Living with My Cousin

Living with my cousin was the hardest.

Not because anyone meant to be cruel. Hard because Salma and I were separated — split into different houses, different routines, different versions of surviving the same loss. After Mum and Dad, the world that had held us together in Buziga became a map of other people's homes. Grief already made everything sharp. Distance made it lonelier.

I had to learn to do a lot of things on my own.

Trying to get a scholarship. Learning to clean. Learning to cook — really cook — because our house helps used to do all of that for us. In the life before, someone else wrung the cloths and stirred the pots and kept the ordinary machinery of a household running while we were busy being children. Suddenly those jobs had my name on them. Soft hands meeting hard water. Recipes I had watched become recipes I had to finish alone.

When I wasn't doing school, I was working.

That sentence still sounds older than fifteen, sixteen, the ages I was living through. But that was the shape of the days: study, apply, work, rinse, repeat. Scholarship essays written like prayers. Uniforms washed by hand. Meals that had to be edible even when my heart was not. Independence arrived without a ceremony. It just showed up and asked for dinner.

Salma was getting into all sorts of trouble.

She was expelled from all the schools she attended until she graduated. Every phone call felt like another door slamming. Every new uniform felt temporary. The sister who had refused to go home after Mum's burial — who had stayed with cousins because the house was too empty — was still fighting the emptiness, just louder, in hallways and headmistresses' offices. I was trying to build a future out of applications and dish soap. She was burning through institutions like they couldn't hold her.

And then she finally figured things out.

Or so at least I thought.

That is the tender, dangerous part of loving someone through chaos: the relief when the noise quiets, the story you tell yourself that the chapter has closed. Graduation looked like an ending. Calm looked like healing. I wanted so badly for her to be okay that I mistook the pause for the finish line.

Separated, we became two different kinds of orphans — one learning to carry the house, one learning how not to be carried by it. The kitchen I cook in now still remembers both of us: the girl who had to teach herself, and the sister I kept believing had finally landed.

Some stories end clean. This one doesn't. It only tells the truth of that season — how hard it was to live apart, how much I learned with my own hands, and how hope can look like a sister who seems, for a while, to have figured it out.