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The Track of the Eyelids
"I didn't choose to have this feeling... I loved him madly, but he didn't even know I existed... or so I thought. When one-sided love turns into obsession, where does the mind end and madness begin?"
Based on a true story:
Maria and Ahmed, two neurodivergent Egyptian-American teens, share an unspoken bond built on fleeting glances and misunderstood emotions. What starts as a quiet admiration becomes an overwhelming obsession, distorting their perception of love, reality, and each other. As Ahmed battles emotional outbursts, nightmares, and impulsive decisions, Maria is left to question whether their connection is ever real or just a projection of her longing. They struggle to understand: is their love a delusion or a truth?
The Track of The Eyelids has been produced as a short feature film with AI and has been selected
1) Lift-Off Filmmaker Sessions Film Festival 2024.
2) Lift-Off First Time Filmmaker Sessions Film Festival 2025.
Theme songs have been produced for the story which can be found online.
Based on a true story:
Maria and Ahmed, two neurodivergent Egyptian-American teens, share an unspoken bond built on fleeting glances and misunderstood emotions. What starts as a quiet admiration becomes an overwhelming obsession, distorting their perception of love, reality, and each other. As Ahmed battles emotional outbursts, nightmares, and impulsive decisions, Maria is left to question whether their connection is ever real or just a projection of her longing. They struggle to understand: is their love a delusion or a truth?
The Track of The Eyelids has been produced as a short feature film with AI and has been selected
1) Lift-Off Filmmaker Sessions Film Festival 2024.
2) Lift-Off First Time Filmmaker Sessions Film Festival 2025.
Theme songs have been produced for the story which can be found online.
98 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 9, 2025
2 people want to read
About the author
Samar Khalefa
4 books9 followersA psychologist who is interested in music, storytelling, and filmmaking. I write stories inspired by my experience with mental health and my own experience with mental illness (Schizophrenia). I have produced theme songs for my book "The Track of The Eyelids" which can be found online.
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March 21, 2026
There are some books that arrive in your hands at precisely the right moment — not by coincidence, I believe, but by a kind of quiet providence. ‘The Track of the Eyelids’ by Samar Khalefa is one such book. I finished it in a matter of three days, and when I turned the final page, I sat in silence for several minutes, thinking about the extraordinary courage it must take to write a story like this — a story drawn, as the author unflinchingly tells us from the very first page, from her own lived experience of psychosis, erotomania, and the bewildering labyrinth of love and mental illness.
Samar Khalefa is no ordinary debut author. She is a psychotherapist with years of experience in mental health and neuroscience, a published researcher in the Wiley Journal of Neuroscience, a reviewer at Frontiers, and a filmmaker whose AI short film adaptation of this very story has been selected for the Lift-Off Filmmaker Sessions Film Festival 2024 and the Lift-Off First Time Filmmaker Sessions Film Festival 2025. That such a multi-gifted and clinically informed mind should also be a storyteller of this sensitivity is, frankly, remarkable — and it shows on every page of this book. Marvelous Samar, and I need to interview you now for both my literary blog insaneowl.com as well as my website teaching portfolio for PGCITE fizapathansteachingportfolioforpgcite.com – ASAP! It would be an honor for me if you would accept!
The story of ‘The Track of the Eyelids’ is set in 2015, at an international high school in San Francisco, and it centres on two second-generation Egyptian-American Muslim teenagers, Maria and Ahmed. Both are neurodivergent - Maria suffers from psychosis, a symptom of schizophrenia, and is quietly drowning in delusions and auditory hallucinations; Ahmed has a childhood history of ADHD, a history he has been shielded from and cannot fully remember. What draws them together — and what ultimately tears them apart, until the deeply tender final scene — is entirely unspoken. It is communicated, as the title so memorably suggests, through the eyes alone - through glances held a beat too long across a sunlit playground, through smiles that sparkle and widen and beg, through the track of the eyelids moving in the direction of someone they dare not yet name.
As an educator who has spent 20 years teaching young people — many of them navigating pressures and identities that their classrooms barely acknowledge — I found myself deeply moved by Khalefa's portrait of two young Muslims trying to love and be loved within the constraints of mental illness, family expectation, cultural dislocation, and the particular cruelties of adolescent social worlds. Both Maria and Ahmed come from Egyptian-American families struggling with cultural negotiation and these parents do not know that they are doing a lot of damage. This is what makes the book so heartbreaking. I can resonate with Maria and Ahmed on this because, my parents also technically should not have been parents in the first place, and my mother was too overambitious and too much of a career woman, which prevented her from being a mother to me during my years at school. So I can easily get this.
What struck me most however, as both a student of human nature and a person of faith, is how profoundly Islamic this story is — not in a performative or didactic sense, but in the most organic and intimate way possible. Both Maria and Ahmed begin their days in the pre-dawn darkness, performing Fajr prayers, speaking to Allah in private whispers, laying their exhaustion and confusion at the feet of God before the world is even awake. Maria's prayer — in which she cries out that she is tired of the thoughts she cannot resist, and begs Allah to let her be healed — broke my heart open in the way that only the most honest writing can. I have read a great deal of literature that features Muslim characters, but very rarely have I encountered a portrayal of Muslim interiority this genuine, this unglamourised, and this real. These are not characters who wear their faith as a symbol; they carry it as a lifeline, which is precisely what faith is for those who truly have it.
The structure of the book is one of its most distinctive features. Khalefa writes in the format of acts and parts, much like a screenplay or stage play, and the narrative is delivered almost entirely in scene and action — compressed, visual, relentlessly present-tense in its emotional impact. This is not conventional novel writing, and readers who prefer long descriptive passages will need to adjust their expectations. But what Khalefa achieves through this form is something quite extraordinary - a quality of witnessing.
We do not read about Maria's psychotic episode — we watch it unfold, moment by terrifying moment, in real time. We do not read about Ahmed's mental health crisis — we are in the room with him as he kicks the wall, grasps his hair, and shouts the name of the girl he cannot stop loving into the empty air. The form and the content are perfectly matched, because this is, above all else, a story about perception — about what we see, what we think we see, and the catastrophic gap between the two.
I teach my IBDP and AS & A Level students constantly about unreliable narration, about the social construction of reality, about how meaning is co-created between people. ‘The Track of the Eyelids’ is a masterclass in all three. The tragedy at the heart of this book is not simply that Maria and Ahmed love each other and cannot say so; it is that every adult around them — every doctor, every parent, every well-meaning friend — systematically interprets their love as pathology. Magdy and Faried, driven by class rivalry and social vanity, instruct the well-intentioned Dr. Josef to suppress and dismiss what is, in fact, a genuine and mutual feeling. The medical machinery of diagnosis is weaponised by patriarchal pride. This is social commentary of the sharpest kind, and Khalefa delivers it with the precision of someone who has lived it from the inside and studied it from the outside.
I even know what this particular kind of pain feels like (technically) because I too was prevented from confessing my love for someone because of parental, cultural and societal pressure from both his side and mine. It was painful for me to keep my feelings to myself and to kill my love in the ‘womb itself’ but that is what I had to do and so I complied. But it is painful to go through such an ordeal, and so yet again I empathize with the characters in this novel on this major point. And I don’t think till date the man I loved even knows that I love him. It hurts till date. It really hurts.
Samar Khalefa is a psychologist with experience in psychotherapy and in mental health and neuroscience research, with a published manuscript in the Wiley Journal of Neuroscience. The extraordinary thing about ‘The Track of the Eyelids’ is that all of that learning, all of that clinical training, all of those years studying the brain and its betrayals — none of it has made this book cold. It has made it wise. There is a warmth and a mercy in Khalefa's gaze upon her characters — even upon those who wound them — that could only come from a writer who has known suffering from the inside, and chosen compassion as her response. I applaud her for this and esteem her for the same. I would not have done so. And I am the one who is the Catholic Nun and Theologian back here!
The final scene, my favourite, in which Ahmed and Maria leave the hospital together — he opening the door of his long-dreamed-of cabriolet for her, she laughing and stepping in, both of them saying nothing more than a simple, beaming ‘Hi!’ — is one of the most moving endings I have read in a long time. It is not a fairy-tale resolution. No way! It is something better - the possibility of a beginning, won at great cost, and all the more beautiful for it.
I recommend ‘The Track of the Eyelids’ wholeheartedly — to educators, to mental health advocates, to readers of faith, to anyone who has ever loved in silence (like me) and wondered if the silence was only theirs. Samar Khalefa has written a book that is brave, compassionate, intellectually serious, and genuinely beautiful. I will not forget it.
Samar gets a resounding 5 stars from me! Fantastic- Fantastic-Fantastic! And if you can make me weep, then you’ve got to be a winner – because I rarely cry.
Samar Khalefa is no ordinary debut author. She is a psychotherapist with years of experience in mental health and neuroscience, a published researcher in the Wiley Journal of Neuroscience, a reviewer at Frontiers, and a filmmaker whose AI short film adaptation of this very story has been selected for the Lift-Off Filmmaker Sessions Film Festival 2024 and the Lift-Off First Time Filmmaker Sessions Film Festival 2025. That such a multi-gifted and clinically informed mind should also be a storyteller of this sensitivity is, frankly, remarkable — and it shows on every page of this book. Marvelous Samar, and I need to interview you now for both my literary blog insaneowl.com as well as my website teaching portfolio for PGCITE fizapathansteachingportfolioforpgcite.com – ASAP! It would be an honor for me if you would accept!
The story of ‘The Track of the Eyelids’ is set in 2015, at an international high school in San Francisco, and it centres on two second-generation Egyptian-American Muslim teenagers, Maria and Ahmed. Both are neurodivergent - Maria suffers from psychosis, a symptom of schizophrenia, and is quietly drowning in delusions and auditory hallucinations; Ahmed has a childhood history of ADHD, a history he has been shielded from and cannot fully remember. What draws them together — and what ultimately tears them apart, until the deeply tender final scene — is entirely unspoken. It is communicated, as the title so memorably suggests, through the eyes alone - through glances held a beat too long across a sunlit playground, through smiles that sparkle and widen and beg, through the track of the eyelids moving in the direction of someone they dare not yet name.
As an educator who has spent 20 years teaching young people — many of them navigating pressures and identities that their classrooms barely acknowledge — I found myself deeply moved by Khalefa's portrait of two young Muslims trying to love and be loved within the constraints of mental illness, family expectation, cultural dislocation, and the particular cruelties of adolescent social worlds. Both Maria and Ahmed come from Egyptian-American families struggling with cultural negotiation and these parents do not know that they are doing a lot of damage. This is what makes the book so heartbreaking. I can resonate with Maria and Ahmed on this because, my parents also technically should not have been parents in the first place, and my mother was too overambitious and too much of a career woman, which prevented her from being a mother to me during my years at school. So I can easily get this.
What struck me most however, as both a student of human nature and a person of faith, is how profoundly Islamic this story is — not in a performative or didactic sense, but in the most organic and intimate way possible. Both Maria and Ahmed begin their days in the pre-dawn darkness, performing Fajr prayers, speaking to Allah in private whispers, laying their exhaustion and confusion at the feet of God before the world is even awake. Maria's prayer — in which she cries out that she is tired of the thoughts she cannot resist, and begs Allah to let her be healed — broke my heart open in the way that only the most honest writing can. I have read a great deal of literature that features Muslim characters, but very rarely have I encountered a portrayal of Muslim interiority this genuine, this unglamourised, and this real. These are not characters who wear their faith as a symbol; they carry it as a lifeline, which is precisely what faith is for those who truly have it.
The structure of the book is one of its most distinctive features. Khalefa writes in the format of acts and parts, much like a screenplay or stage play, and the narrative is delivered almost entirely in scene and action — compressed, visual, relentlessly present-tense in its emotional impact. This is not conventional novel writing, and readers who prefer long descriptive passages will need to adjust their expectations. But what Khalefa achieves through this form is something quite extraordinary - a quality of witnessing.
We do not read about Maria's psychotic episode — we watch it unfold, moment by terrifying moment, in real time. We do not read about Ahmed's mental health crisis — we are in the room with him as he kicks the wall, grasps his hair, and shouts the name of the girl he cannot stop loving into the empty air. The form and the content are perfectly matched, because this is, above all else, a story about perception — about what we see, what we think we see, and the catastrophic gap between the two.
I teach my IBDP and AS & A Level students constantly about unreliable narration, about the social construction of reality, about how meaning is co-created between people. ‘The Track of the Eyelids’ is a masterclass in all three. The tragedy at the heart of this book is not simply that Maria and Ahmed love each other and cannot say so; it is that every adult around them — every doctor, every parent, every well-meaning friend — systematically interprets their love as pathology. Magdy and Faried, driven by class rivalry and social vanity, instruct the well-intentioned Dr. Josef to suppress and dismiss what is, in fact, a genuine and mutual feeling. The medical machinery of diagnosis is weaponised by patriarchal pride. This is social commentary of the sharpest kind, and Khalefa delivers it with the precision of someone who has lived it from the inside and studied it from the outside.
I even know what this particular kind of pain feels like (technically) because I too was prevented from confessing my love for someone because of parental, cultural and societal pressure from both his side and mine. It was painful for me to keep my feelings to myself and to kill my love in the ‘womb itself’ but that is what I had to do and so I complied. But it is painful to go through such an ordeal, and so yet again I empathize with the characters in this novel on this major point. And I don’t think till date the man I loved even knows that I love him. It hurts till date. It really hurts.
Samar Khalefa is a psychologist with experience in psychotherapy and in mental health and neuroscience research, with a published manuscript in the Wiley Journal of Neuroscience. The extraordinary thing about ‘The Track of the Eyelids’ is that all of that learning, all of that clinical training, all of those years studying the brain and its betrayals — none of it has made this book cold. It has made it wise. There is a warmth and a mercy in Khalefa's gaze upon her characters — even upon those who wound them — that could only come from a writer who has known suffering from the inside, and chosen compassion as her response. I applaud her for this and esteem her for the same. I would not have done so. And I am the one who is the Catholic Nun and Theologian back here!
The final scene, my favourite, in which Ahmed and Maria leave the hospital together — he opening the door of his long-dreamed-of cabriolet for her, she laughing and stepping in, both of them saying nothing more than a simple, beaming ‘Hi!’ — is one of the most moving endings I have read in a long time. It is not a fairy-tale resolution. No way! It is something better - the possibility of a beginning, won at great cost, and all the more beautiful for it.
I recommend ‘The Track of the Eyelids’ wholeheartedly — to educators, to mental health advocates, to readers of faith, to anyone who has ever loved in silence (like me) and wondered if the silence was only theirs. Samar Khalefa has written a book that is brave, compassionate, intellectually serious, and genuinely beautiful. I will not forget it.
Samar gets a resounding 5 stars from me! Fantastic- Fantastic-Fantastic! And if you can make me weep, then you’ve got to be a winner – because I rarely cry.
March 22, 2026
I went into this book out of curiosity, and what stayed with me the most is how personal it feels.
It really reads like a story that comes from a very real place — from personal experience, emotion, and a need to understand something deeply internal. That kind of honesty is hard to fake.
For a debut author, this felt especially raw and emotionally driven.
This isn’t a light or typical romance. It leans more into mental health, perception, and the quiet ways people misread each other. You can feel the isolation of both characters from the start.
What stood out to me most was the atmosphere. There’s a quiet tension throughout — in the looks, the silence, the misunderstandings, even the rumors. Some scenes, especially the exam moment and the theatre scene, really stayed with me.
I also liked that the story has its own identity. The cultural background, religious elements, and psychological layers make it feel different from more typical romance reads.
At times I did find myself wishing for more scenes and less explanation, just so I could connect more naturally with the characters. But I also understand that this style reflects how internal the story is.
The ending felt emotionally complete to me, with a sense of quiet hope that fits the journey.
Overall, this is a very personal and introspective story. I’d recommend it to readers who enjoy emotional, psychological narratives more than fast-paced romance. I’m glad I read it.
It really reads like a story that comes from a very real place — from personal experience, emotion, and a need to understand something deeply internal. That kind of honesty is hard to fake.
For a debut author, this felt especially raw and emotionally driven.
This isn’t a light or typical romance. It leans more into mental health, perception, and the quiet ways people misread each other. You can feel the isolation of both characters from the start.
What stood out to me most was the atmosphere. There’s a quiet tension throughout — in the looks, the silence, the misunderstandings, even the rumors. Some scenes, especially the exam moment and the theatre scene, really stayed with me.
I also liked that the story has its own identity. The cultural background, religious elements, and psychological layers make it feel different from more typical romance reads.
At times I did find myself wishing for more scenes and less explanation, just so I could connect more naturally with the characters. But I also understand that this style reflects how internal the story is.
The ending felt emotionally complete to me, with a sense of quiet hope that fits the journey.
Overall, this is a very personal and introspective story. I’d recommend it to readers who enjoy emotional, psychological narratives more than fast-paced romance. I’m glad I read it.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews