Did I Get Lost By My Own Choice?

I was on a night bus.  I made an exhausting effort of trying to make the driver understand that he should stop on the hilltop “in front of the stairs that reached up to the cemetery road” at the beginning of that slope that descended towards my home. He could hardly understand my demand.  I was horrified that he might have been a stranger and that I might get lost.  All the time I was imagining our old house—the rooms, the smell of the western wind, the windows that overlooked the descending vast lands with their blue trees, carrying the fruits of the misty dawn.  I was also longing for the timber-furniture haunted with reveries, the doors that opened into other doors, and for those unexpected remnants of sunlight found without justification in abandoned corners.

However, when I got off the bus with all my luggage, I suddenly remembered that the house was deserted; my family left it for another one in the suburbs.  But that suburb seemed very far away from me, like an unknown continent, farther than what memory or roads could reach.  That suburb was far away like a spaceship travelling in lightspeed, a destiny of someone else, a wedding that had closed its doors although the bridegroom was me and the bride became another’s by an incontestable royal feat.  It was like a mountain falling on my shoulders that I could not bear and thus started to collapse.

I was wandering along the closed market, gathering from the locked doors the dust of hazy warm memories which flowed as hot sweat on my face and chest, and from the delicious fragrances that emerged from those few open shops at that hour which was not counted on the almanac of our galaxy I was smelling fear, love, and exile.

Waking up I was struck by a more distressing thought.  It started to pervade my being slowly and persistently like a drop of ink in a glass of water until it dyed my whole consciousness by noon time:

Had I already known that my home was abandoned and yet I still got off the bus?

Did I get lost by my own choice?

By Fadi Abu-Deeb

From: Syria

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