Moments of Fracture

Morning Reflection

In the mid-seventies, I was a thin young man carrying a small suitcase and a heart heavier than mountains. I arrived in a land that resembled neither my village nor even the version I had imagined in my dreams. I was searching for an opportunity… or perhaps running from the echo of the call to prayer that rose from my village minaret, as though calling me back.

The nights were not rosy as the migration books had promised, nor as the songs of those who left before me had suggested. They were dark and dense—like jet smoke before takeoff.

Sometimes I would cry quietly in the kitchen—not from hunger, but from memory. Homesickness slipped in beneath the door: in the smell of bread when it burned, in the sound of water boiling. I missed my mother—her voice calling my full name, the warmth in her hands, even the way she poured tea. My mother was my homeland; everything else was a waiting room.

I believed flying would set me free. But it taught me that freedom is not measured by altitude—it is measured by meaning. The deepest prisons are the ones we build while pursuing our dreams.

Evening Reflection

For forty years I flew across many skies—from California to India, from the clouds of Paris to the nights of Tokyo. I saw cities glitter from above and hearts dim below. Every city had its scent. Every cloud I crossed seemed to whisper in my mother tongue:

“Return… even for a moment… return to who you were before you became who you are.”

In the mirror of my small apartment, I would study my reflection and ask myself,
“Am I living my dream—or did I lose myself on the way to it?”

I realized that a dream can become a burden of light. It illuminates your path, yet weighs upon you with its responsibility.

And still, each time I watched an airplane rise from the womb of the runway like a mythical bird, I felt I had not lost my way. Every pain I endured had been a stone placed along the road toward truth. Suffering was not failure—it was a map. Those who have never been broken cannot truly understand the value of light when it returns.

I was no legendary hero, no rider of glory’s waves as in stories. I was a simple man who once stood at the threshold of his homeland, his heart lit by something unseen. He turned to his mother and said, his voice trembling slightly,
“I will come back… soon.”

I did not possess perfect certainty. But I carried another kind: that God does not plant a wish in the heart in vain, and that heavy dreams do not come to break us, but to reshape us.

Life was not easy. But it never lied to me. It was honest—and therefore, in its own way, beautiful.