Alifa and Her Spark

Imagine a world where you can immediately tell if someone could be your potential love interest. How would that work? Even if you only pass each other on the street, not knowing anything about each other – if you are a match, as soon as your eyes meet, you see a spark light up right in the middle of your eye contact. Can anybody else see the Spark that you just shared? No, nobody. Your Spark is invisible to everyone, except the two of you. After that, you can choose what to do – talk and get to know each other, exchange numbers, perhaps go for a walk together. 

Well, a world like that exists. It is called the city of Iscra.

Alifa was a teenage girl who lived there. She went to high school and was not the happiest person around.

“Hey, Alifa!” her friend Ella clapped her hands excitedly when they met in the morning. “Guess what! I just had the Spark with Mike Winters! He invited me on a date!”

“Oh, wow,” Alifa tried to smile. “That’s … Wow. Good for you!”

Mike was one of the most popular jocks at school. Alifa also had a crush on him. But not ever experiencing the Spark with him was not the only reason she was unhappy. She had never gotten the Spark with anyone. And she always tried to catch an eye of boys who she fancied. But nothing.

“Nobody likes me,” she would tell herself every night, crying herself to sleep. “Maybe I’m just that ugly. Or maybe I’m cursed. Whoever I like, doesn’t like me and vice versa.”

She was so obsessed with experiencing the Spark that sometimes she spent hours studying the magic of Iscra, trying to understand how it works.

“Perhaps I’m unemotional,” she thought while reading through a list of reasons why you possibly will never see the Spark. “Maybe I don’t have feelings so I will never be able to connect with someone else.”

She tried hard not to care. While Ella and Mike became a couple, Alifa acted like she was happy, but on the inside, she felt like she was dying. Even her grades struggled. In her younger years she was always an excellent student, but now her school work noticeably dropped.

“Alifa, I have to ask you this,” her literature teacher, Miss Healtee, said one day after class. “What is going on with you? You seem so down, and you are not the student you used to be. Is everything okay?”

“I just …” Alifa started, feeling embarrassed. “I don’t know. I mean … Sometimes I feel like everyone is happy except me, you know? Oh, sorry,” she corrected herself. “You probably don’t know. You’re normal.”

“Alifa,” Miss Healtee leaned forward and gave the girl a kind smile. “Is this about the Spark?”

“The Spark?” Alifa swallowed hard. “No. I mean, maybe it’s about the Spark too, but … Well yeah … Perhaps it’s about the Spark,” she admitted. “I’ve never experienced it. I don’t even know what it looks like. Maybe the magic of this city just doesn’t work on me. Perhaps I don’t even belong here. Or maybe …” she sighed. “Maybe nobody likes me.”

“It’s not about that, my dear,” her teacher shook her head. “There are plenty of boys who fancy you. I just heard two of them talking yesterday. One of them was saying how sad he was that he didn’t see the Spark when he looked at you. So you can be sure that people do like you. The problem lies within you, Alifa. You don’t love yourself. And if you don’t love yourself, you can’t love anyone else. The barrier within your heart is in your way.”

Those words made an enormous impact on Alifa. From that moment on, she spent every evening looking in the mirror, saying:

“I am beautiful, and I love myself.”

At first, she didn’t believe in her own words, but after a few days, she was more and more comfortable saying them. During the fourth evening, something incredible happened; Alifa saw the Spark light up before her eyes while looking in the mirror.

“My very first Spark! With myself!”

Warmth and happiness filled her heart as she came to another realization.

“I love myself, and that is all that matters. I don’t need anyone. Why force it, when it’s not my time to meet the right guy yet?”

Despite those words, Alifa experienced the Spark with a cute boy the very same day.

The End