The Dark

Suddenly, everything is black, not a ray of light all around, no one could rescue you from your pain and suffering. Suddenly all you could see is darkness, and your nose, all it could smell is the scent of death.

All you could tell now is you are gone and you won’t be coming back. Your soul starts wandering all around, starts seeing what your eyes can’t see anymore, people all around, eyes amazed at your unexpected death. People live to turn seventy and eighty with their poisonous nicotine sticks, never parting their hands and you, played all kind of sports, never tasted coffee, never smoked a cigarette and yet you are dead. You didn’t suffer any disease, your heart was fine, your kidneys were fully functional and your lungs were pure and yet you left.

Throughout your life you thought you were invincible, unbreakable, and probably immortal, you thought your healthy habits would keep you away from death, from the end and yet the end came crawling and got you while you weren’t looking…

Now that you are done, you just can’t manage to find a reason, but you know that you have walked through life with an attitude, you have walked through it thinking you are so great and no one was ever able to stop you. Your healthy life and your strong body gave you the arrogance you needed to run people over. Today, maybe your family is around, maybe they miss you but there are a lot of people smiling and laughing and admiring fate for how it brought you down, when you least expected it. The thing is you should have stopped to think, you should have come to your senses when you still had the ability to do so… Now you are just another corpse, another man people will forget…

If you had the chance to live it all over again would you do it differently?

Death

Today I wake up with severe pain in every single nerve all over my left cheek, my left jaw, my left ear, everything that is left in my face. I took a sick leave knowing that I am gonna be murdered soon at work for all the leaves I have been starting to take lately especially when I have a lot of freaking work to do. Anyways, that is not the point. On my way back from the doctor’s I heard this thing about death on the radio. I was already since I woke up thinking of death. I mean I knew my whole nerve situation isn’t something to be scared of but well the thought has hit me and started taking over.

When I got home I watched an episode of Frasier and one statement he said really got me to think:

Amazing thing the human heart, you know. It can pump eighteen hundred gallons of blood through it each and every day, but the tiniest tear, in the tiniest part of the tiniest artery and ‘POOF’, you’re gone.

I think the hardest part of thinking of death always comes down to people thinking about their lives, what they did and what they wanted to do and what they are supposed to do. And that is exactly what I started thinking of.

I started thinking: What if I die today? What if this is the end and I am not talking about the pain, I am talking about the moment being the end? What have I done with my life? What did I achieve? Was I able to make anyone of those I care for really happy, they are gonna remember me and pray for me when I die?

WHAT IS IT THAT I HAVE DONE IN MY LIFE TO PLEASE GOD? Haven’t I always been caring about myself and so consumed with my life and selfishness forgetting more important things and issues that I should have cared for?

Wasn’t I silent on the injustice of many humans to fellow human beings? Was it right to shut the hell up when I heard people bullshit me with their theories and ideas that I didn’t believe in just cause I cared and aimed at pleasing them?

What have I achieved by being rude at times when I shouldn’t have been and by being polite when I should have been ruder? Should I have forgiven when I could? Did I over forgive some people when they deserved my kicks? Did I apologize for all the harm I have brought or the hurting I have caused?

When it comes to death I keep thinking… When it comes to thinking of death I feel a lot of pain and I almost die, just out of the thought…

The Second Memory

Still the same day, still the same arrangement and my dad is still telling us about the hardest moments, there comes a second one when I see another tear… It is a story about one of my aunt’s…. My dad was in prep school back then. He was attending his uncle’s wedding with my grandpa and grandma. Back at home my aunt ‘N’ was left with their neighbors since she was badly ill… Anyways, the neighbor was supposed to give her a medicine at a certain hour and when that hour drew closer my dad started getting worried…. He thought it would be better if he went back home and made sure his sister got her medicine on time…

He tried to get to my grandma who was in the middle of the crowd talking to people but he couldn’t… What he needed was money to go back home… That didn’t stop him though, that is my dad, nothing would ever stop him from achieving what he aims at… He starts walking his way home… A good distance but he is determined to make it to where he wants to be….
When he arrived at home, he knocked the neighbors door and apparently when he asked her if she gave my aunt the medicine she said she forgot… He was ten minutes late so it didn’t make a difference… My dad tells me he tried to give her the medicine when his sister who was below two years of age nodded with her head and refused to take it as she smiled a smile that my dad described to me as some sort of an unspoken, “Don’t worry.”

My dad was still a kid, almost ten or eleven so it isn’t his fault anyways…. The night passed by and the wedding was over and everyone slept for the night and things seemed fine and dandy… The next morning my dad left for school and had a normal day until he came back home… While going up the stairs to their flat, my grandpa was walking down the stairs carrying the dead body of a one and a fraction years old girl… My aunt…

My dad always thought if she lived she would have been the sweetest and most tender of all his sisters and he talks of her in a way that makes me tell he loved her more than any other sibling he had….

I was able to see another tear in his eyes…. My dad is the best family man ever… He was eleven when he wanted to take care of a younger sister, he was a kid and he had it in him… I wish I could be like him and I wish I would make him real proud….

That was the day when I knew that nothing was ever wrong with my dad’s eye… That was the day I knew that my dad was just stronger than the rest of the herd, strong enough to have lots of feelings and yet be able to keep the pain to himself when he has to because he has to lead whether as an eldest brother or as a loving father…. He always has the lead….

A few days ago before my dad left to Cairo on his vacation he told me that when people grow older they get softer in the heart, things that never used to show can be seen and feelings that never used to be there are discovered… He told me that as we grow older in age our tears tend to flow with more ease and that we get to unbear less hurt than we used to bear…. He told me that if anything ever harmed or hurt one of us, be it me, my bro, my two sisters or my mom he would not bear to live a single day and I believed him….

I miss you Dad….
And I guess here comes my tears….

To Possibilities…..

Two memories…..

Before I start, I would like to mention that the idea of first times is not mine, it has been stolen from Miss Cerise… I hope it is fine with you… Yet I am not gonna go and list many of my first times… And if I plan to I would like to detail the story for each first time, I would dedicate an entire blog to it… But well this first time is a memory I always have, maybe it is one of the memories that have stuck to my head and since I am all depressed with my dad being in Cairo I would like to have a small talk about him….

So I am a kid, I get hurt I cry, I fall I cry, I get yelled at I cry, this is what I do and well my mother usually cried being the sensitive person she is… I remember that I was told that once when I was around the age of ten I walked up to my dad and asked him if something was wrong with his eyes. Well he had to ask me for a reason for my question and to his surprise my answer was, “Cause I never see you cry.”

What kind of kid is so sadistic to the extent that he wanna see his dad cry. I mean come on that is a weird need of mine that was really hard to be satisfied by my dad. Until one time when I was in highschool, I sat along with my dad and my sister while my mother was in the hospital for a couple of weeks and he started telling us about some stories from the past and then I asked him about the hardest moments in his life, the most moving ones, until then I never saw my dad shed a tear…

My dad told me how he was here in UAE when my grandpa and grandma got into a car accident on the Cairo-Ismaeliya highway (Egypt) and how he didn’t know about it when he got a telegram from my aunt’s husband who went like ‘Please come to Egypt soon, there’s some problem with your parents.”

I know that kind of message was kinda caring but comeon coming to think of it he scared the crap out of my dad anyways and left him to face the shock when he got to Cairo…. When my dad arrived at Cairo my uncle was waiting for him and he drove him to Suez and as he arrived there my eldest aunt told him the bad news… My grandpa was dead… He died before they could even move him from the car. My second to the eldest aunt (They are the only two older than my dad) also died in the accident and she was pregnant with her third baby…

So basically two girls are motherless and my dad has lost the person he loves most in the world, his father. He then had to ask about my grandma and my aunt told him she is hanging there but her health is deteriorating… My father took the news and asked for the reason why they didn’t drive him to the hospital and my aunt replied saying that she didn’t want him to see my grandma kind of deformed because of the accident because he wouldn’t bear seeing her that way. My dad then asked to go to wherever she was to see her but then they told him that she was in a hospital in Ismaeliya (Totally different city)… Why the fuck would they drive him to the family house in Suez if my grandma was lying in a hospital in a totally different city?

Anyways after a lot of convincing my aunt and uncle did my dad agreed to stay for the night and then visit her and hit the road the next morning to see her… By the time he arrived there she was dead and it was time to go for a burial… My dad told us the story and he had a tear in his eye, it was the first time ever.. I mean come on he must have cried sometime in the past but this time is the first I have ever heard of or saw with my naked eye… It wasn’t even crying anyways they were just a couple of tears but with a deep breath and very hard feelings that could be seen in the pale smile on his face as he said, “While they were crashing I was playing cards with my friends over here.”

Well my grandpa is missed, I was below the age of two when he died but I have been told not only by my dad but by my aunts and uncles too that I was his favorite grandson, I was the first in the blood line to carry on with the name of the family and over that i was the first born of his favorite and most obedient of all his children and my grandpa had nine of those… I was the son of the the son who made my grandpa proud more than anyone else did or could’ve and I am proud to be this man’s grandson and that man’s son…

And by the way the car my grandpa was driving when he died was my dad’s car and my dad never wanted the car back and left it out on the highway until it was stolen piece by piece…..

May my grandpa’s grave be like paradise to him….
اللهم اجعل قبور المؤمنين روضة من رياض الجنة

To be continued….

Here’s to possibilities…..