Love Is.

'And yesterday I saw you kissing tiny flowers, 

But all that lives is born to die. 
And so I say to you that nothing really matters, 
And all you do is stand and cry.' 

I miss you so much Julie. I stopped trying to figure out a way to realize the extent of it.

How to realize your best friend is really dead

Sit in your room and get into your now-regular thought process of how you just can't deal with people anymore.

Watch a prolonged television show episode that so happens to be about someone thinking the same thing who got better through therapy

Finish the episode and wonder if you can't do this by yourself anymore, and that you need help. Try to shrug off the thought that you don't really want help because you don't really want to get better, as you see it would  be pointless anyway.

Remember this song you've come across earlier in the day at work and thought you should give it a good listen when you get home.

This is the song.

Remember that you couldn't look up the lyrics because lyrics websites were prohibited by your work server. Look up the lyrics.

These are the lyrics.

Decide you're going to keep downloading as many albums by this band as you can before you shut down your computer. Stare at the band's name, let it, for some reason, remind you that it's been a while since you checked IWroteThisForYou. Check IWroteThisForYou. Get confused on whether you actually want the possible new post to speak to you or not. If it would finally get you to see things differently, to see them for what they are, that is.

Find that this is the new post.

Notice that the song is still on repeat. Keep staring at the photo on the post and at the text. Read the title of the post once again and surprise yourself with a thought 

The sun has left the earth...

Cry before you know it. Look through the tears at the date on your computer. It says October 16th. It's been a little over two and a half months, and this is the first time you feel it.

Surprise yourself with another thought as you stare at the word sun. Your mind just responded to this stare by bringing up an old picture of her in which she was wearing a top with giant sunflower on it.

It also pointed out that the first time you went through her pictures after she died, you paused at this particular photo and you remembered she looked especially pretty in it.

You're making sounds now as you cry. And somehow, also your hands are now covering your face.

For two whole minutes, she was really gone.

Stop crying abruptly. Realize this was practically the first time you cry since her death. That time you cried the day she died was more of an overdue reaction to the emotional build-up of her accident two and a half years go, not her death.

Somehow find yourself back to wherever you were before those two minutes.

Realize this is the closest you could get to reality in a long time to come.

Now try to get that picture with the sunflower top off of your mind, and fail. 

'So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be'

Your dream job would still give you chronic neck pains and stress-induced indigestion. It would still make you feel inept at more times than what you might have made a margin for. It would sometimes not be able to get in the way of reasons not to get out of bed on a weekday.

The person you've always wanted to grow up to be is a person who has no time to look in the mirror before heading to work, and has to make do with the car's mirror during traffic stops.

It's a person that is still afraid of their own dream while they're living it. And it's not a case of be careful what you wish for.

It's a case of complicating things until there are no sides of it left to complicate, cause that's the way that leads to the only version of a simplified conclusion you can accept. And by the time you reach the conclusion, you'll have a backpack full of other things you never knew you needed until you got.

I Watched

I was a 5 minute walk away from heavyset military APCs ploughing into a thousands-strong demonstration.

I was just done with an uneventful day at my newsdesk job when not an hour later a barely 15 year old boy got killed, brutally, cold-bloodedly, killed.

The camels, the camels who broke into Tahrir Square on the infamous afternoon, passed along my neighborhood mainstreet on their way.

Someone who went to the same school as I did, only a year older, was also killed in the same place the barely 15 boy was.

I completely lost the ability to take breaths, being the claustrophobic I am, within less than 5 seconds of the first stampede I found myself in after police shot a new round of tear gas into an alleyway street.

I come home to my mother crying on more weekdays than not. She says she can never stand it when she sees  any pictures of our martyrs on television and hearing their families speak.

And all she can do is sit and cry at a television screen because she doesn't allow herself to go to protests, because 'what if I get killed and you're left with no one to support you?' And only because of that.

I watched my 7 year old brother going back and forth around the house repeating to my mother 'I told you, I told you he was lying. Why is he late until now? he must have lied to us and went down to Mohamed Mahmoud. What else would take him so long? What if they beat him there?'

I have trouble sleeping because the minute I turn off the lights mental images of too many young men jump through my head, and I punish myself for my mere inability to grasp the extent of their mothers heartache. I punish myself by not sleeping. Why do I get to sleep and their mothers don't? Why am I in a warm bed while hundreds of people mostly my age have lost their lives way too soon?

I haven't even lost a loved one in the revolution and I'm having a degree of PTSD symptoms already.

And I won't fake smiles. If I can't get myself to smile at all of this then I won't. I know too much by now how much it costs to deny how I feel and focus my energy on feigning what I 'should' feel.

I feel. I feel now. And it's more than I can take. But I'd rather feel too much than to smile and fill the air with empty it's-gonna-be-okays.

And not that it isn't, but that's just not how I'm planning to get there.

The truth has pain in it. It has bitter sacrifice, loss. It has blood and tears and poignant moments of powerlessness. And I'd rather look all of it in the face and tell it like it is.

Faith does not contradict with the truth, and cynicism does not erode faith.

May you rest in peace Anas. May you rest in peace.