The third day of Ramadan.
It is the fourth day of Ramadan, 2026 and something in him has opened. It’s not loud or sudden but Just enough to take him back to the first time he fasted in 2021. Rehab. Before Dubai and the restart, when he hadn’t learned how to speak about those years without tightening his jaw. That year he was past rock bottom, past the point where metaphors made sense and lost in ways he couldn’t yet name. He was raging at everyone, his parents, the system, the other men inside those walls, and the girl he tried to make things work with while they were both broken in the same building. She left with his heart in her hands. He sinking deeper. He was angry at everyone except himself.
When Ramadan approached that year, he asked Fahad, who had been there a few months longer than most people usually do, that he wanted to fast. He said it almost defiantly like fasting was something to conquer and Fahad just nodded and told him he would help. To this day, it still unsettles him how Fahad ended up there you know? How someone the world might have labeled a “failure” knew almost every dua by heart and how he led them in prayer, guided them gently through the days of hunger and carried faith with steadier hands than men who had never fallen. It still makes him wonder if the price of intelligence or sensitivity is sometimes heavier than most people can bear.
He was angry because it was easier than being ashamed, I guess anger gave him posture, volume and let him point outward to his parents, the system, the girl and everyone who had witnessed him unravel. Rage always feels powerful while Accountability feels fatal. Ten days into the fast and something started to change, the hunger did what arguments couldn’t which was quiet and strip him. There is only so much fury a body can carry when it hasn’t eaten. The edges start to dull and the noise thins out, within the silence, he could finally see clearly. He called his parents not because they had changed but because he had. He understood then that he needed their forgiveness more than they needed his. He had dragged them into his lowest moments and forced them to watch him collapse in slow motion. He had fought them while they absorbed every blow but still loved him consistently even though he did not love himself enough to receive it because gratitude requires humility and he had none. That’s when he turned the anger inward this time, and on some days he fed on shame more than hunger, other days he replayed every disappointment, every person he had let down and sat with the weight of it without distraction, there was no phone, no escape but Just him and the quiet reckoning of his own reflection, and forgiving himself was harder than forgiving anyone else because It required surrender and not to the system or to circumstance but to God. He gave up control because he had already proven he could not carry it well. He was alone and needed something or someone to hold him when pride no longer could. By the last days of Ramadan, something inside him felt light and not because his past had disappeared but he had just stopped fighting it. There is a particular joy in conquering yourself, it’s not something you can announce, but quietly it feels like breathing without resistance. He had never felt happiness like that before.
A few months later, he moved to Dubai. New city, job, life arranged carefully over old fractures and when Ramadan came again, it felt different. Fuller because in this new country, fasting is not a private act but the whole city kinda slows down with you, the working hours shorten. it’s a city or country where mosques fill every corner of the skyline and during ramadan there is a visible softness in people, more patience, more generosity, more restraint and hunger becomes collective but so does reflection. He enjoyed it more than he expected because the discipline felt shared and the quiet felt supported which took him deeper into himself again into the version of him that had once felt light even though outside of Ramadan he still lived on edges and moved in extremes, Ramadan always felt like the reset button, physically, spiritually and mentally.
He reconciled with an ex and began to dissolve again. He has always had a way of letting the things he loves consume him and a way of letting people take up so much space that he can no longer recognize himself in the room. Devotion turns into disappearance and attachment turns into erosion and by the time the next Ramadan arrived, he was already withering inside another relationship. Present, but not really here, speaking, but not fully there but mostly not confident enough to stand honestly before God or grounded enough to show up for himself.
That was the first year he didn’t fast.
Avoidance can look like devotion from the outside and that year, he was deep in his vices performing versions of himself, the man the relationship required, the man work expected but to a certain extent, he was happy because had something many people long for, a safe space, a partner and the shape of a future forming. It felt stable and settled. But slowly, almost imperceptibly, he drifted and friends became distant, family conversations shortened and the things that once steadied him, faith, discipline and even his own interests began to fade. It felt like diving into the ocean. At first, the descent is beautiful and the water is cool, the light dancing above you but the deeper you go, the darker it becomes and the pressure increases. Shapes move in the distance and the sharks do not need to rush they only need to wait. Still, he kept descending because he believed the greatest treasures live in the deepest parts of the ocean and in some ways, they do because he was given a son. Aiko. For a moment, everything felt worth it, the darkness, the pressure. Then, almost as quickly as it formed, it was gone. She left, quietly and early. The details no longer matter in the way they once did except what remains, which is the absence and the silence after a door closes. The kind of pain that does not announce itself but rearranges you from the inside. There are few things that break a man down completely and this was one of them. It is not something he would wish on anyone and when everything collapsed, there was only one place left to go.
God.
Ramadan arrived again and he was exhausted not physically but spiritually. He had been performing strength for too long. He gave everything over because he could not carry it anymore. He needed rest. He needed to stop pretending. He needed something steady when everything else had dissolved. He was alone again. More alone than before but Ramadan has a way of thinning the darkness. Hunger sharpens truth and silence clears the noise and slowly, almost stubbornly things became lighter, clearer. Not fixed but bearable. Nothing makes life lighter than moving without a mask. That year, something shifted in him, it wasn’t loud or public but internal and a chain had broken. He stopped performing as much and began writing again, picked up a camera with intention, years after arriving in Dubai, he felt present in his own life for the first time even though there was still pain, a million small needles lodged somewhere in his chest but most days he didn’t feel them. He was living on the sunny side of himself. Functional, disciplined and productive.
Another Ramadan came and this time, he had nothing urgent to beg for, no collapse to crawl out of and no visible wreckage and his prayers were mostly of gratitude. Gratitude for survival, for distance from the man he used to be which felt clean and stable and slowly, like always, it began to feel like a performance again, less surrender and more posture, less confrontation and more comfort. It felt like cosplay, like an appearance of devotion without the excavation and he wasn’t digging anymore. He had taken his eyes off his demons, convinced they had dissolved. But they had only been waiting. Untethered and patient and when they returned, they did not knock because what followed was one of the worst years of his life with no dramatic explosion but Just steady erosion. The kind that happens when you stop watching yourself closely.
It is the fourth day of Ramadan, 2026 and he is grounded. A lot can happen in a year. A man can lose himself more than once and a man can rebuild more than once but what matters is not the fall, it’s knowing how to stand again. so as he writes this, he is not the same person who entered the previous years blindly. He has seen the highs and survived the lows. He no longer treats either as permanent. For the first time in a long time, he feels like himself, not an inflated version or the disappearing one but Just himself. He understands now that this is the moment to let it all go, the fear, accumulation of unspoken things, hope that clings too tightly, even the despair that once defined him. Ramadan is no longer an escape or a performance but a practice, practice in presence. Hour by hour making day by day. Staying awake to his own patterns and watching his shadows without pretending they are gone.
Each day of fasting feels lighter. Not because life is easier, but because he is carrying less resistance. There is something shedding quietly like an old skin loosening.
Soon, it will fall away.
