Narrative Arc

A collection of short stories and reflections exploring themes of resilience, blindness, war, memory, and the human spirit. Each piece is drawn from lived experience and imagination, offering moments of connection across distance and difference.

• Stepping Off

  Rehabilitation begins in the space between what was known and what has not yet taken form. A reflection on courage, identity transformation, and moving forward without certainty.

• The Navigation of Arcs

  Fencing in rehabilitation for the blind. By the time spring edged into the city, the fencing room knew who pressed forward, who guarded distance, and who needed the floor to promise it would hold.

• Seeing Without Chains

  In a quiet clinic near Massachusetts General Hospital, I waited for prosthetic eyes, shells to cover the spaces war had left. Blindness does not give many gifts, but that day it gave me the grace of ignorance.

• Eggs for Breakfast

  Imagine: you wake one morning and the world has vanished, not in sound or shape, but in light. You have lost your eyesight. A journey through rehabilitation and rediscovery.

• Bruce

  The bus arrived early, as if it had somewhere more important to be. That's when Bruce materialized. Not "walked up"—materialized, like people who don't quite live in this world but keep finding ways to crash into it.

• The Interrupted Path

  The Green Line trolley rattled down Commonwealth Avenue with more echo than weight in the chilly night. At Allston Street I stepped out into a roadway stripped of its usual daytime hustle. Nothing moved.

• After the War, Before the Silence

  In a city that never quite thawed from its last winter, Elias wandered through the ruins of memory. He was no longer a soldier, yet the war had followed him home.

• Understanding — The Weight of Clarity

  A minimalist composition on glass where restriction and possibility coexist. The eye sits at the threshold, suspended between recognition and action, attending to a reality not yet fully integrated.

• Will

  An acrylic painting on a circular pane of glass and the reflection it carries — on agency, adaptation, and the emergence of direction after disruption. The eye presses, and the structure responds.

• Crossing Streets, Crossing Foils

  A functional mapping of Orientation & Mobility technique and the art of fencing — two disciplines that mirror each other in unexpected ways. By Rabih Dow.

• Restoring Confidence in Movement After Vision Loss

  An exploration of how rehabilitative fencing rebuilds spatial awareness, trust in movement, and the courage to navigate the world after losing sight. By Rabih Dow.