PATHS TO FAITH

King She was a diamond amongst dirt. And she was mine. The room was dark save for the soft blue glow of the television washing over her face. She didn't know I was watching her. She rarely did. She had fallen asleep the way she always did — quietly, without fuss, her arm wrapped around my torso and her head resting against my shoulder as though she had been designed to fit exactly there. My fingers moved through her soft brown hair slowly, unhurried, the way a man moves when he has nowhere else to be and nothing more to want. I had everything I needed in this room. Her long lashes cast small shadows against her smooth cheeks. Her button nose, her lips — every detail of her face felt like a deliberate act of creation. Perfectly proportioned by the Almighty, as though He had taken particular care. And perhaps He had. Perhaps this was what it felt like to receive a blessing you had not earned and could not fully explain. How did I get so lucky? SubhanAllah. I thought about the years before her. The years I did not like to think about for too long. I had moved through women the way some men move through cities — without settling, without intending to, leaving nothing of value behind. The daughters and sisters of other men, treated as though they existed only for my entertainment. I had not been cruel in the way that leaves visible marks. But I had been careless, which is its own kind of cruelty. I had taken what was offered and moved on without looking back. Those women had given pieces of themselves to men like me. Men who held them briefly, treated them gently for a season, and then grew bored and disappeared. A cycle that diminished everyone inside it. I had been part of that cycle without shame, without question, without ever stopping to consider what I was actually doing. Until her. She had waited. In a world that told her waiting was weakness, that guarding herself was old-fashioned, that purity was something to be embarrassed about — she had waited anyway. She had preserved herself not out of fear but out of faith. Out of a deep and quiet belief that she was worth more than what the world was offering. That somewhere, there was a man who would receive her as the gift she was. Allah (swt) had chosen me to be that man. Of all men. Me. I still did not fully understand it. I suspected I never would. But I had made a promise to myself on the night we married, a promise I renewed every morning without speaking it aloud — that I would spend every day of my life being worthy of what I had been given. That I would show her through action, not declaration, how profoundly I understood the weight of this blessing. We would not be together only until death parted us, the way the old vows go. By the will of Allah, we would meet again beyond this life. In Paradise, where I would have forever to love her the way she deserved. Forever was not enough.