By: Manal Rabie
*”I hear my own voice inside me… as if I am vanishing, piece by piece.
The room is pale, its walls gray like the ashes of my heart, and the light slipping through the window is not light, but shards of a cold sun, powerless to warm me.
No one knows I am dying now… not a death they can see, but a slow, silent death devouring me from within.
They think these tears are only salty water, but they don’t know… they don’t know they are the remnants of molten fire, drops of flame hiding in the salt of sorrow, escaping from the depths so I wouldn’t burn alone. They scorch my eyelids like the edge of heated iron, searing my eyes until everything turns blurry, foggy, faceless.
My lips… oh God, how bitter they taste! As if I am licking ancient rust. I bite them to smother a blaze that refuses to die, then swallow shards of glass disguised as sobs.
I once thought death was the end of life, but I have learned endings begin while we are still breathing. They begin when colors drain away… when red fades from blood, green wilts from trees, and blue grows as pale as a dead sea. When every sound turns into a distant murmur, as if the world is retreating from my ears, leaving behind a heavy silence pressing against my chest like a black stone.
Fear feels like safety. Sorrow feels like joy. Death feels like life… all of it is ashes—ashes floating in a gray void.
I feel like a shadow, a phantom drifting in cold air, light yet hollow… My body has grown heavy as stone, my limbs stiff like dead branches in a winter without end. I reach for something—anything—but there is nothing there. Nothing… even my name has slipped away, dissolving like a whisper into the fog.
At the end of the corridor, I see light… but not a warm light—just a silent whiteness, without heat, without life. It moves toward me slowly, like ice crawling across my skin. But… wait—behind it, a golden shimmer, a thread of sunlight not born of this world. The thread widens into a river of light—not water, but mercy, warmth, stillness.
I hear a call—no human voice, but something flowing inside me without letters: ‘Come… the fire is over.’
Suddenly, the flames that devoured me are gone, and the ashes have become wings. White wings lifting me beyond the gray, beyond the cold, beyond everything I ever knew.
I look back at my body… nothing of me remains there—only an empty shell. But I… I am soaring toward a light without beginning, without end—a light that whispers to my soul: ‘Here is life… not the one you left behind, but the life you were promised.’
And at last… I feel
alive
