I stopped hearing about her a long time ago.
When I found out that she was in a relationship,
With someone who was prepared for marriage,
And that they were intending to get married,
I withdrew in a nice manner and wished her all the best.
I mean I know my luck:
I am always too late.

It was maybe a year later that I started hearing of her again.
I heard that her husband was treating her terribly,
Beating and abusing her,
And that his highness used all the drugs that he could get his hands on.
I also found out that she knew that he was using before they got married,
But that he had told her that he only smoked hash,
And that he, God willing, was going to quit after marriage.

The expected ending to all this,
To my personal knowledge,
Was definitely a divorce.
But strangely enough,
Their marriage lasted for almost two years.
I figured she must love him and that’s why she was putting up with him,
But they ended up divorcing anyways.
I didn’t try to get closer to her or even show up at all,
In the way certain people do to exploit situations to their advantage.
And even though I was really eager to learn more about what was happening,
I remembered Nietzsche’s wisdom,
When he said that for every woman there is a master and there is a slave.
That always stopped me.

Nietzsche was wrong twice though.
Once when he didn’t say slaves,
And another when he didn’t say,
“If you’re not her master don’t be her slave.”
But I know that fate had made its decision,
And now the only position available for me was that of the slave;
Something I would never accept for myself.

I was surprised to find her calling me.
She blamed and reproached me for what happened to her.
I explained that both our situations were sensitive.
That I had wanted to hear her news from afar,
Because I didn’t want to add to her worries,
And that she should consider me her brother if she needed anything.
She said nothing and I couldn’t say anything else either.

I found out later that her husband was trying to get her back.
With a lot of promises that he no longer did any drugs,
And that he'd never lay a hand on her again.
The strange thing is that she went back to him in less than three months,
And she travelled with him to the Emirates.
I wished them a happy life away from me.

Two years later,
I got a call from a mutual friend
Who said that she was back in Egypt.
She’d been through a series of disasters,
And had lived with her husband for almost a year and a half,
Just trying to make ends meet.

On his way to work,
His highness was caught with pills in his car,
When he was involved in an accident that rendered him permanently disabled.
So his highness called her before he was locked up,
Told her about the drugs stored in their house,
And told her that she must get rid of them one way or another,
Because they were definitely going to search the house.

The bigger problem was that she was pregnant.
After a lot of inner dialogue and struggle,
She called her father who told her
To leave her house and to go at once to one of their relatives in the Emirates.
She quickly packed her clothes,
Or in other words, whatever she was able to throw in a bag,
And she fled to her relative’s.

I can, of course, easily imagine the things she said:
“Thank you,
You are my flesh and blood.”
“Your mother is the cousin of the niece of so and so.”
And last, but not least,
“The moment I reach Egypt, I’ll send you the ticket money.”

She is now in Egypt,
But she’s pregnant.
Her father is suing her husband,
Who has been convicted and imprisoned and has lost all his belongings.
Her father is determined to divorce his daughter from him,
And this brings us to a whole other problem.

Her mom convinced her that she consulted a lot of sheikhs,
Who told her that it’s permissible to abort the baby.
She was at a clinic less than a day later,
Getting an abortion without her husband.

As usual, she came to me complaining,
But after she did what she did.
I asked her calmly and with caution,
“What kind of sheikhs exactly said that it’s okay?
Are you sure that they are actual sheikhs and not fake ones?”
A couple of days later she told me that she had confronted her mom,
Who had admitted that she didn’t ask anyone,
And that she did it because she wanted her to cut all ties with him.

What is really funny about this whole thing is that,
She went and told her brother-in-law,
Who in turn told her husband and his family.
They decided to file several lawsuits against her and her family,
That could get them all jailed for a good number of years.

She came to me crying, looking for a solution,
I told her, “Sadly, there is no way out anymore.
There is nothing you could do except go down the path your parents drew for you.
Regarding the lawsuits, a good lawyer will be able to get you out of them.
As for your faults, they’re for God to judge.
May he help you in the mess you’ve gotten yourself into.

I don’t have anything nice to say,
Because your entire family won’t tell you a single true thing.
There is no one but me who tells you the truth.
I know that my words cut through you,
But I don’t want to participate in their injustice towards you.”
She ended her call and her story with me,
With the strangest few sentences I’d heard in my life:
She said, “No, I did this to myself.
I was the one who rushed to marry someone,
Only because he was rich and was prepared for marriage.
I sold myself to him before anyone else did.
I knew everything, but I lied to myself,
And in the end I lost my life, my husband, and my child.
Deep down I lost all respect for my parents,
Just like way before that,
I lost you first.”

The strange thing is,
I didn’t really believe her.