I arrived before the roads learned their names. Back then, no signboard pointed to the direction of my four walls.

This house was not a shelter. It was a beginning. These walls were my first cry. Much like being born, I had arrived all alone. My home was just a box standing upright on an endless and empty stretch of land. In August, the sun scorched it and dust moved freely over it, nothing stopping it.

The land echoed thoughts and return them, unchanged. When I unlocked the door for the first time, the key echoed in the lock, returning its sharp ringing to my ears. There was no one to hear it yet the sound seemed exposed. There was me, the dust, and Allah, who was present without being curious.

They asked me why I chose this place. I had nothing useful to say. How could I explain the grief that weighed so heavily on my heart it closed my throat? That after burying a husband and a child, I couldn’t live among walls that still rang with laughter?

In the mornings, the land didn’t require any performance. Only the faraway chirping of birds, the morning wind, and the sun were my true witnesses. I read the Quran outside. Not loudly. The verses travelled without obstruction, no houses to interrupt them, no lives to collide with. Sometimes a sparrow would land a few steps away, tilting its head as if listening, then fly off without any judgment. The sunlight would stretch slowly across the ground, the walls and my hands, reminding me that loneliness is not emptiness, it is clarity. 

The grief did not disappear, but it settled like an old companion who no longer needed to explain its existence. Years passed, quietly.

Then, slowly, the land began to change. Not all at once and not loudly. A road appeared where wind used to blow uninterrupted; it made way for faces that appeared temporarily, being carried away in vehicles. After that, the land lost its shame and footsteps filled it. There were walls and roofs. The air now held conversations, laughter, the scent of food from neighbouring homes and greetings exchanged freely. Children ran where once my chair used to stand. I found my gaze staring at them instead of the Quran, a smile slowly stretching my lips. The afternoon was no longer quiet, there were sounds of life surrounding me. The land no longer listened; it began to react.

I watched all of it, sitting, aging, becoming older than the road, older than the laughter, older than the urgency everyone carried to reach the destination that wasn’t even promised to them.

They arrived carrying futures, little dreams and wishes in their hearts. I remained holding memories, which were heavier and had no use.

Sometimes I thought I had been forgotten. Then I remembered, Allah forgets no one. Some of us are simply placed earlier, like a witness writing history. 

When my hands began to shake, I stopped sitting outside. The Quran came indoors with me. By then, the walls had learned how to breathe. I could hear the neighborhood through them, alive. I had watched it grow the way one watches a child that is not theirs: without claims and without expectations.

On my last morning, the city woke up before I did.

I left the way I had lived: quietly and without making my presence known.

By afternoon, people had gathered near my door. They said my name with grief and surprise, as though I had been permanent. They said I was the first to come and the first to leave.

They did not know I had practiced leaving for years.

The house remained.

But now, surrounded.

Just as I was – at my end.