✧ Scene: A Symposium in Granada

It was held in Granada — not far from Córdoba, but enough of a shift to feel like a crossing.

An interdisciplinary symposium on memory, loss, and sacred texts in postcolonial frameworks. Intellectually niche. Emotionally charged. The kind of event attended not for prestige, but because something within insisted.

She was on the panel.

Zahra sat at the far left, a simple scarf tucked at her neck, her voice clear but never performative. She spoke of Andalusia not as a lost paradise, but as a layered wound — one that still whispered in archives, in architecture, in the way history chose to forget.

Aaric sat in the third row.

He hadn’t known she would be there. Or perhaps some part of him had.

He recognized her tone before her name was spoken.

As she read a passage aloud — her own translation of a pre-1492 poem written by a Muslim woman in exile — something in his chest tightened. Not desire. Not even longing.

Recognition.

"My feet do not belong to me," she translated softly,
"They are pulled by earth that remembers what I do not recall."

She looked up briefly then, across the audience. Not scanning. Seeking.

Their eyes didn’t quite meet. But their awareness did.

He didn’t speak to her after.
He left just before the last question was answered.

Later that night, she found the name “A.Soler” on the sign-in registry.

There was no signature. Just initials, scribbled at the top corner, almost hidden.

But she saw them.

He had been there.

And this time, she didn’t feel the urge to chase.

She felt the hush of alignment. Again.

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