I have a folder on my phone that is just places.
Saved posts. Screenshots. A bookstore in a city I have never been to with wooden shelves and a ladder that slides. A cafe with three tables and a hand-painted sign. A street I have looked at so many times I could probably find my way down it in the dark.
I was scrolling through it last night at 2am instead of sleeping and I realised I have planned the outfit for that street. Not consciously. It just arrived one day, the whole image of me walking down it in something I already own, and now that outfit belongs to that street and I cannot wear it anywhere else until I have been.
I want to take my brother.
That is the part I keep returning to. Not the street. His face on the street. The specific moment when a place lands on someone who has never seen it and something shifts in them permanently. I want to be standing next to him when that happens.
I closed the folder and lay there and felt the clock.
Not a real one. The one that starts ticking when you are old enough to understand that the life you want and the time you have are two different numbers and you do not get to know either of them.
And then I thought about her.
The girl in Afghanistan.
Does she have a folder?
Does she save places she has never been? Does she have a street she has walked down in her mind so many times it feels like a memory even though she has never once been on it? Does she have an outfit that belongs to a city that does not know she exists?
Or has imagining somewhere else become a thing she had to stop doing to survive where she is.
I add to that folder without thinking. Something catches my eye and I save it and the saving alone is a small pleasure and it costs nothing and I love that it costs nothing.
Does she still save things?
Or did she close the folder one day and not open it again.
I am in my twenties and I think about who I am becoming in this open-ended, greedy, delicious way. Like flipping through possible versions of myself. Maybe that one. Maybe something I have not thought of yet. I lie awake genuinely anxious about how much I want and how little time there is to do all of it and I know that anxiety is a privilege even while it is keeping me awake.
Does she lie awake wanting?
Or does she lie awake counting. Years. Doors. The number of things that have closed since the last time the future felt like it belonged to her.
She was in school once. She had a favourite subject. She had a teacher who said something to her one afternoon that she has never forgotten and probably never will. She had a version of herself at thirty that she used to be able to see quite clearly.
I wonder if she can still see it.
Or if the picture has gone soft at the edges the way things do when you stop looking at them.
Last week I bought a book because the cover was beautiful. Not because I needed it. Because it existed and I wanted it and the wanting was reason enough and the world said yes without me having to ask twice.
She is not incapable of wanting a book because the cover is beautiful.
She is capable of it. She probably does it constantly. The wanting is not the thing they took.
The saying yes is.
She is somebody's difficult first daughter.
Somebody's restless one. Somebody's girl who wants too much and knows it and should be allowed to want it anyway. She has a bookstore in her head. A street she has walked in her mind. A brother whose face she wants to watch seeing something beautiful for the first time.
She has the outfit picked out too.
The only difference between her and me is which side of a border we were born on.
That is the whole difference.
Her clock is ticking too. She can hear it. She has been listening to it for years.
The only thing she has never had is somewhere for it to be counting down to.
For every girl with a folder full of places she is not allowed to go,
Hafsa