Another Random Moment

I'm tracing a vivid memory as I stare out into the flickering dark waters.

The breeze laps at my neck and I suddenly feel a great void within me, as if I had misplaced something precious to me and I cannot seem to recall where I had last seen it.

The memory lingers, and then transforms into another.

I've been feeling misguided by my wanton for a familiar touch. For a whole month, my heart pumped liquid pain through my veins instead of blood.

13 Floors

Once the elevator doors closed

I was in the dark alone

Is that a whisper I hear?

I could’ve sworn it was your voice

Cutting the air that stands between us

I’ve got a blue lights in the palm of my hand

It casts a weak glow around me

But all I see is numbers

Between you and me

Thirteen floors sounds like a long way

To go down in the pitch darkness

One by one, there no light in sight

Maybe you should reach a hand out for me?

I promise I won’t bite

A House Is A Box

We forget that houses have memories too. And once these houses are abandoned, their memories begin to fade.

My parents lived most of their young life in the old part of Manama. But like many of their generation, they opted to move into the city, to find a better home in the new suburban areas of Bahrain.

As years passed, most of Manama’s original inhabitants departed, leaving their homes behind, the homes they grew up in, the homes their parents had lived in, leaving them to their fate. Most of those old homes are demolished to make way for apartment buildings.

My aunt remained in her dilapidated home and every time we’d visit her, she’d complain about the new neighbors whose names are either too foreign or too long for her to remember.

From every angle and corner, a new apartment building leers over her ageing house, bullying it, waiting for it to finally fall and crumble; to be erased along with all of my aunt’s and my family’s memories.

Even to this day when I visit, I still get excited by the prospect of seeing my aunt and her home. As a kid it was almost like an adventure every time we visited, on the usual occasions, because it was different, it seemed like a completely different world compared to where I lived, a house in the suburbs of Isa Town.

When we were little, my aunt would always sneak to the “other room” – which we wouldn’t dare venture into – to fetch us some treats. The house always smelled of aromatic scents and spices.

On the Strangness of Life

Life sure is strange. You can never get what you really want from it, or figure out what it wants from you! It’s just a whole mess. Day after day. Day in day out. Comes and goes. Passes and ticks by. And you haven’t a clue what’s going on. You just ride the wave. Go with the flow. Events and decisions (not all yours, matter of fact most of them aren’t yours) and other people, that’s what makes up your life. It all comes together and produces this mixture, sometimes colorful sometimes colorless, but either way you accept it and learn to live with it. Or just let it be. Sit tight and watch it manipulate your life, your mind, your time. Some might call that fate.

Do you know how many times I’ve been carried off the playground at school? Seems that I always get knocked pretty bad, been happening all my life. Sometimes I'd be crying as some classmates pick me up and take me to the principal’s office, and I would sit and wait for mother to come for me. All dirty and sweaty and eyes filled with tears. No matter how many times I got hurt playing, mother always had that same concerned look on her face when she found me.

I’m just waiting. I’m letting the decisions be made for me. I’m running along. That’s what I always did all my life. It’s never up to me alone to decide what to do; actually no one can make a decision solely on their own.

There are always powers and sources interfering, guiding or leading you to make a decision. You’re never in control of your own life. It’s not your life alone, no matter how much you think it is. People and events around us make up our lives, without them we have nothing. Things will always happen in the end. Its the choices you make on the impulses you get in one particular event resulted by a decision that would draw up your recent future till the next decision is made up for you. And then you’re faced with another set of choices, and even then it’s not entirely your choice to go for whichever choice you tell yourself so hard to believe that is right. Tomorrow is just another day, just like today was just another day. Sometimes I feel like there is no past and no future. There is only present. There is only now. So that days aren’t bulks of time anymore, they are just symbols of something, some place, to be in. We don’t move forward. Days, they come to us. We stand still. We wait.

I remember my granddad (from my mum's side) he used to make us laugh so hard, he'd jut out his denture and start clattering them against each other and make these funny noises with them... or he'd take them off and give us this huge toothless smile! It was silly but when you're little anything like that makes you laugh. When he died, I remember how bad mother took it. She was very close to him. And somehow he used to hold the whole family together (after he was gone everybody get further apart and lost contact). Everybody loved him, he was such a character.

Funny all the time, even at the worst moments and situations. I remember that night I heard he had died, I sneaked to the back of the house and started crying silently, alone. I don't know. I just didn’t want anyone to see me cry, for some reason. I missed him that night more than I did afterward. I used to keep his thick black sunshades and his old, rusted ring... the glasses have disappeared since, but I still have that ring.