Walls at their breaking point

In the middle of our complex lesson on Attached Pronouns in Classical Arabic, our tutor slipped in a short aside on the “guarding alif.” The alif that appears in perfect plural verbs. It’s not read. It’s silent. It just stands there like a wall, he said, as he drew a sharp, vertical line down on the white board. It stands there to let you know that this word ends here. And its stays there. Well, that is until we need to attach a pronoun or something to it. With a swipe of his thumb, he obliterated the guarding alif and gave it ownership.  

Last night I came home from Paris. I’d spent three days talking incessantly to one of my dearest friends. When I rode to the airport on Friday, I felt like I was scrambling out of Oxford for a breath of fresh air. Last night, when I returned, I climbed up the three sets of stairs to my attic room. I opened the door and felt the rush of iced breeze. My radiator had been off for the length of my three day trip, and steeping into my room felt like stepping into a freezer. The central heat was off for the night. I changed and slipped under my duck feathered duvet, and pulled another blanket over myself. The air was so cold that my forehead was starting to pound. I shut my eyes, and while I was so exhausted, the freeze in my nose was so alarming I couldn’t sleep. I spent hours going back and forth between suffocating under my blanket and bringing my head out only to freeze. The night passed. I woke up with the headache I’ve had all day. Sleeping in cold isn’t unfamiliar. I do it often, only not in a room with walls. I sleep in the cold when I’m in the mountains, when I’m near the highest peak in mainland America, when I’m at the edge of the Sierra lakes. I take the cold as a gift from the star ceiling over my head. But in this room, in this house, in this city that is defined by its medieval walls, this air was painful.

This headache has been a lens. Everything I’ve done today, touched today, I’ve seen and read and experienced through this headache and the story that came with it. I’m immersed in a world of invisible walls: my hard book cover, the gloves that protect my fingers from the slashing breeze as I ride my bike, exhaustion, the locked café doors.

I’m reading a book about ultrarunners, people who never ran a day in their life, who become proof of man’s unlimited and boundless capabilities by running hundreds of miles in unimaginable natural terrain. They break every physical, mental, and emotional boundary we think exists. I’m close to the finish line, only 20 pages left to read, and I can’t decide if this book has been uplifting or miserable. Because every time I’m confronted with such inspiration, with people who break every link in their chain, I’m upset by how bounded I feel. Knowing what we can achieve and knowing how to achieve it are different from actually believing you, yourself are capable of it.

Walls are as easy to bring down as they are to build. I’ve realized this even more from this painful and stubborn headache. It’s not the swipe of the finger that really matters, but what we attach ourselves to once we’re standing in the vast boundless openness before us that gives it meaning.