Triggers

A bright ray of sun coming in through the window shades woke me up. My head was pounding and my mouth was dry as if I was sleeping in the desert. I opened my eyes slowly trying to reduce the light's unforgiving effect on my pupils. I scanned the room. My full-bookcase, my TV, an empty glass. I peeled the blanket off my chest slowly like a prisoner making his escape.

I sat on the bed cradling my head between my palms. What happened? Where was I? Ah! I remembered. It was a nightmare.

I put on my sports T-Shirt and short and sneakers and got ready for my daily jogging. I decided to run faster today. I wanted to forget all the wounds I encountered in Baghdad. I put on the headphones and started listening to hard rock songs. It was weird to hear these songs since I never liked them before. I just wanted them to fill my head with loud music to make me forget what I had seen in my nightmare. But then it all started. A rush of thoughts, flashbacks, feelings, and moments. With every step I ran, I felt the pain of both of my leg muscles and my horrific past. I kept running watching nothing in front of me but a chain of images I had seen, a cut leg, a drilled corpse, a child sobbing, a woman beating her head, a school destroyed, piles of corpses, the smell of the morgue, the daily coffins on taxi cabs and KIA minibuses. They were like panorama chain images. I kept running, faster and faster, but more images came before me. Um Bashar, my father’s friend and neighbor, funerals, shattered bodies, destroyed buildings, burned corpses, hospitals blood-covered floors. I raised the songs volume, but in vain. The sounds and voices of explosions and people’s cries were louder. My heart was pounding fast. I thought it was because I was running, but it was different. I didn’t have this feeling since I was caught in the middle of street fighting on the highway in Baghdad. It was the same feeling I had when I was covering a bombing at an army recruiting center when an ambulance arrived and everybody shouted “car bomb”. It was the same feeling I had when I went to the morgue covering the reprisal attacks after the Samara bombing.

I hit my head with my hand and yelled at myself within myself. “Stop it. Stop it. Leave me alone.” Then I stopped running didn’t feel but my feet running me back to the house. I took a deep breath and bent down and then sat at the grass. I remembered what was this all about. Anderson Cooper’s 360!

It's never quite over. After all the sadness, the anger and the healing, after it happened and done, it can all come back in an instant. Set off by a trigger with the unrelenting power to roll back time. Last night after reading some chapters from the new book I started reading, I decided to watch a movie or a TV show or anything that makes me sleepy after the two tea mugs I had. I tried with all my senses not to watch the news. I made sure that morning that my family has survived the day. I knew better than to do it, but I couldn’t help it. An addict falling off the wagon. I hated myself for being so weak. My eyes follow the words on the screen. Month of Mayhem. Where else than in Baghdad a month of Mayhem would happen, I asked myself.

Before I got to the image of Anderson Cooper, I come back to my senses and hit the next channel button. I've learned my lesson not to open the wounds again, but quickly realized I couldn't. Too much love to my country. I switched back to CNN. An image, one small gesture, and the sadness which seemed to have almost disappeared found its way back from the dead, like a serial killer in bad horror flick.

Mayhem was the word the CNN reporter described what Baghdad was going through. His one-hour-interview with Anderson triggered all what I had seen during the time I worked as a reporter with the American newspaper.

I got up from the grass, determined, I started running again. This time, my mother’s voice came louder. “Live your life.” I ran faster shouting within myself “I will. For you, for Iraq for my future.” I will live my life, but I will never ever forget, and as we say, the strike that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

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