Alhaitham speaks many languages.

He reads ancient scripts as if they were written yesterday, deciphers dialects long abandoned by their speakers, and corrects mistranslations without a second thought. Language, to him, is structure. Rules. Meaning distilled into something precise.

Love has none of that.

He understands the concept of love—has read about it in philosophy, psychology, even poetry. He knows how others describe it: overwhelming, irrational, consuming.

None of it sounds…appealing.

And yet, when it comes to you, something consistently escapes his comprehension.

He notices it first in small ways. How his attention drifts when you speak, not because he isn’t listening—but because he’s listening too closely. How silence feels incomplete when you aren’t nearby. How your absence registers like a missing variable in an otherwise perfect equation.

He doesn’t call it love. He calls it habit. Familiarity. Efficiency.

Until one day, you’re hurt.

Nothing severe—but enough to trigger something sharp and unfamiliar in his chest. His thoughts scatter, logic dissolves, and suddenly every system he trusts fails him. He speaks to you carefully then, voice lower, steadier than he feels, hands hovering like he doesn’t know where they’re allowed to rest.

Later, alone, he realizes something unsettling.

If love were merely theory, it wouldn’t disrupt him like this.

He tries to express it the way he knows how.

He offers solutions before comfort, adjusts your schedule so you rest more, places books beside you that might distract or soothe. He sits with you in silence longer than necessary, even when he could be anywhere else.

You smile at him one evening and say, gently, “You don’t really know how to show it, do you?”

He doesn’t deny it.

“I lack sufficient experience,” he admits. “And there’s no reliable framework.”

You laugh softly, and somehow that sound feels like approval.

That night, Alhaitham lies awake longer than usual, replaying your expressions, your tone, the way you stayed instead of pulling away.

Perhaps love is a language that can’t be translated.

Only learned—slowly, imperfectly—by choosing the same person, again and again.

And if that’s the case, then for the first time in his life, Alhaitham is willing to be a beginner.