In Islam, Allah tells us that He created the mountains to stabilize the Earth. Without them the planet would shake violently until she met her own undoing. In Islam, the Qur’an uses the Arabic word rawasiyah or “anchor” to refer to a mountain. They are instruments of stability, holding things together when they are screaming to break away. These anchors were molded by His hands like clay as part of a deliberate design. In Islam, Allah tells us that the mountains, the things we all know to be immovable stone mammoths, will dissipate into mere clouds on the Last Day. 

In Islam, mountains serve a purpose, they are a sign for those who believe that even the largest things will fall one day if He directs them with His word. When you perform the Umrah pilgrimage, you must walk between two mountains, Safa and Marwah, seven times, symbolizing Hajar’s once desperate search for water for her dying child. She never lost faith that eventually Allah would materialize a spring of water for her as provision in that hopeless desert, bookended by stone anchors. The Qur’an does not say on which day Allah made the mountains but I think He made them on a Sunday. In Islam, we are made in His image, and Sundays are when I take stock of what unsteady Earth is beneath my feet. 

I am drawn to the mountainside in a manner of unmitigated magnetism. I want to spend all my PTO teaching my muscles the art of lying between stones and sleeping for a millennium. I want to dissolve into snow-capped peaks, with a steady procession of clouds the only thing touching me for days, each one a better lover than the last. I want to live in a cave overlooking a steep jagged fall of stone, sunlight bathing the entrance in amber. I want to be carried by a puma up and down the windward side of the range, stopping only to share water from cupped hands. I only want to journey with, to break bread with, a creature who will carry my load for a day; hunt anything that looks at me funny. 

Mountains are just the floor before they become mountains. The plates of the Earth collide and shove and scream their anger before crashing together head-on and towering into a dagger. When I am done crashing and colliding, I want to be a weapon, too. I want to fashion myself into a firmament to avoid ever losing control again. I want to become a thing of majesty that people stare at with googly eyes, that they train their DSLR lenses on, that they sleep next to in tents, setting up temples in my caves, never knowing what it took to make me this way. 

I want to build a home at the base of a range that perforates the clouds, so every day I can live as a tiny spellbound thing, gazing up at my neighbor with eyes that are gelled with dew. I love things that make me feel small because, for a moment, all the bad things about me are small, too. When I am flattened by the proportions of comparison, the nastiest part of my ego goes to sleep. When I am small, I finally understand my place in creation.  I love things that make me feel small because I am enticed by all the possibilities of how much more I have left to grow. In the daylight, smallness feels like peaceful humility mixed with awe and inspiration. But at nightfall, smallness feels the same as being prey. 

I am in Nepal during the monsoon season and the Himalayas are hiding behind a thick quilt of clouds. Colorful prayer flags disappear into fluffy white cotton. Disappointed at the lack of visibility, I begrudgingly pose for photos at the mountain base, but there is nothing discernible behind me. A man selling bottled water approaches me – a girl with a frown for a face – and says, “you know, it doesn’t matter if you cannot see them.” He shakes his open hand in a quick twist in front of his face to emphasize how insignificant it all is. “Himalaya is something you feel.” I didn’t understand what he meant until I saw my first mountain at night.

The same mountains that pose like beauty queens during the day transform into nefarious shadows at night. They feel the same as the burn of a glare on your shoulder blade. They become an energy that suggests they are spawns of evil even though they were divinely raised. A friend tells me that this feeling is a form of megalophobia, or, a fear of large objects. But I doubt that this diagnosis can be parsed for the sun and moon. I’ve already told you that mountains do not scare me in the daylight. During the day I want to become its stone bed, to die in its valley and rest in an unmarked grave that deer prance upon. But the nighttime mountain feels like a conjuring of all the things I fear the most. I think I have loved many beautiful things that became terrors at night. 

I like feeling small and being near things that make me feel small. Hindi makes me feel small because I’ve lost the muscle memory to twist my tongue the way I was born to. Most of what I know is from movies and songs. I can only say things of little utilitarian value, things you can sing from a mustard field or a waterfall’s foamy basin. I can assemble conflict and say things like, “Yeh shaadi nahin ho sakte / This wedding cannot happen.” I can say, “Arre, duffer! Kya yeh tumhaare baap ka galee hai? / Idiot! Is this your father’s street?” I can recite all forms of drama and melancholy. I can cry and implore, “I will love him in every lifetime, that is my promise!” 

But I cannot tell you the time. 

I cannot tell you that red onions make me feel sick. 

I cannot ask you which way is home. 

I do not have any language other than my captor’s to describe my house to you. To tell you that it smells of coconut and jasmine, that the central air hums right after dawn, that the vent over my stove needs tightening.  

Hindi is a mountain whose base I loiter around, practicing the climb cautiously each day. Allah promised that in jannah language will never be a barrier. The righteous will simply speak to each other and they will understand. But I want to ask my great-great-grandfather in his own tongue who put him on that ship and how much they got for it. I want to ask him what happened on the Atlantic because no one seems to have a conforming recollection of ninety whole days at sea. 

Hindi makes me feel small with its complex sentence structure, precise pronunciation, and script so beautiful it can border a palace door and be mistaken for zari work.  I am learning Hindi for the first time in three generations in my family. I study on an app that rewards me with digital gemstones and a streak count for all the dressings of performative self-discipline. In Hindi the word for yesterday is the same as the word for tomorrow. I find that Fatimah Asghar laments over the way this is also the case in Urdu as I search the internet to confirm that this is not a mistake. The search engine confirms the pair of definitions. The word kal is both the life you’ve lived and the life you are yet to live, to shape, to seize, to waste. Kal is both your undoing and your rebirth. Kal is the promise that a thing shall never be static, but can metamorphosize in the span of five prayers if you believe hard enough. Kal is both sides of the mountain. 

Kal is the mountain in daylight, brimming with the mental amenity of the familiar. Kal is the mountain at nightfall, imposing with the threat of the untrustworthy and the unknown. Kal, your parents’ country was a place that called you home for joyous weddings and beach vacations. Kal, it is only the place you visit to bury the dead. Kal, a whale swallowed you whole, and you called out to Allah in the darkness of the night, the darkness of the belly, the darkness of the ocean floor. Kal, a cresting wave spits you back out on the shore, and you say you do not know how you got there. Yesterday and tomorrow are stabilizers for today. Kal is the rawasiyah for today. I am scared of the mountains at night, because as long as they are standing and Allah has not ordered them to collapse into dust, kal is on the other side. 

I like feeling small, and writing makes me feel small. The oscillation between this is brilliant and this is shit gives me the most exhilarating whiplash. There are days when I am embraced by the warmth of critical celebration, and there are days when the icy barrages of rejection feel like I am running between Safa and Marwah, pleading for my spring. I know that might sound dramatic, but have you considered that this is my life’s work?

I like feeling small because all small things get cared for. But I used to take lovers who made me feel so small I wondered if I was invisible. I would admire their peaks, never wondering about my own slopes and how far up they go if I followed them all the way. I’ve forgotten what that’s like, now that I only receive love that sees me as the sun, as the center of all creation. As a light toasting a mountainside cave’s entryway, sending a spot of heat to a sleeping lion with kajal for eyelids. 

I like feeling small, and so I want to become a carpenter ant living with my two hundred family members between igneous rocks. I want to be reborn as the soil crusting a hiker’s boot sole so that I can know what it feels like to taste every single step of the elevation. A Rolex wearing a Columbia vest once told me that he backpacked all through South Asia. He detailed all the ways his stomach could not digest the food, how the women looked so striking, how the people are “so happy with so little,” how he was intimidated by the men in the mountainous Baloch firmament with fireballs where their eyes should be. He told me that violence and anger won’t advance their cause, how they will be the reason for their own downfall. I wanted to tell him that even the grains of rice protested him standing in their land and that’s why they made sure to brutally claw their way out of his stomach each day. I wanted to tell him about Nikki Giovanni and how she said that if those who lived by the sword really died by the sword, there would be no white men like him left on this Earth. He ordered the paneer makhni at lunch and made sure to stick the “kh” sound in his throat in a way that made me wish syllables were knives. 

I am in Peru to see Machu Picchu when I learn that most hotels there carry oxygen tanks for their guests. Mountain air becomes so thin at certain altitudes that a mere few steps can feel like you’ve been running all this time. I know this because I have to stop frequently for breaks as I walk down the street, my lungs having grown accustomed to the sea-level of New York pavement. In places where there is less oxygen, fewer life forms can thrive. But in Machu Picchu, everything one needs to survive flourishes despite the limitations of the elements. Corn for carbohydrates, quinoa for protein, pumpkin to coat your stomach, coca leaves for the altitude sickness, chocolate to hand-feed your love. There is just enough to sustain a people, give them the strength to carry boulders up the mountainside and fashion them into an entire city that people centuries later will be convinced only aliens could construct. 

In the mountains the sun is always late to work. A reminder that the night isn’t as long as we tend to think it is. Morning light just takes her time to climb the firmament at dawn. I want to be a bead in the mountain embroidery, undetectable as an outsider to the ecosystem. I want to play freeze tag with gazelles so I can know what it feels like to dance without the expectation of perfection. I want to share unhinged jokes with hyenas and roll around, laughing on our backs, our voices echoing off the stone walls and propelling into the heavens. I want to make love to a man with fireballs where his eyes should be in the cooling shadows of a mountain ridge, my skin resting on the padding of a block-printed blanket. I want him to ask me whose it is in the throes of his passion, only to respond between breaths I struggle to muster, “yeh teri liye.” It is for you. I want a love that feels so much like home I forget that I ever knew the language of my captor. Have you ever had a man pull a homeland from beneath your tongue? 

I am walking along a lake in the Argentinian side of Patagonia, hugging myself as cool breeze ices my skin. I am amazed by the juxtaposition of the sapphire blue water below and the silver stone of the mountain range above. Hairs of green peak out of the lake near the shoreline, trembling at the movement of tiny fish swimming around each blade. A fisherman cleaning his motorboat observes me squinting my eyes to see what exactly is happening in the water that is causing the grass to shake. He tells me this is where the tiny fish and shrimp hide from the bigger fish. He tells me that the trout in this lake consume them all. He tells me he knows this because he caught some trout once, and when he opened it with a kitchen knife, sliced it right down the belly, he found all sorts of tiny undigested fish and shrimp spilling out. I will my eyes to light up with genuine interest at his personal confirmation of this ecosystem, but fishing stories have never intrigued me. 

I take a seat on the soil of the lake’s shore and watch the blades of grass shake with their underwater traffic. In Islam, Yunus is consumed by a whale, lives in its stomach for more days than most people care to believe. I become lost in the thought of cutting open a whale, only to find prophethood running out its digestive tract. I wonder what someone would find inside of me if they opened me up, splayed me out flat, right now. My mind starts to itemize a list of all the things I prey on, of all the things that would hide between blades of grass only to eventually spill from my guts: screenshots of messages that make me feel like I matter, completed checklists lined up like trophies, a notebook of prayers I whisper into the ground as I wait for answers from the sky, memories coated in a thick film of dust because I am too afraid to pick them up and remember. In Hindi, one of the words for the past is the same as the word for a ghost: bhoot.