A cold winter evening. A warm, cozy corner. A bookshelf full of books that had already taken her on adventures
far better than anything this world had to offer. She sat there knowing it was the perfect time to read and yet she had already flipped through these beloved pages countless times before.
Then her eyes caught on something. A book.
Unread.
Happiness drifted toward her slowly, almost cautiously. It was one of those moments when she wanted to read more than anything, something new, something different, something brimming with emotion, something filled with tales of love and sacrifice. What she did not know, as she reached for the book, was that she had just found exactly what
she needed. She would stay up all night finishing it, even if she told herself she wouldn’t. She would cry and scream at times, but she would also laugh and thank God that it did not end as horribly as she had feared.
As she accompanied Noor Ahmar, an undercover journalist, to Syria where a civil war raged—she found herself laughing with the people she had come to love and crying when they left. She survived bombings, shootings, and endless hardships, all in pursuit of the truth.
Everywhere was dangerous.
At times, she found herself lost in the mystery of Noor’s past and the haunting visions that kept drawing her back to her mother. At others, she was reading Noor’s diary, or shielding Noor and her friends from soldiers who seemed to be everywhere. And sometimes, she found herself wishing for Muhammad to return—to help, to save them, to make things right.
Eventually, she realized hours had passed, and what she had feared came true: the book had ended far too quickly. Noor Ahmar’s world was gone. There was no Muhammad. It had all come to an end.
She reread it often, but rereading could never bring back the feelings that had awakened that night. And for the rest of her life, the book sat among a select few—the ones she claimed she would sell her soul to read for the first time again. It was titled When the Sky Wrote Back by an author called Maryam Imbisat.
