Ramadan Journal '18 | Week Two

He asks me some questions.

I go blank.

Give me more time to think. Please.

He checks my passport. It is the only thing I entered this world with, the only thing with which I leave.

Is it in check, is it in date, please don't let it have expired...

I was cutting it close. It is there, but only just.

Weak, fragile, the pages ripped and torn with the binding falling away, but it is there. It is intact.

Somewhat. It may be my only reprieve.

He marches me through security, asks me more questions that I stumble over, my tongue twisted up and falling over itself in my mouth that is suddenly dry, so dry, and the ground seems to be quaking beneath my feet and the fear that courses through my barely-there body is nothing, nothing, to what they told me it would be. And as he takes me through the boarding gate and escorts me into my flight, I hear the receding footsteps of everyone else around me and as he slams the door shut to entrap me, I realise that I am alone in this place, completely alone, and I feel the earth-shattering scream that rips through my throat and falls on deaf ears. I choke on the dust that's filtering through my airways, can't breathe as the walls squeeze in on me and crush my bones, again and again and again...

I think I pass out. And come to. And pass out.

Raised voices give rise to consciousness. And though I could swear that I was the sole being here, there is a muffled voice persistently defending my name. My unnamed saviour. I think we acquainted once before but truthfully, I neglected them more often than I should have. I don't deserve the beseeching, insistent intercession and yet here we are. And so time evades me like this, me flitting between moments of agony and moments of relief while invisible armed soldiers defend my honour.

The rocky landing after what feels like forever almost makes me gasp in relief. Almost. Because I feel, before I hear, the thunderous clap that resonates hard enough for the world to collapse. The runway is leaden with horror and fragments of a shattered world, the plains in which we descend packed tight with people. so. many. people. 

We jerk to a halt and as I step off, I am hit by a blast of the scorching heat that plasters to my skin and suddenly, I am parched and my blood boils and it makes me scream but the scream is a whisper amid the screams that rock the very ground on which I stand. I must be delirious because I can hear my limbs speaking, voices overriding one another and it's reached a fever pitch and is this what it feels like to be going mad? Bodies after bodies knock into each other and not a flicker of recognition sparks, just unfamiliar faces stricken with fear as we line up at border control. And I can't think except for those damned scales that I know will be my undoing.

Sweat drips down the back of my neck as the heat of the sun blisters and burns. I rock on the balls of my feet, anxious, impatient, scared out of my mind. And here we are. My baggage is weighed, my papers scanned. I watch in the suffocating heat as the scales slowly tip back and forth, back and forth, back and forth while my papers are intensely studied and each record is tallied.

Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth.

I am shaking from head to toe. But as the last page is read, I hold out my right hand.

And I wait.

"When we die and become dust and bones shall we (then) be raised up (again)" - Holy Quran, 37:16