Hanging from the window on a summer night.
I sat by myself one evening, using my mind’s fingers to knead through messy thoughts. It was in Galway, and I was in the staff room of a boarding school turned summer camp, a few storeys above the ground, with my legs hanging the outside of the window.
It never occurred to me that I could fall. From the window, I could see large, empty football pitches, and the street lights closer to the houses than the school, and the low brick wall that all students hopped for no real reason instead of walking through the gate sliced through its centre.
I thought thoughts: about where I was, what I was doing. Where I might find people who make my heart feel at home. Where I might find my balance in the religion I had decided to make a part of my life.
In ways, with my legs swinging from the sill, that was the beginning and end of my adolescent experiment; the self-awareness had burst through the fourth wall and was the demon in the dark tickling my toes.
At sixteen I realised that the only way I would learn about life was by living it. An underwhelming epiphany in hindsight, but one that took my heart by surprise. I learnt this without regret, a feeling I would later come to recognise with the same subtly-shifting familiarity as the view from my bedroom window. The monotony of the view, the same house across the street parallels the monotony of making mistakes and falling short for the nth time and dusting off the irritation with myself as I stand up, carry on, and resolve to do better. I learned that some thoughts only make sense inside the mind that created them. I learned that some emotions only truly exist in their fullness inside the heart that holds them. I notice that part of the amusement of the human condition is knowing that you’ll never know what goes on inside another soul, but trying desperately all the same to understand.
Later I would learn that people come and go, later I would learn that I would have moments where I wished to escape from within myself. But somehow I knew the journey would be beautiful, and I knew that life had just begun, what felt like a lifetime ago.
A woman looked up at me, the darkness of my figure a silhouette in the halo of the staff room’s yellow light. She was a miniature in the big empty field below, with a brown and shaggy dog on the end of the lead in her hand. She asked me if I was sitting outside a window, ensuring her eyes weren’t playing tricks on her, worried that the figure in the window was suicidal. I laughed that I was okay, and yes, hanging outside the window. The sun was just past setting and I looked out at her in the darkening sky. The world was drowning in indigo, my mind was becoming awake and alive, the air was so fresh on me, and the sky was so, so wide. I felt like I was being born.
I look back at this moment, and I read in the Qur’an that God had promised and then asked:
‘We will show them Our signs in the horizons and within themselves until it becomes clear to them that it is the Truth. But is it not sufficient concerning your Lord that He is, over all things, a Witness?’
In that quiet moment, with no one else a witness to the turning of my heart, nor to the kneading of my mind, I struck a secret equilibrium and found myself being blessed beyond my imagination.
How great is Allah? How enlightening and loving and generous and pure? How perfect a Witness?
