My name is obscured. Just like the image that falls before me, a sky
painted with dark grey clouds, pine and cypress trees filling the
spaces, the echoes of black ravens, the chanting of the wind. All of
that scenery and my name remains obscured, hidden amongst it all. I
feel the coming of planes and rain, the way they come and go tells us a
lot. The way they descend and elevate in different rhythms tells us a
lot. If I was Shakespeare, you'd find my name inscribed on each and
every corner, the wood bark of those trees, the desk I lay my laptop
on, the margins of my books, the sound of the wind, the carvings on a
labradorite stone ring, or even on planes. You'd find my name
everywhere you go, you'd hear it in supermarkets, on television
screens, you'd smell it in the crisp baked olive breads in the furn. But
that's not what it wants, it wants to remain hidden and obscured, just
like everything else. It wants to lay its shadow and leave the sun, it
wants to be the sun and the shadow, both and the same. It likes to
stay under the rock or in a snails chambered shell or in the infinite
constellations of stars. There is a space, so vast it can encompass
everything. It can collect us in memories and turn us into little
droplets of that rain, little ashes of dust, little atoms that are outweigh
every mass and size, till we no longer become little. I've always
desired to have people look at the world through the irises of my own
eyes, but then I understood that to each iris is its own world. Then I
thought, what if the world I saw with my own eyes was so simply
grand, that it had to be shared by other pairs of eyes? Someone told
me once that if I had something beautiful in my life, I shouldn't share
it with other people because then they would take advantage of it,
they would try their best to ruin it. It is true to some extent, people do
like to manipulate the most beautiful of things that we tend to share
with them. However, I don't believe in my heart, not even for a
second that all of these people contain an embedded form of
selfishness. We are selfish humans, but we try our best to be better
and that process of trying is effort enough. We are more than what we
are labeled as. I used to listen constantly to that voice that kept telling me to stay inside, to keep everything within, to conceal all parts of
myself and only let out silky silences on the surface. The thread of
silence that we often thinks saves us from all forms of misery, can be
the root of it all. When we look outside the frames of a window, we
see a scene. We imagine it as if it were from a movie, but movies take
such scenes from the beauties of everyday life that we often take for
granted. We look outside and an image appears, to some it is only an
ocean, a few trees, the sky, and another windy day. To someone else,
that image is the world. It is my world and yours, and we keep trying
to hide it or hide ourselves in it, when it calls out to us to be heard
and seen. I want to be seen and heard under a nameless entity
because we limit so many parts of ourselves when we are defined and
bordered; when we start to focus on the frames of the window instead
of the image within. I know that the age of Romanticism departed a
long time ago, and that time is changed and so are the people. Today,
when we talk about that world, which is ours but we are no longer a
part of it, we are placed in boxes. To romanticize a life is seen as
"dramatic", to cry is seen as "weak", to smile is seen as "strength", to
talk about your achings is seen as "seeking attention", to eat so much
is seen as "fat", to eat so little is seen as "sick", and so on. We are
placed in enclosures almost every day, and that is sickening to the
mind and heart. To tell the bitter truth, it is not easy. It hasn't been
easy on any of us for a very long time. For that reason, I chose to write
this piece of work without labeling it under any specific genre, for it is
but an accumulation of thoughts out bursting in splashes of diverse
colors that have long been squeezed into bottles of paint for years. I
write this without a name, lest those who know my name will change
the way this book is perceived. We live in a time of ache, but this book
is not about that. It is not about how or why we got here, rather it is
about how to trace our way back. It is a trip back in time to a past that
we reluctantly have been told to dig its grave, bury it, and forget its
mere existence. To travel back is to understand our current standing.
There is a lot that expands and continues to go further. There is a lot
outside more than window frames, trains, planes and rain. There is a
street in Beirut that no one walks in, heart shaped leaves, the aging of a trees wood bark, the sound of a typing keyboard, the smell of
morning Arabic coffee with your grandmother, a black raven that
gawks in the distance, a desk, buildings that reach the sky and others
now buried under ground, people that breathe and others that took
their last, shapeless clouds, long conversations with a stranger, it's
about the image and the world that lies within and without. As I sit
here, I tell you that my name is obscured. I want you to remember my
words alone, and my world. Let my world be yours and yours mine,
by which they coincide homogenously. All that you will hear are
stories of absolute randomness, interwoven with other stories. You
shall create that image and add color to it, for you are the observer
and the creator. Trace the motion of such stories, lest you find your
way back...
YOU ARE READING
The Way Back To God
SpiritualI have never been able to make people understand my different and peculiar perceptions of the world. I tried writing books many times with stories about fictional characters, and I found myself failing because that is not what I want to express or s...
