Seeing the light of your smile is enough to make me want to live, even if metaphorically and nothing more. I only know a little about immigration; I know every letter that has been written about exile, eeriness, and tears in the darkest of the nights as I long for someone to make some soup for if signs of a malady are ever imposed on their features, as I long for someone forcing me not to leave my home as chaotic as ever, afraid that they would look at me differently even after a year they have realized I am not exactly the most obsessed person with tidiness and the cleanness of the corners of these rooms.

And I don’t know the first thing about facing what is yet to come, I don’t know a thing about challenges, but I know everything about dreams; I know how I never stayed late facing my struggles while I have pulled so many nights painting my canvas of our life together someday, and I know how none of my canvas ended up being a realistic product, nor have they ended an expressionist product, not even an impressionist one. I know I have used all our surrealism as pieces of vocabulary in my imagination, I did not want them to mean anything to anyone apart from us, and I do not want to listen to interpretations of them by anybody, except for the spontaneous interpretations by those who pretend what they say is of any value at all. We will listen to them and laugh, then we will go back to hating post modernism, embracing the dramas we watched in our childhood, and cursing this generation that knows nothing about depth further than getting lost.

We will go once and again back to our little pains to remember life is better however it is right now, to remember that no hurdle can ever bury us after all the life we managed to live amongst these pains;

Like counting the metal bars before the glass of our window because we cannot know when is the power coming back; sixteen bars, maybe.
I do not know how could the parents of some child imagine that such vegetative ornaments on the bars of the windows of their kids would distract them from the main purpose of the bars, not to assassinate themselves free falling upon teen-aging or upon some random failure.

Or like waiting before the stove as the water reaches the warmth we desire before we place it in a bottle as we prepare to place that on your feet.
It’s the same as the wait of the apostles in the isthmus before the final resurrection; they are well aware of their fate, and so is god himself, but it’s the bureaucracy with which god has distinguished his prophets with from the rest of the believers.

Or like trying to walk without getting run over by a car without a plate, or with one that has been born in the generous time of war.
We cannot decide we do not want to die today; war has a thousand ways to reach the soul apart from bullets, and it lacks no creativity if you stare at its terrains as well as you always do.

Or like trying to look for a dignifying job, to find the last of whatever dignity we have left within us.
It is like rejecting to drink from an oasis that god has inspired us to reach as we were lost in the vastness of deserts because we only drink cold water. War leaves you no space for dignity, nothing but trying for a living.

Or like asking the market boy “Don’t you have bread from another bakery?”, or like asking the groceries boy “Don’t you have any less shriveling lettuce?”, or like asking the electrician “Don’t you have a different battery brand?”
It’s the irony of wars; we start shouting for other options in a single context of our life, only to find ourselves before a single option in every context of our lives.

Or like risking taking our pills after they expired, as it is no longer available in any market whatsoever.
We are all going to die someday, this is not a suicide, at worst it is a desperate attempt to clinch on to life. You don’t have to worry about whether or not you are going to heaven, you are promised with an afterlife. Probably.

“And death is marginal in here, and life rarely ever exists, and tourism is either to view the war, or medicinal or to mix blood with whatever drugs you find, and the sunset look more beautiful in front of the houses that have tilted in response to the echoes of the drums of war, but nobody cares about sunsets anymore.”

Nothing is absolute here. Everything is absolute here. But you are the same in the land of war as you are in the land of peace; ever white, ever crystal, and no death can ever leave more than a scratch on you. All our pains mean nothing in front of the dream, and scratches on your clarity are medals in the face of the irony of life. To smile at it the more it surprises you with its hits, to wake up at some morning featureless as you gained more scratches than you could bare, then to ask me as seriously as you have ever been: Did you sleep well enough yesterday to produce a new text today, my love?

Hazem Raad