Four days felt like a lot, until it wasn't.
The first day was for shopping and it was, by any reasonable measure, chaos.
Mel had appointed herself chief coordinator which meant she had a colour coded list on her phone, strong opinions about luggage brands and absolutely no interest in moving at any pace other than full speed. They started on Oxford Street and worked their way through it like a small storm — Yara quiet and considered, holding things up to the light, checking fabric, reading labels. Mel three steps ahead already pointing at the next thing. By afternoon the back of their Uber home looked like a boutique had collapsed inside it.
Their mother had insisted on coming the second day. This was a different kind of shopping entirely. Hana moved through shops the way she moved through life — purposeful, unhurried, with an eye for quality that came from a woman who had learnt early that buying something right once was better than buying something wrong twice. She held cardigans against Yara's shoulders and said things like the UAE is cold inside, all that air conditioning, you'll need layers with the authority of someone who had personally designed the climate. She bought Yara a small gold necklace with a delicate pendant — a crescent and a star — and fastened it around her neck in the middle of the shop without ceremony, just smoothed it against Yara's collarbone and patted it once and moved on before either of them had to say what it meant.
Yara wore it for the rest of the day. She didn't take it off after that either.
The third day her father drove her to her favourite music shop in Soho — the old one with the creaking floors and the staff who knew her by name — and told her to take her time. He sat in the small seating area near the door with a coffee and his phone and didn't rush her once. She spent two hours in there. Came out with new manuscript paper, a set of mechanical pencils, two music theory books she'd been circling for months and a small portable keyboard that folded flat, which her father paid for without looking at the price and carried to the car himself.
On the drive back he said — you know you can call me. Any hour. I don't care about the time difference.
Yara looked out the window at London sliding past.
I know Baba, she said.
He didn't say anything else. He didn't need to.
The fourth day was for packing, which turned into Mel sitting cross legged in the middle of the bedroom floor conducting a thorough review of every item Yara put in the suitcase with the energy of someone who had strong feelings and unlimited time to share them. There were negotiations. There were a few things removed and put back and removed again. At some point their mother appeared with a ziplock bag of homemade spice mixes because apparently Abu Dhabi did not have the right kind of cumin and this was not a risk she was willing to take.
By midnight two suitcases stood by the bedroom door, full and latched and final.
Yara sat on her bed and looked at her walls. All that sheet music. She wouldn't be taking it down — she couldn't bring herself to. It would wait for her. The room would wait for her. That was the thing about home. It held your shape even when you weren't in it.
She took out her hearing aids and let the world go quiet and just sat with it for a while.
****
The morning she left the house felt different before she even opened her eyes.
She knew it the way she knew most things — through sensation. The quality of the light through the curtains. The way the house held itself. Something in the air that tasted like endings and beginnings pressed up against each other.
Her alarm was a vibrating pad under her pillow. It went off at four thirty and she was already awake.
She dressed carefully. Dark straight leg jeans, a soft white long sleeved top, the cream oversized blazer Mel had picked out on Oxford Street that Yara had initially resisted and now loved. Her hair down. The gold necklace her mother had fastened around her neck two days ago. White trainers. She looked in the mirror for a moment — not vainly, just checking. Making sure the person looking back felt like someone ready.
She thought she mostly did.
Downstairs the kitchen light was already on.
Her mother was at the stove. It was four forty five in the morning and Hana Malik was making breakfast as though this were any ordinary day and not the day her eldest daughter was leaving for another country. There was tea already made, toast, eggs, the small bowl of labneh with olive oil that Yara had eaten every morning of her life. She hadn't asked for any of it. It was just there, the way her mother's love always was — practical, warm, asking nothing in return.
"Sit," her mother said without turning around. "Eat before you go."
Yara sat and ate. Neither of them spoke much. They didn't need to.
Mel came downstairs at five in her pyjamas looking like she had not slept at all, hair everywhere, eyes slightly puffy in a way she was aggressively pretending wasn't from crying. She dropped into the chair beside Yara and stole a piece of her toast and leaned her head on her shoulder and said absolutely nothing which was the most out of character thing Mel had ever done and therefore the most devastating.
Yara leaned her head on top of Mel's.
They sat like that until their father came downstairs in his coat, keys already in his hand.
Ready? he asked.
The drive to Heathrow was quiet in the way that only early morning drives can be — the city still mostly sleeping, the roads clear, the sky that particular deep blue that exists for about forty minutes between night and proper dawn. Tariq drove the way he did everything, steadily and without fuss. The radio was on low, something instrumental, and Yara watched London pass the window — the familiar streets, the bridges, the Thames catching the first grey light — and tried to memorise it as if she hadn't been looking at it her whole life.
Her mother sat in the front. Mel was beside Yara in the back, their hands loosely linked in the space between them the way they hadn't sat since they were children on long car journeys.
Terminal Five was already awake and buzzing when they arrived, all rolling suitcases and announcement boards and the particular fluorescent energy of a place that never really sleeps. Her father pulled the suitcases from the boot. Her mother immediately started talking about making sure to eat properly and not skipping meals and calling when she landed, instructions Yara had already received in various forms over the past four days and received again now without complaint.
Then it was time.
Mel went first. She hugged Yara so hard it was briefly difficult to breathe, and when she pulled back her eyes were doing exactly what she'd been pretending all morning they weren't going to do. She pointed at Yara very seriously.
You had better FaceTime me literally every single day, she said, emphasising every word.
Every single day is ambitious —
Every. Single. Day. Yara.
Okay. Every single day.
Mel nodded, satisfied, then stepped back and made a show of composing herself that fooled absolutely no one.
Her mother held her for a long time. Said things into her hair that Yara caught in pieces and felt in full. She smelled like cardamom and the kitchen and home and Yara closed her eyes and held on for one extra second before letting go.
Then her father.
Tariq Malik picked up her carry on bag and placed the strap over her shoulder himself, adjusting it the way he used to adjust her school bag when she was seven. He looked at her for a moment — really looked, the way he had at the dinner table four nights ago — and then he put one large hand briefly on top of her head, the most old fashioned gentle gesture, the one that meant more than anything else he could have said.
Go, he said quietly. And be extraordinary. As if you know how to be anything else.
Yara smiled. Picked up her suitcase handle. Turned toward the departures gate.
She looked back once.
Her family stood together in the terminal — her father straight and steady, her mother's hand pressed to her mouth, Mel waving with both arms like she was flagging down a plane — and Yara looked at them for one long moment and pressed the image somewhere permanent.
Then she turned back around and walked through the gate.
****
The flight from Heathrow to Abu Dhabi was seven hours and twenty minutes.
She had a window seat, which she had specifically requested, and for the first hour she watched England disappear beneath the clouds with a feeling she didn't have a name for — not quite sadness, not quite excitement, something that lived in the space between the two.
She had her hearing aids in but turned the sensitivity down low, the world reduced to a comfortable murmur. She had her composition notebook open on the tray table and one of the new mechanical pencils in her hand, but she wasn't writing. She was just sitting with the blank page and the clouds and the feeling of being, for the first time in her life, entirely between worlds.
Somewhere over Europe she started to write.
Not notation this time. Just words, which she rarely did. A few lines at first, then more. Something that wasn't quite a lyric and wasn't quite a diary entry and was maybe both. She didn't question it. She just let it come.
Somewhere over the Gulf the captain announced their descent and Yara looked up from her notebook and pressed her forehead gently against the cool window.
Below, materialising slowly out of a honey coloured haze, was the skyline of Abu Dhabi — towers of glass catching the afternoon sun, the curved sweep of the corniche along the water, everything luminous and enormous and completely new.
She watched it rise up to meet her, this city she had never seen, and felt something shift quietly in her chest — the particular sensation of a life rearranging itself around what comes next.
She sat with it for a moment. Then she closed her notebook, tucked the pencil behind her ear, and began to gather her things.