Vigil

The crescent grows thin again.
Soon the fasting month will begin.

Each year I keep a day of it
with Muslim friends.

It is not my religion.
Still, something in me answers.

⸻

Many years ago
I lay in a hospital ward

in that uncertain region
between recovery and disappearance.

Doctors spoke quietly outside the curtain.
Machines continued their indifferent counting.

It may have been a medical error.
Or the body’s own refusal.

Fever blurred the ceiling lights.
Time moved in fragments.

At some point
I was taken to another room.

Night had deepened.
The hospital had grown still.

And there was someone sitting beside the bed.

Not what the imagination would invent—
no radiance, no mystery.

Only a nurse
reading quietly.

I drifted in and out.

Sometimes I thought I had already left the body.
Sometimes I heard footsteps in the corridor.

But each time I opened my eyes
she was still there.

At dawn I woke completely.

She closed the book in her lap.
In her hand were prayer beads.

I asked the charge nurse later
who had been assigned to that room.

No one.

The woman’s shift had ended hours earlier.

She stayed, they told me,
because no one should die alone.

⸻

I learned she had come from a country
that had been destroyed.

A refugee.

That year people looked at Muslims
with suspicion and fatigue.

Still she sat there
through the night.

No witness except the quiet breathing
of a man she did not know.

⸻

Time passed.

As time does, it covered the event
with other events.

Work.
Marriage.
Ordinary obligations.

But certain things remain.

Years later a friend was dying.

His family could not reach him in time.

So we stood there instead.

Another friend drove.
Someone called an imam.

I leaned close to hear the last words.

He thanked me.

I spoke the phrases his faith required.
Borrowed words
but sincere.

When the prayers were finished
the room became very calm.

And suddenly I understood.

The kindness given once
had returned.

Not as repayment.

That is not how such things work.

More like a seed
that waits in the soil
until the right season.

⸻

People ask sometimes
what religion I belong to.

I tell them
names matter less than actions.

If faith means
keeping watch beside another human being

through the longest part of the night,

then perhaps
I have learned something of it.