The Window Was My Sky

I was only a child

when the world grew heavy in my lungs.

Tuberculosis, they said—

but no one told me

what it meant to breathe like drowning

even when you're not underwater.

They sent me away,

not in anger,

but in fear —

a fear shaped like silence,

like a madrasa chamber

with a window

too high to look through

unless I stood

on the edge of my narrow bed.

That window…

it was all I had.

A square of sky

4.5 feet above the floor —

my only proof

that life existed outside

the cough,

the stillness,

the prayer that tasted like dust.

I missed everything.

My mother’s hands,

my father's quiet presence.

The smell of home-cooked rice,

the chaos of cousins fighting over sweets.

I missed birthdays

no one celebrated,

and Eid mornings

that came and went

without hugs, without color,

without me.

I heard joy from a distance —

firecrackers, drums, laughter,

the world moving on

while I stood still,

watching it all

from behind a curtain of breathlessness.

The walls became my only witnesses.

The light that crept across the floor

was my closest friend.

I measured days

not by calendars

but by how strong the cough was,

how many times I cried

without making a sound.

Six years passed

like a whisper I wasn’t allowed to speak.

And then one day —

the cough left.

Gone.

A miracle, they said.

But by then,

I had learned how to disappear.

How to live without touch.

How to feel joy

as something that belonged

to other people.

Sometimes,

I still see that window in my dreams.

And I’m back there —

standing on the bed,

looking up,

wondering if the sky

ever looked back at me.