This summer, soon after I first moved into my apartment, I put up a sheet of aluminum foil over the little bedroom window that faces east over the Nile and the cityscape of Cairo, and which also happens to overlook my bed. The early rising sun would peek through at an unseemly hour, and even when I tossed and turned on the mattress trying to escape its indomitable march into my sleep time, the ferocity of its rays warmed the room to an uncomfortable temperature that was impossible to sleep through.

Over months, crinkles, wrinkles, then hairline cracks began to appear in my window cover. In the mornings golden flecks began to glimmer along the aluminum faultlines. Soon tiny holes punctuated the steely gray, sun freckles flowed through onto my pillow, the headrest, lights of something divinely alive behind the tattered thin but tenacious metal curtain.

And when a starry burst of morning strays over my yet half-sleeping eyes, in dim musings I consider that behind the world I choose to see, is another more glorious light-filled world to which I am somehow tied inextricably but am unwilling or unable to behold other than through the cracks in those fragile barriers that anchor me to the finite spaces of the familiar.