I’ve walked through many narrow corridors when my life has been reorganised around the principle of simplicity.

The first time it happened I was living in Toronto. I was 27 years old and my then husband told me that he was not in love with me anymore and wanted a divorce.

I keep going back to that moment. Without warning I felt the solid earth beneath my feet dissolve. I was in a waking nightmare.

I tried to escape it all the ways that I knew how. I cried more tears than I could imagine exist in a person’s body.

It was divorce, but it felt like dying.

Sometimes I wonder if there are parallel universes stacked next to one other, like sliced bread, that quantum physicists theorise about. I wonder about the multiple possibilities of my life that could be playing out.

Is there a world where I am still married to my first husband?

Is there a world where I never leave Toronto?

I did not know that my first heartbreak would return me so kinesthetically to what is here in the now and what is felt by my body. One wet April day, on a busy urban street in downtown Toronto, I had forgotten my umbrella. I didn’t have a raincoat. I was wearing an indigo-colored woolen coat with a big collar, my hair was unruly and open, and I couldn’t tolerate standing still to wait for the street tram.

On my walk home time enlarged into a pure and spacious encounter. Perhaps it was a particularly difficult day showing up for my responsibilities at work. Perhaps I had walked the edge of too many lumps in my throat when talking to colleagues or writing up notes about my clients. Perhaps it was just that the present moment had found me to be a good companion.

Each raindrop settled on my head and neck. The pace of the rain increased. With each sensation I accessed a long-forgotten joy of being touched. When I arrived home the oneness I had felt with the environment disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. I reached for my cigarettes, opened a bag of chips and watched TV.

Grief changes you in ways that are unpredictable to a past version of you. I had spent close to 17 years actively disbelieving in any greater power. I did not know why people followed a religion. I did not understand the need for prayer. I remember being both wistful in longing for what seemed like the safe harbor of faith and arrogantly sure that there was no truth to it.

Perhaps I had a memory of pre-eternity of what I later learned is known as the day of Alast. The day when all the souls were one and they all professed their belief in Allah when He asked, “Am I not your lord?”. Perhaps I had a memory of the Azaan that my father’s voice rung in my ears as a newborn baby. Perhaps it was just God wanting me to accept that He is my companion.

I began with searching YouTube for “Azaan”. In my precarious and desperate turn to faith I also felt motivated to do my Namaz for the first time in 17 years. I again searched YouTube: “How to do Namaz”. IPhones had just come out and I used mine to navigate this return to a specific kind of worship that I had long rejected and discarded as unnecessary.

I was encouraged by my cousin who lived in Dallas to come see her for the Christmas holidays. I arrived alone to the Toronto airport. I kept thinking my husband would show up to say good-bye. I kept looking for his body wearing his favorite sweatshirt. I kept imagining hearing his voice call out “Aisha!”. Maybe I had spent too many years watching Bollywood and Hollywood films. He did not rescue me from my pain. He did not change the script.

I sat next to an Asian man as the small plane took off. By then I had lost count of the number of flights I had been on, living away from Karachi for close to nine years. After taking off we ascended for nearly 10 minutes. Suddenly the plane began to wobble and a loud alarm began to blare through the speakers. My life, in its smallness and bitterness at that point, flashed before me. I felt rising anger and fear. I was going to die and it was all my husband’s fault that I was on that flight, alone, instead of with him and my in-laws.

The man next to me stayed quiet. I began to shout involuntarily. I do not know what I said.

The plane began to descend. We heard the captain say that he would be doing an emergency landing.

A near death experience and an imminent divorce destroyed my capacity for rationality and self-control. I had some terrible conversations on the phone. I couldn’t believe that he still didn’t care. I had already been heartbroken, but his immaculate coldness on that day led to a year of desperate measures. I must have known that my marriage was over then, but I couldn’t bear the idea of losing the plans I had made for my future.

This crack, this wound, it was a rite of passage but the timing was terrible. I was starting a promising career in social work and academia. My close friends and I had all applied for our PhD’s, I was a research assistant to one of the best people I know, and I had a permanent job working with newcomer immigrant youth.

I walked a lot in downtown Toronto. I mostly used the green line on the subway. I climbed on and off the red and white street tram to go to Little India every weekend. I had old friends from my undergraduate years in Montreal who had moved to Toronto. I had friends from my Masters program. I had a full life of activism, pursuing radical social justice, and knowledge to empower me. I envisioned a grounded future in my new identity and for the first time I felt belonging in a place outside of Karachi.

Today, I’m repeatedly submerged in the visceral memory of a future that never happened. I’m living in a small city in Colorado and my work as an assistant professor in the Social Work program arises from those pivotal years in Toronto. How I know colonialism. How I know racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, and so much more. For when I decided to leave Toronto forever, I could not have known that 12 years later I would be called to open this closed chapter of my life.

I remember coming home heavy with rage on cold days in Toronto. I worked long hours with people who lived on the extreme margins of society. I worked with refugees who had spent years in UNHCR camps in Kenya before getting their paperwork to leave. I worked with teen boys who had grown up in Afghanistan and witnessed how hard it was for them to attend high school in Toronto. I worked with immigrant mothers who had been married off to strangers for a better life. I worked with mothers whose children had severe disabilities and who had no legal status in the country. I worked with transgender women who weren’t accepted in women’s shelters and were unsafe in men’s shelters.

This was not the kind of immigration I had been exposed to as a privileged rich person from Pakistan. I was immersed in the underbelly of the mosaic marketing of a nation, formed upon the erasure of Indigenous people, called Canada.

Only now I see that in being abandoned by my husband I also abandoned my pulsing life and community in Toronto too. I hated living in the apartment that was once “ours”. My divorce felt like irrefutable proof that I was a failure at life. I shoved my guilt for leaving clients who relied on me into a compartment so that I could get on the flight back to Karachi. Like a homing pigeon it was all that I could do to survive. I could not have known that the marriage I was obsessively trying to save would be integral to shaping the life I have now.

I cannot paint over that whole episode with one bright yellow stroke of gratitude, because I lost more than just my marriage. But it is too exhausting to stay submerged in the narratives of blame, hate and what could have been. Perhaps I’ve been trained since that 27th year of my life that little is in my control. Perhaps it is just that grief wants me to courageously trust that loss, in all its shades, is a necessary companion.

The writer is an Assistant Professor in the Social Work program at a university in the United States, where she lives with her husband and three sons. She tweets at @AishaChapra