Healing
I discovered that wren was lost. he was living in his head. he carried fears and doubts that no one knew about. one of these fears was that he did not know how to look at god. not out of lack of faith, but because the way we learned religion did not include space for what a man can endure from the inside. the emphasis on this is either completely absent or very shallow. because of that, he struggled to understand what he was going through. is it good. is it punishment. the men of religion did not emphasize this enough.
I followed up with him again after that. this time, he told me the latest diagnosis. high red blood cell count. elevated sugar levels, though not urgent, at least for now. he said he was not planning to tell his family. they worry too much.
He sounded exhausted. too tired to sleep. he kept repeating something that stayed with me. that what he was suffering from was not the illness itself, but what his head was telling him. the collapse was not only physical, but mental too.
I’m slowly starting to form an answer. the three years I wrote about were not random. they were shaped, heavily and quietly, by days I still don’t understand , and I keep discovering this, a little more each day. those days are becoming one of the most important chapters of my life. so dense, so unprocessed, that it has taken me years just to begin understanding what happened there. and I still don’t have the full image. there is something I haven’t yet confronted, something I’m not ready to name, sitting at the center of it that I keep circling without going in. What I do know is this: I feel like I got caught there. like I locked myself inside those days without realizing it. like there is a version of me that I left behind in 2023, specifically at the University of Khartoum, and never went back for. a version I am too afraid to think about clearly. I didn’t choose to abandon it consciously. I just never processed it. and when I try to understand why, I find nothing. not resistance, not pain, just absence.like a self discontinuity: when something ruptures so completely that the person you were before it and the person after it don’t feel connected, just splitted. it is not like growth, the I outgrew something. but like.. the way I imagine it, something that was never finished, yet I closed the door.
In the five unplanned hours I’ve spent on calls with Awab, he mentioned once that he had started a course kind of on self discovery, presented by the author of The Surrender Experiment. as I remember they were nine chapters, online. Awab said he moved through the first few quickly, impatiently, because the material was already familiar to him. and then he reached the end of chapter six, where the instructor said: in the next lecture, we’ll be talking about x. and Awab paused. he told me he knew, instinctively, that what came next was something he wasn’t ready to hear. so he stopped. and he stayed stopped.
Change is not only about will power. you can fight your inner conflicts . you can decide to improve . you can push yourself daily. but there is another factor that matters just as much: timing. some forms of change does not happen just because you want it to. it happens when life gives it space to grow. it happens when conditions are in favorable.
Wren’s heart is deeply faithful. when we lived in the same building, I never once saw him miss a prayer at the mosque. not even Fajr. no matter the hour, he was always there.
I met him when I was around eighteen, and we remained friends from that point on. he has one of the most beautiful voices I have ever heard in Quran recitation. our conversations were light. he was gentle, considerate, quiet. a pure soul. he did not have many people around him, at least that is how it felt to me.