: I’ve Always Known Layla

It sometimes feels like I’ve always known Layla, always been in love with her.

I remember the day I first saw her, driving home, oblivious of the late night rain. I was staring at the traffic light, wondering why this huge alien red eye was glaring at me, when something at the edge of my vision caught my attention, and I glanced at the car beside me.

There she was in the backseat, not a care in the world. A little smile was unconsciously playing at the corner of her mouth, as she sat reading something in her hand, the street lights casting their yellow, sickly light on her pretty face, failing to mar its beauty.

I knew right then and there that this was Layla.

It was like a magnetic tug, the pull of tides… I began following her car; a task in itself pre-ordained, already written. This was fate. History was being made.

The car came to rest in front of a small elegant house, and I sat in my car, mesmerized by her graceful movements. The driver opened her door for her, and then climbed the stairs to the door. She moved like a dream, her feet barely touching the ground, as if the earth itself hesitated to apply her mean gravity on such an ethereal creature.

I put my hand on my chest, making sure my heart still beat within… that it hasn’t been swept away in her wake.

A policeman came walking down the block. When he passed beside me, I looked at him and smiled. He returned a somewhat bemused smile and moved on.

Getting her number was easy, a simple task of asking whose house this was, then dialing directory assistance on my mobile phone.

I stored the number in my phone, and then repeated it to myself twice, softly, to memorize it.

…Then I wrote the number on a piece of paper, just in case.

In the drive back home, I couldn’t resist, I called her house. I wanted to know what angels sounded like, and I wanted to be sure.

Her “hello” was the sound of sunrise, the music of smiles. For a full minute I was rendered speechless…Layla! This is my Layla. “Hi,” I said, and, in my mind’s eye, I could see the frown that has begun to form between her delicate eyebrows smooth out. When I didn’t say anything further, she said “hello” again, and I knew then that she was smiling.

“Layla?” I asked, smiling as I uttered the word, knowing that she wouldn’t know yet … wouldn’t understand.

But I was going to make her understand.

She laughed then, a laugh that made every cell in my body light up. Her laugh made me feel as if everything was right again, as if love was endless, and I was basking in its delight.

“Sorry, it’s the wrong number. Bye.” Then, a click.

…I slept with the phone placed next to my sweetly aching heart.

That night I dreamt about the policeman I saw near Layla’s house.

I was 6 again, and I had just come back from the store with a bag of plastic toy soldiers I bought. I was sneaking into grandmother’s house… waiting for her to sleep so I can steal her magnifying glass, the one that she uses to help her read.

After obtaining that little weapon, I went out to the street. Kneeling near the corner of the block, I started using it to burn the toy soldiers one by one, and each of them had the immobile, frozen face of the policeman.

They didn’t scream though, except maybe inside my head.

Suddenly a shadow blocked my sun, and I looked up. I couldn’t really see the person’s feature, the sun being behind them that way, but I knew. I knew.

It was her, and she was smiling at me.

“Burn me.”

She smiled, at me… I put on my sunglasses.

I think she wants me.

I was the beast. I always have been the beast. Forged in hellfire, I still dared to aspire to pureness. White pain exploded behind my retinas.

She whispered, fingers tracing delicate circles in the small of my back. Her voice… oh her voice… like the soft hum of satin sliding over her thighs, a spring breeze, bringing news of smiles and happiness…. “ I love you, I love…”

“…You “, my voice, my lips forming the words, hers and mine merging, and I say her name, again and again….

“Layla…”

She watched the dancing flames with me. Shadows cast on her smiling eyes, and I knew from the look on her face that it was joy, dancing inside her just like the flames we were watching.

As I looked, a drop of sweat came trickling down her cheek, like a lonely, forgotten tear. I stood transfixed by it’s journey over her angelic face. The drop acted like a lens, magnifying the skin underneath it, and I could see the slight flush of excitement there, and the tiny, almost microscopic blonde hairs on her velvet skin, almost – but not quite- bending under the passage of this almost-tear.

Suddenly I felt an urge, a blind desire, to kiss her there, to feel the texture of her face under my lips, and taste the slightly salty taste of her. Fill my nose with her smell. All my nerve-ends felt exciting, I was on fire. A white burning heat that would consume the flames we were watching in an instant, and still not quench its hunger.

The dancing flames wavered a little then, as if fearing the advance of my private furnace, and Layla looked at me. Lips slightly parted, in her eyes that expression again, the one that said she knew what I was thinking about. She was in control… only this time, that expression said more.

She moved into my waiting arms.

Moving my fingertips over her cheek, I said, never taking my eyes of hers: “you are my Layla.”

She started to protest, smiling, “But I am not Layla, that’s not even my name. My name is-“

“Shush”, I said, not ungently, placing my finger on her lips, when suddenly it was insanity, feeling her lips with my finger… her warm, moist lips. It took all my concentration to keep my finger from trembling. To keep my arms from enfolding her…

“You are my Layla… I love you”, I said in a soft voice I didn’t really recognize as my own.

She smiled then, and I could feel ice melting (Shattering, Breaking) inside me, in my heart.

Layla…

The room took on a hazy feeling, as if I was viewing it through water. I touched my fingers to my cheeks, and then looked at them.

The blood on them was mixed with a transparent watery liquid.

I was crying.

And I looked at her eyes (Oh her angel’s eyes!), and they were staring back at me with a new alien life, as if she was mocking me.

© Shadi N. Saber, all rights reserved.