It’s Been A While

Writer: Nada Elnady
Editor: Doaa Saady


It’s been a while. A while since you felt like you can stay happy for longer than 2 weeks without the walls suddenly crumbling down and the floor giving away, without your hope scattering into pieces like a vase thrown head straight into a surface, leaving you lurking there in mid-air, only you’re not happy that you’re flying away. You do not get to enjoy the lack of gravity and the fact that you’re seconds away from escaping forever ’cause they’ll squeeze at your heart and make sure you whimper your way back to life; they will grab at your feet and pull you down until you stand beside them, or quite even possibly, underneath them.

You will have to listen and obey like a slave dog that would get whipped if it dares bark, if it dares protest. You fear the whipping, so you shut up just like every other time, only then you realize that dogs are even treated better than you are and for a while, you don’t even mind the whipping anymore. You reach a point where you would prefer the whipping as it would give you an excuse to shut yourself out for a few hours, but you remember all those times when your flesh was torn down and your skull was used as a substitute for a soccer ball, when your hair was pulled out of its roots and used to clean the remnants of your broken pieces, and when afterwards, you were forced to act normal in front of every single outsider who commented on the red spots marring your facial features or watched you get stepped upon without trying to step in, fearing the same fate. You would remember having to act normal in front of the dog owners themselves.

You try to decide between choosing to shut up or shut not until the emotions gathered up inside you choke you to death, until you suddenly explode all in a second when you can no longer keep your organs intact. You’d think that they would deserve to clean up the mess you had left after spilling your guts all over the floor, but once again, you bear with the consequences yourself, and what’s left of you is a living body without a soul, a collection of flesh and blood and permanent scars that would leave their eternal mark even when the physical ones cease out of existence, so fragile and so meaningless, so lonely and so hurt that you’d think about just trying to end its pain, numerous times, but you shut the thought out as soon as it makes its presence known. And at the end of the day, you end up writing this all down with tearful eyes and an aching heart that still questions its very own purpose up until the day when happiness temporarily knocks its door again.