It’s two in the morning. I can’t sleep even though my eyes are hardly open. Cocooned in the darkness of my room, and enveloped by my blanket, I recalled the images I saw on Nabil’s blog a few days ago. They beset me like a murderous ghost in a series of horror flick. I forced my eyes to close.
I got up from the bed and hurried to the computer. A click after a click on the pictures, I found myself shouting “no”. Not this neighborhood, not my childhood, not my memories. The streets which once embraced people with warmth are empty and deserted today. The restaurants that I barely recognized in the pictures became like empty boxes along side the concrete barriers and the destroyed sidewalks. I clicked the video. It was worse than the photos. I felt walking with Nabil in the streets but with my heart bleeding for every stone in the street. I walked and recalled how I walked in this very street before with Ahmed, Safaa, Sameem, and Ali. I passed by Ibn Farhood restaurant and the coffee shop where I smoked Hookah and played backgammon and dominos with my friends. I barely recognized them.
I forced my fingers to close the webpage. It was a click, but what about the sideshow playing in my mind? What fingers can close that window? Then a rush of other stories and memories came running. I recalled how I woke up today on Khalid’s murder. I recalled how my entire spine chilled when I read the news. Memories of murdered people I knew came running like a thunderstorm. Lightning and thunder. A Shock. A bright light that almost burned my eyes pupils. Alan’s image with him preparing the hookah on the referendum eve, my neighbor Yasir offering me a ride to work a day before he was murdered on the highway, my friend’s mother asking us to be careful a few days before her chest was shredded with shrapnel and my father’s neighbor carrying his one-year-old granddaughter a few weeks before he was kidnapped and shot to death.
I closed my eyes, talked to them one by one and thanked them with tears pouring from my both eyes like the Tigris and Euphrates. They stood smiling. I thanked them for their bravery and sacrifice. I thanked them for their courage. I thanked them for paving our roads with martyrdom. I promised them that I will never let them down. I promised them I will go on and let the world know how generous they were to us with their lives.
