#thoraya

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FIRST DRAFT Thoraya

Settling on her design. Sketch.

Ooof! I feel this so much.

I’ve followed Thoraya’s videos for years now. She’s one of the best human beings out there. 😍

Video made by Thoraya.

Stunning, in perfect shape, and adventurous. The life of the party.  Creative, writer, and lyrical. A photographer, and an animal lover. One of a kind.

All of these things, Thoraya was not. She was a senior in high school in one of the Gulf countries. Not a “local” but a citizen, nevertheless. She was born in that country, and has lived there for the majority of her life. Despite that though, she never felt any sentiments towards this desert temperature clad land. She never belonged there in the first place. Her heart was over there, across the Red Sea, in the most magnificent of countries. The country that was a beautiful amalgam of cultures, ethnicities, and religions, intrigued her. Although, she only spent her summer vacations there, her love for her home country continued to grow and expand in her heart. When she was younger, she frequently got asked by her relatives, which country she liked better. She’d reply with a child’s innocent criteria, that she preferred the Gulf country. It was cleaner, less crowded, and far more organized. Young Thoraya would also point out the fact that you’d rarely see people in the streets, only cars. However, as she grew up, she soon realized the emptiness of that land. She became aware of its hollowness, shallowness, and contradictions. It sometimes occurred to her that she hated it, but she was never an ungrateful person. She knew that without that country, and her father’s job in that country, she wouldn’t be enjoying half of the things in her life at the moment. So she set her feelings regarding that country to indifference, neither did she like it nor did she hate. Like her feelings for most things in her life.

Thoraya was for the most part independent, except perhaps for when her mother used to wake her up every day for school. In that sense though, she was not as independent as she thought. But she was okay with that. She didn’t see why she couldn’t revel in such a privilege. At the age of eighteen, Thoraya has never once, set an alarm. Her mornings were spent in a blurry hurry. She didn’t bother with breakfast. She knew that it was “the most important meal of the day” and all that, but she never was a healthy person anyway. Every day, the reader would find, up on the dining table, three cups of chocolate milk. At which point, it occurs to me that I’ve never mentioned that Thoraya had three other siblings, and so clearly these three cups were set for them. Her mother has long ago lost hope in Thoraya ever having breakfast. Her school bus’s honk would often be heard while Thoraya was brushing her teeth. She’d grab her socks, put on her dirty converse shoes (much to her mother’s dismay) and dash to the door. Now Thoraya never tied her shoe laces. Maybe she didn’t do it out of laziness, or carelessness, but in that simple act, her spirit and personality can be summed up.

And so the girl who never tied her shoe laces would go to school…