Diaries...

Maryam wrote in one of her diaries, dated January 15, 1988:
(I waited for you with the patience of a thousand men, and forgave your sins with the compassion of a thousand women, and you only came when I longed for forgetfulness.)
Then on the next page:
(How can I forgive a man who severed my longing for you for years? And then he came from the fog to tear off the buttons of my shirt.)
At the bottom of the page, after leaving several blank lines, she wrote:
(As if we had never parted.)
Shams continues reading her mother's diaries, but her heart inevitably leaps to the page bearing her date of birth, where the notebook's thread is fastened, with a transparent white button at the end. She reads a single word amidst the chaos of whiteness: (Shams).