Sometimes I long to be snugly zippered into something warm and familiar. But more often, I embrace freedom, and it welcomes me – as though it’s been waiting for me all along.

I love to drive. Several times a month, I take to the open highway: the wide expanse of concrete, the dusty horizon, and Alligator by The National on repeat. Eyes on the road, one hand holding a drink that’s sweating slightly, the other on the steering wheel. I keep my hands at the six o’clock position, a habit noticed by other people who enjoy driving. I don’t know why I do it; my sister does the same. My carbon footprint competes with my unending desire to explore.

I am often skirting the edges of town, trying to see where one ends and the other begins. Something comes alive when you cross city limits: it is beautiful, intangible. An unspoken language connects drivers at rest stops. In UAE, rest stop culture is refreshingly unserious. If you visit my local gas station after 2 a.m., you’ll find groups of people who have arranged beach chairs on the empty lot next door, drinking cups of milk tea. Their chairs face the gas station as if it’s the view worth admiring. Who am I to contest this?

Drive far enough and I reach another dimension of sorts, dimension one-and-a-half, and then I am neither here nor there. It is here that things begin to fall back into place, thoughts aligning and mending themselves seam by seam. A carefree oblivion settles over me. 

Jean-Paul Sartre may have said “There may more beautiful times – but this one is ours.” I could not find the source of this quote so who’s to say it’s not just a Pinterest user who has smugly fooled us all. If it is, then it’s even less derivative to say: there may be better cities, even better versions of those cities at perhaps even better times, but this one is rightfully, indefinitely, wholly, gratuitously, ours.

“We’re the heirs to the glimmering world” (The Geese of Beverly Road, Alligator)

We have always felt precisely the opposite, felt the opposite of entitlement. (What would the opposite of entitlement be?  Humility? Reverence? A quiet knowing that nothing is owed; everything is a gift. Everything is a bonus. My devoutly Islamic, devoutly stoic Mum would be proud of this conclusion. “Everything is a bonus”; she always tells me).

But what if it isn’t? What if we are the heirs to the glimmering world? What yet do we have to see, to feel, to claim as ours?

I recently told my friend that I always saw the world through words and phrases and only in the last year or so have I started to see it in shapes and colors. I notice things I never did before: my mum sears an eggplant on the stove and it’s not purple at all, but almost-black, with a startlingly reflective skin. My friend blows steam off a cup of hot cocoa on a cold wintery night. Skies turn purple and orange and pink as I drive back home from work.  

Working on the magazine (website, design elements, socials, beginner photography) has played a part in this shift in perception. It’s as though a new sense has been unlocked, one that was clogged by my tendency to be too cerebral. Too in my head. That we can be tactical, mechanical creatures that aren’t always driven by reason and rationale is a revelation, a soothing one at that.

Now that I am aware of shapes and shades, frames and dimensions – like a toddler hitting their 6^th month– I’m the most lucid I’ve ever been, possibly. It’s almost too much to bear. Ironically, I take to the page, to my magazine, to you. There is no vocation, no goal, no deliverable. There is no intended discovery. To exist in this space – one that is separated by a porous line from a known me to an unknown you – is enough for me.

So, take this note from the editor’s desk – my desk – as a sign. Throw on that shirt that’s been waiting for a special occasion, grab that refrigerated drink, and let the condensation soak into your sleeves. Put on your favorite album, turn the volume way up and hit the road.

You never know what – or who – you may find along the way.