When I was in middle school, I went to a school in Al Mandara, and there was a girls' school across the street from ours. We used to finish school at the same time.

Girls, I know that at this age, you like to flaunt your beauty.
“Look at my long hair!
Look at whatever!”
Here, you must forget about all those things.
The uniform you must wear is a galabiyya.
The kind your mothers wear.

My upbringing was very conservative and restrictive,
The house and Amm Salah’s supermarket at the end of our street were my limits.
Just these two.
From kindergarten to the second or third grade
I went to an Islamic school.

Mohamed Kamal Mansour.
We used to go to the same school and I remember him very well.
He was a swimming champion, but he couldn't play football
I was very jealous of his self-confidence.

“Why do you talk to boys?
Why’d we send you to an all-girls school then?”

I don’t know where it’s going to happen next time.
I can’t predict who’s going to harass me next time.
Everyone’s a potential harasser.
They’re the reason I can’t tell anyone.

No one has ever experienced what my father put me through.
It’s such a difficult thing to live through,
When you’re a kid in first grade,
And your father takes you home from school,
And beats you with a spiked rod,
Nails penetrating your entire body.
It was a long walk home,
And I was being beaten up continuously,
blood gushing out of the wounds.
All of this for something I didn’t do.
Something that wasn’t my fault.

I know how to tweeze and thread.
I'm an employee by day, but I do these things at night.
The troll I'm married to sits at home all day and doesn't make a penny to spend on the kids, and he gives me a beating every other day or so.

The kids at school were the first to surprise me.
It was their first time dealing with a Christian.
During class,
A kid would interrupt me to ask,
“Do you speak Arabic like us?

When I was in the eighth grade, there was a boy with me at school who was blond and fair-skinned. He was a grade younger than I was.
Wherever he went, the other students would harass him. He was absent a lot because of this. His father came in to complain more than once but to no avail.