In Dubai, summer never truly ends. The heat lingers like a heavy blanket, even in December when other places see snow. I used to love watching the sun set behind the skyscrapers, turning the glass towers into columns of fire. That was before. Now, at twenty-five, I haven’t watched a sunset in thirteen years.

The memories come in fragments. Five shadows. The smell of shisha from a nearby café. My new blue dress with the silver threading that my aunt had bought me that morning. The sound of traffic on Sheikh Zayed Road growing distant. The call to prayer echoing across the city, unanswered.

They took more than just my childhood that night. They took my voice – it stayed trapped in my throat for three years. They took my trust in crowds, in dark places, in the sound of multiple footsteps. They took my love for the city I was born in, where minarets pierced the sky and the desert met the sea.

We moved to London the following week. Father said it was for his new job, but I saw the truth in Mother’s eyes when she packed my things, leaving the blue dress behind. In London, the rain washed everything grey. I welcomed it. Grey felt safer than the golden shimmer of desert sun.

The doctors spoke in gentle voices about trauma and healing. They gave me clay to shape with my hands when words wouldn’t come. I made dozens of tiny buildings, a miniature city I could control, could make safe. Then I would crush them, start again. None of them looked like Dubai.

Sleep became a foreign country I couldn’t visit. In its place came paintings – dark, shapeless things that filled canvas after canvas in my therapy sessions. My art teacher called them “expressive.” She didn’t know they were really maps of the places inside me where light couldn’t reach.

Five figures. Five shadows that grew longer with each passing year, stretching across my adolescence like sundials. In group therapy, other girls shared similar shadows. We recognized each other without words, an unspoken sisterhood bound by the things that haunted our nights.

At sixteen, I started martial arts. Not for protection – it was too late for that – but for the feeling of strength flowing back into my limbs. Each punch threw off a fraction of their weight. Each kick pushed the shadows back an inch. My body, once a prison of memories, slowly became my own again.

The nightmares still come, but less frequently now. My therapist says healing isn’t linear. Some days I’m thirteen again, huddled in a London bathroom, trying to scrub their touch from my skin. Other days, I can walk past groups of men without my heart trying to escape my chest.

I haven’t returned to Dubai. The city appears sometimes in travel magazines, all gleaming spires and desert romance. I turn the pages quickly. But lately, I’ve been thinking about the sunsets there, how the light painted everything gold. Perhaps, someday, I’ll watch one again. Not yet. But someday.