“Why do stars fall down from the sky

Every time you walk by?

Just like me, they long to be

Close to you”

Everyday, I see you walking by

While girls greet you in every corner

It might be a bit crazy, but it’s because

You’re the perfect man, sweet and kind.

And just like them, I longed to be with you

As I watch other girls walking with you

I imagined you loving me, and I loving you

You’re just the perfect man, sweet and kind.

“Why do stars fall down from the sky

Every time you walk by?

Just like me, they long to be

Close to you”

This is a game, and in this game no one lies. Close your eyes, ignore the sounds of your neighbour through the wall, of the cosmopolitan passer-by sailing past your street. You are alone now. All you have is my voice guiding you. Let it.

There are trees around you, rising tall, ferns at your feet. The trees are evergreen, you cannot see where they end and the sky begins. You hear the whisper of the wind through pine needles and the crunch of your boots on the path. Even your breath is quiet. Do not make another sound, lest you feel that split-second terror as you realise the forest might be an anechoic chamber.

Is it?

Keep walking.

You feel the ground sloping upwards, and you pass what looks like the entry to an old minefield. A door surrounded by bluish slate, which moss has begun to prowl through. The incline grows steeper, and the path becomes nothing more than roots and nettles.

It is path made by the broken bramble bushes pushed back by hordes of deer. Be careful not to step too close, they will catch and tear your clothes.

Don't be afraid of that, though. There are wild boars in this forest. The only thing to do should you come face to face with one is take a gentle step back. If you run, the boar could catch you, if you threaten, the boar will kill you. It has happened before, to others who did not follow my voice well enough.

You notice bushes of gooseberries in the distance, still gleaming with morning dew. The land is deep green, rich and wet. Life can thrive here. On your left is freshly dug earth, where boars have scavenged mushrooms and grass.

At the top of the path that was not a path, you meet a mother boar. She has her young by her side and she looks at you with fear and fury. What do you do?

You run.

Back down through the bramble bushes, and you hear her trotters pounding the earth behind you—or is that just the sound of your own weak heart? Keep running. There is a stone and you are not running carefully enough not to catch your ankle on it. This is a game, and in this game, everyone dies.

I am standing at the back of a church. The floor is a smooth expanse of red carpet, and there is a hallowed, protective feel within—the rest of the world might be destined for damnation, but within these walls, we are safe.

Gilded and gothic, its high ceilings and stained glass windows betray its affectation for tradition, but the church looks down on Pentecostal and charismatic practices. We live by faith—and extensive bible studies.

It is a Thursday, bible study day. I have been sick most of the afternoon, a phenomenon I am still unsure as to the nature of, but in a few years' time, a therapist will tell me it is 'an acute anxiety response' and I will think: yes, that is what it feels like.

I joined the church whilst on a year abroad, when I thought my grandmother might be dying and the ache in my chest matched mostly what my idea of desolate isolation must feel like. The pastor talked about belonging and I broke down and cried—but they were happy tears. I was sold a few months later when I sat in a room and a woman came in an hour late and Mona—one of the church volunteers— said only:

'Are you okay? Can I get you some coffee?'

I was looking for a sense of belonging, I was sold on the love, and, later, on the idea that God might heal me.

A trait my friends have laughed at me for is that I throw myself head first into everything I do. I am glass overfilled from the start. At the time, I had no awareness of this, and my initial bursts of energy soon had me roped into activities I didn't want to do.

I didn't want to always have to give food out to the upper middle class who visited on Sunday evenings, didn't want to give up my Friday mornings to church rearrangement, the occasional weekend to cook in a Welsh basement kitchen for a church gathering. I didn't want to be an unpaid nursery manager every Thursday and Sunday morning. I didn't want to be noticed as absent whenever i didn't show up on Thursdays, didn't want to be unforgiven for being busy with work and socialising and having a life.

There were not enough hours in a day for me to cohabit every world I belonged to, and church, I felt, judged me the most harshly for the hours I couldn't give. The enoughs I gave were never enough, and thank yous ran dry very quickly.

'Are you back for good now?' someone asked me drily. I said nothing.

'You've been away a while,' joked someone else.

'Sit down and tell me what happened to you.' a woman intervened—to save my soul, a kindness, I realised.

I felt guilty, scrutinised, like someone in a bad relationship. Guilty—always, perpetually, for everything. Guilty for being stupid enough to be a Christian—idiot, my siblings sneered— guilty for not being strong enough to always defend my beliefs and always be the weird Christian girl who didn't swear—God will help you get there, and accept it, my dearest friends said.

It has to be said, that Christians, the majority, are good people. Great people. I love them dearly. Even the ones who broke up with boyfriends because said boyfriends weren't against gay marriage. Even the ones who looked patient and pained when I said I wasn't straight. And I think I might have stayed, were it not for the Resurrection.

There was something very gross to me about the idea that I should sing hymns and be saved, while the people I loved the most in the world would burn up in flames—and for what? Could God really demand this? It seemed strange, to be absolved of all sin but one.

I believe there is a distinction between what God, or Grace, or the Universe, or Pre-determinism, might want, and what people who believe in God tell you to do. What is written in texts thousands of years old. Because people want power, and money, and more power. People cannot write the sacred down without corrupting it.

And I realised: it is wrong, for me, to stand within these walls, and be saved by a God who would choose me but not the many, many worthier souls I have had the privilege of meeting, some of whom were gay, some of whom made mistakes, but all of whom did not deserve the punishment the Bible promised. And so I walked away, from that gilded, Gothic church.

Stab my baby in the head,

oh Editor,

carve and masticate

my offspring in your name.

Wield your knife with

mercy and precision that the

death may be quick,

the blood profuse enough to

stain my hands so they

will never wash. Thus

I can never forget

my trespass on your

high sensibilities, and

my work upon your

next sacrifice may be

touched by the brutal,

necessary red.

She packs up her bags and makes her way towards the building exit, her eyes on the dark grey carpet of her office. Hafsa is: a youngest child, a loving daughter and a welfare officer for an NGO, in that order.

Tonight she has to rush to North Manchester Hospital, where she will be allotted her weekly hours to see her mother. Her mother has been in ICU for ten days, breathing through tubes, looking bruised and smaller than Hafsa has ever seen her mother look. She sits there and notices a change from last week: this time, her mother cries as she speaks.

Ten days ago, Hafsa had taken her first leave of work in two years. She had booked tickets to Spain, and waved goodbye to her mother, who looked well and told her to enjoy herself.

She had been in Spain for two hours when she got a call from her older sister.

'Hafsa, you need to come home. Mum is in ICU.'

Hafsa thought, for a split second, that her sister was joking. That it was some prank, and waited for her sister to tell her so and to enjoy her holiday. She was preparing her reproach when the silence on the other end of the line told her this was no joke. Hafsa got back on a plane.

Over the week that followed, a sleepless week, Hafsa guiltily came to realise how much her mother had always done for her, babied her. She still hung up her daughter's clothes, so that all Hafsa ever had to do with regards to clean clothes was put them on in the morning. They had eaten every meal together, and Hafsa had never kept a secret from her. Now, there was just Hafsa at the dinner table, staring blankly at forgotten cutlery, occasionally visited by her sister and nephews.

Her mother had always told her that she felt it in her heart whenever Hafsa cried. So Hafsa cried and asked 'Mum, can you hear me?'

When she spoke to the doctors, Hafsa was told that they weren't sure what was wrong with her mother. Though she was a thyroid patient, it wasn't her thyroid causing the problem, nor was it her liver or kidneys. They were investigating, they promised her.

'There is some improvement in her condition, which is positive,' they said.

Hafsa went to sit beside her mother.

'Mama, the doctors say you are getting better. I will be praying for you,' she said, and tears leaked from her mother's closed eyes.

Hafsa bit her lip, and waited till her hours were up before sobbing in the hospital corridor.

The next day, Hafsa' boss took her aside to warn her that she should begin to prepare for the inevitable. Hafsa's heart seized. She did not want to prepare for anything at all, and prayed all night that her mother would not escape her.

Floating in the ocean of love,

Not knowing what darkness lurks outside.

A tiny world, all for me.

A little reminder that humans can actually do magic.

A place I’ve been once and wish to go back.

Mother’s womb.

The other day a woman with an elegant soul and a slightly burnt nose said to me:

'My children are my world, I give everything to them.'

We are sitting in a large hall, leant to us by the local council, so that we can teach people, often post-asylum seeking, English. The lady in question is Kurdish, and her English is perfect, since she used to be a lawyer in Kurdistan. Her hair is coiled gold, her eyes as black as a sky full of stars.

'I think to be a good parent,' she continues, slowly, chewing the words around, 'to raise your children well and prepare them for the world, you have to be tired.'

She has that look about her which says she has always been a hard worker, in everything she does. A calm, made up from years of determination. Her country, politically, no longer exists. When she flies to the city she calls home, she flies into Irak, a dominator rich in oil and in corruption.

The conversation ends with my holding back tears—and her seeing. She leaves at half past two to go and pick up her children from school. Despite not being taught in their native tongue, they are among the top students of their school.

When I get home the next day, my flatmate cries out, swinging from one foot to the other:

'EH! Amiga!' with a joyous grin I have come to know well.

He is a Brazilian health economist, and I live with him and his wife, who is a marketing consultant currently studying an MBA. We, laxly, share duties around the house.

That weekend, his wife, who is the kind of woman who will do up my zips for me if I am running out the door and have forgotten to check, is upstairs, swaying between business calls and exhaustion.

She is his second wife, and third serious partner. Both are honest people, with Christian backgrounds and too much empathy to want to believe in the Resurrection. We also don't want our loved ones to burn all while we are saved just because we sang in a church once a week.

Perhaps due to an age gap and gender difference, the man and I tend to have brief debates rather than conversations. We have covered most topics we can, and keep each other well informed on current affairs. Interests range from economic studies, how they affect governmental policies, and fighting climate change. Never, I have noticed, do we gossip.

But that weekend, our conversations run long over the weekend, mainly because his wife is calling a business partner one evening and sleeping the next.

His tongue loosened with wine, he begins to tell me about his divorce. Homeless, he then lived in a hostel, lost his political capital and then his job, the woman he'd left his wife left him and then came back. It didn't take him very long to realise her bipolarity made her emotionally laborious to be around. But he loved her, until she was unkind to his children.

'She was demanding more energy than my children, and she barring me from my children and I realised, no, never. This I cannot do, and nothing, nothing can get between me and my children.'

There's a ferocity and an anger when he speaks, reliving the bitter taste of understanding what it means to lose everything. His smile doesn't come back for a while as he looks down at his hands, eyes wide.

'I'm really crazy with that.'

And I think, there is a love and an ache in his chest which screams out at him that there is nothing in the world which should interfere his intense need to protect his daughters.

Once the weather cools down for a day or two, bust out your favorite hoodie and enjoy the crisp air. Listen to the crunching leaves under your shoes. Go basic and get yourself a pumpkin spice coffee. Pick some apples and grab a gallon of cider. Don't forget to visit my haunt - I'll scare you once you enter my room! This season goes fast, but some other amazing holidays follow right after!

You pulled me out of that deep dark place.

You were there for me.

When I didn’t even know I needed it.

I needed it then the most.

You stayed back when you felt it was best.

You nudged your way in when you saw an opening.

You were there as a friend. An I asked why.

An that’s when you said,

“Because it seemed like you needed a friend.”

I did.

Oh boy I did.

An you were there.

You became my best friend.

Now you are my life.

My husband to be.

You were there for me then.

You are there for me now.

An that’s all I could ask for you to be.

I will be there for you.

When you need it too.

All you have to do is ask.

An I’ll be right there…

Next to you.

Just like you were there for me.

When I needed it the most.

I’ll be there for you.

All you have to do… is ask

An I will be there…

For you.

I feel like I am going crazy.

I have all these thoughts running through my head.

They don’t seem real.

I seem too full.

They are just thoughts…

That’s what she’d say.

You can just walk away….

That’s what she’d also say.

But I can’t.

It’s hard.

They keep coming back.

I don’t know what to do.

I don’t know what to say.

But these thoughts

Just don’t go away.

Wait.

Sometimes. Sometimes

They go away.

They go away.

When shes away.

They go away….

When I am with him.

He’s there for me.

He sees me.

He encourages me.

Good things. Only good things.

Are here, with me.

When he’s….

With me…

She’s suffocating….

It’s hard.

She just wants to be there for me.

She thinks I don’t let her in.

She gets jealous to easily.

Because of me.

I don’t want to be like her.

I am like her.

But I am also me.

I don’t want to be like her.

When I’m a mother.

I don’t want to be her.

Like she has been with me.

I want to be me.

Just me.

I

Want

To

Be

Me