Chapter Eight: The Body Forgets Nothing

The Years Of Kneeling Light / 8

The Years Of Kneeling Light

Chapter Eight: The Body Forgets Nothing

Where silence touches skin before sound.

Content Warning: Sacred Scars and Silent Offerings.

This chapter contains depictions of sexual trauma, coercion, and complex emotional surrender involving a minor. It explores survival, silence, and the haunting blossoming of unwanted desire. It is not written to shock—but to remember. To bear witness. To sanctify pain through language.

Please proceed with care.

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Cairo was over.

The train pulled us back north, but I did not return. Not truly.

My body sat there—upright, obedient, sipping mango juice from a cup with plastic film—but my mind trailed behind like a ghost, clinging to alleyways and souvenirs and voices that had touched me without permission.

School resumed. Uniforms pressed. Bells rang. Boys shouted. And I walked among them like a shadow stitched to the wrong body.

The mosque greeted me again, just as I left it—tiles cool, verses recited, and the sheikh waiting. But I no longer felt afraid. Nor brave. Just… rehearsed. I smiled where I should smile. Sat where I should sit.

Obeyed.

But inside, something trembled.

I had learned silence like a second skin. Not just the silence of voice—but the silence of muscle, of breath, of reflex. When a classmate clapped me on the back, I flinched, then smiled too wide. When the sheikh called my name, my body answered before my soul could object.

The flesh remembered. Even when the mind begged to forget.

There were moments—brief, searing—when I would drift.

A boy’s laugh behind me. The sound of wudu. A phrase from Qur’an class.

And suddenly I was not in school. I was not in Cairo. I was in every corridor where shame breathed down my neck. Every room where light hit my skin wrong.

Not a memory. A possession.

I would blink and be there again—knees on tile, lungs caged, throat dry.

Full scent. Full sound. Full pressure.

As if time folded me back into itself, and God had pressed play on a scene I never agreed to perform.

I would swallow it.

Like it was nothing.

Like I was nothing.

My brother noticed once.

I’d pulled my arm away too fast, too hard, when he passed me the remote.

He stared at me. “You okay?”

I nodded. Of course. Always.

But even that nod felt like a lie my body didn’t want to tell.

That night, in our shared room, I stared at the ceiling fan spinning above us.

And I realized: I did not know how to be still anymore.

Not truly.

Stillness meant remembering. Stillness meant listening to the body, and the body spoke in tongues I did not understand.

I pressed the Ankh to my chest beneath my shirt.

The small charm—cold, metal—rested over my heart like a brand.

A key, he had called it. A gate.

But it felt more like a tether now.

Tying me to a version of myself I had never asked to meet.

Sometimes I wondered:

Was the Ankh watching when my skin was turned into scripture?

Were the gods asleep… or were they complicit?

There were days I wanted to throw it in the sea.

And others I clutched it like prayer.

Because if my body was a wound,

then this symbol… was the scar.

And scars mean you survived.

Even if you don’t know how.