just as Ellen DeGeneres was coming out on television, but the pressure of disapproval from my family and peers kept me firmly in the closet. Also, because I was not completely averse to guys and because I wanted children, marriage to a man seemed much more realistic than ending up with a girl and having kids.
When I began the process of learning about Islam, I put my thoughts about my sexuality on the back burner. At the time, I was still reeling from an unrequited romance with a female friend. We had grown close our final year of high school, before we both went away to college and into the unknown. I spent months working up the courage to tell her that I loved her and wanted to be with her, even if the distance between our universities separated us. But when I told her, she recoiled and said, “I like guys.” Ah—my gaydar had missed the mark. My proclamation hurt our friendship, so I quickly learned to become much more cautious and renewed my vow to remain closeted.
