SANCTUARY (DON'T FORGET TIME)

            Tears well in my eyes the moment I'm out of the shrubbery. The grass of the overgrown path tickles my ankles, humidity embalms me, and I fill my lungs to the brim with petrichor. I'm greeted by budding lily pads that float on the shimmering lake and the buzz of striped hoverflies. Aspen and maple wave at me in the breeze. Subhanallah.

Summer is one of those places impossible to believe as real; moments spent here become memories impressed onto film, rose-gold with something like nostalgia already in the present.

That's the best name nine-year-old me came up with when I discovered it: Summer. So that I could talk about it in public and nobody would understand, I'm going to Summer now. Rather uncreative but, as far as I'm aware, it served its purpose: I've never bumped into anyone here.

Vicky, the lake within Sufsdale city limits, is perpetually crowded regardless of season or time of day. This lake, Salver Waters as I've later discovered, is severed by a railway bridge and has no villas lining it. It's inhabited only by tangly marsh grass and skipping water striders.

It's mine without belonging to me at all. That's the best part.

Summer belongs to the laughs of generations past that still echo within the trough and the opposite shore, to the arguments woven into the beams of the bridge that looks a gust away from collapse. Metal rings are bolted to the edge of the wooden platform where a dock must once have been attached for the enjoyment of countless families, whilst, now, I'm left to jump in the water and heave myself back on using gaps in the bedrock underneath.

I like to think that East Trough was once — before the school's funding got severed and the running path that loops behind it was neglected by the city — a neighbourhood brimming with opportunity. There's a billboard on that running path, right before the fork of the faded trail that leads here, and it still exhibits a Thatcher campaign, though its promising sheen has long since weathered away and been covered in copious vandalism.

I consider the people who used to spend their free time here and how they've all moved on, not in a melancholic way, but grateful they've passed their joy onto me through the messenger of singing marsh grass. Maybe they simply don't need Summer anymore, not in the way I do.

I never told Naz about it. Maybe that's why we're not friends anymore: I never shared enough with her. I don't share enough. How do I learn to do so without the sense that once there are more participants than me and God, life is diluted, syrup divided into several glasses with less left for me and I've always preferred squash too strong?

Why am I only able to be comfortable in the presence of spirits and memory? Perhaps because I'm half-ghost myself now. Will I always?

My footsteps gain an echo when I reach the wooden platform and lose it again as I wedge off my shoes. My house, no shoes inside. I discard the rest of my clothes and, once left in my briefs, jump in at a run.

The water is freezing at first but by the time my head breaks the surface, I've adjusted to it. It becomes a cooling embrace to swim in. It's nearly eight and the yolk of the sun has sunk behind the hill and the railroad. Its glow still colours the sky, a few stray shoals dapple the surface and give a halo to the occasional leaf or maple seed pod that pirouettes from the trees.

I swim through pollen until the platform is ten metres behind me. There, already out of breath, I turn to float on my back and watch the sky. The lake is locked into hills and they turn it into a sound chamber; passing cars sound much farther than the distance to the motorway yet my own heartbeat booms all around me.

A distant hum disturbs the serenity and my body perks up. I count backwards, anticipating thunder, three seconds is one kilometre, and as I reach zero, a deafening ruckus buries me as a train slits onto the railway bridge.

The only proof of my laughter is the rumble in my chest and when I fill my lungs to the brim to scream with all my strength so that my abdomen tires. It gets lost entirely in the noise of the passing train. A silly ritual but one that keeps me alive: train is passing, scream.

The train ends, the ruckus quiets, and I stop, lungs deflated and stomach fatigued, though a smile rests on my face.

Instantly, I'm lighter.

Summer is the place where I can always find peace. It has been my private sanctuary a seventeen-minute walk from home ever since I discovered it a decade ago but especially for the past two years — its ambient noise and constant but calm movement is the antithesis of Edenfield's rigorous structure and surveillance, cut off from anything living. There was no God to be found in the consuming antiseptic nor the wiry bedframe, no matter if I scoured until my cuticles were bloody, but here... They're in every detail. Here I'm closer to God than even in masjid or church because holy structures are, after all, built by man. Summer is a materialisation of God's will.

Any creator will know this: there's always more of them in the pieces they create for their own enjoyment, imperfect and incomplete, pieces that forget what others think or want and even what they themselves need, to focus only on the ephemeral desires of the moment. Summer is Allah's book of scrap doodles and there's nowhere else I'm surrounded by Their love more intimately.

I'll never find Summer in Oxford. I'll never know Oxford like this. You only grow up once and childhood familiarity is a unique secret that can't be engineered later. Even if I was capable of sharing things with others then, I'd have nothing to share.

I have no clue how much time has lapsed when I clamber onto the platform. I stretch before I dig out my cell.

The alert of five missed calls is visible just enough for me to register it before it's covered up by an incoming one, a disruption so unexpected I nearly drop the phone despite it being mute. I curse myself before I answer.

Iya's voice bursts through the speaker before I've pressed it to my ear. My internal spiral of scolding combines with hers to make an incoherent cacophony but it's easy enough to fill it in from memory: I should always answer my phone, I know better, I don't get to disappear, I'm supposed to text every four hours.

'Désolé, désolé. I lost track of time. I forgot it on silent from school.' I drop my phone onto the planks and continue to apologise in every language I know as I shrug my shirt onto damp shoulders. 'I'm on my way right now.'

At some point, she hangs up because once I've got my shoes on, the call has ended. I rush through the shrubbery, unbuttoned shirt slapping the wet skin at my sides, cell in one hand and crumpled socks in the other. By the time I slip from behind the Thatcher billboard onto the gravelled running path, my heels blister. The sting doesn't slow me down. Nor does the stitch at my side or the complete absence of oxygen in my body that quickly turns me dizzy.

Iya is waiting in the open doorframe. Tough she sees me when I turn into Cleavers Grove, I don't stop running until I've torn past her into the entrance, where the friction of my shoes on the floor yanks me to such an abrupt halt I nearly fall flat on my face.

Through the daggers pierced into my lungs, my sides, and my Adam's apple, I wheeze another apology.

Clearly, it's not persuasive; she shuts the door with a snap. 'Your curfew is not a suggestion, Ziri. You're home at nine. If not, you tell me.' Though I interrupt her with continuous I know's, she continues as if I'm mute. 'How should I know you're not dead somewhere? For all I know, you're dead somewhere. We didn't get you a cell phone for you to never answer it.'

'You didn't get me a cell. This is Baba's old.' Irrelevant! 'Sorry.'

I screw my eyes shut at the prickle of tears and clamp a hand over them too. Why do I always have to latch onto insignificant details in everything? Idiot.

'I'm sorry, Iya.' Despite tears weighing my lashes, I open my eyes so she knows I mean it. 'I'm not dead.' Is that a joke? Even I've got no idea.

'But you are grounded until your exams end. You're supposed to be studying anyway.'

I nod. Not like it makes any difference–

'And that includes Dalmar.' I snap my head up to her accusatory finger. 'You think I don't know you visit him when you're grounded?'

He's told her? Bloody grass!

Though my tears increase into a flood, I acquiesce. I cry so often that it's hardly going to change her mind. Nonetheless, she dries my tears with gentle caresses before she pulls me into her, confessing how worried she was.

It only makes me sob out gratitude for her and anger at myself. I keep burdening them with new scares and I've still not paid back for the first one.