Before the world I knew comes to an end between tyrants and
terrorists, I was a teacher. My life as an enthusiastically obsessed young man
who believed in building a place of conscious. It was long before the internet
find it ways to that. I believed I could rebuild everything around me. A home
where I could belong after a life spent moving from city to city. I was stuffed
with politics, principles, charged by a will I had siphoned from every corner
of my childhood. I believed that people wanted to build beautiful things. that
they truly believed their own words. Maybe it all began in those smoke filled
salons, listening to my parents elite friends dissect the big problems. I was a
boy programmed with my grandmother’s etiquette, my teachers’ dogma, and philosophy
of ideals I found in books. I grew up watching, always watching. Seeing how the
main problem was the people themselves. They feasted on principles, gorging on
conversations about what must be without taking any action that express
commitment to their beliefs. They were to me irresponsible, unwilling to carry
the weight of their own words. Perhaps it was the arrogance of youth. I didn’t
know about the mentality of the defeated or crushed people. I was
authoritative, ambitious, and a naïve. My thoughts were always finding an echo
inside the people hearts, but never really making an impact. I hadn’t known fears in those days. The
admiration I used to see in their eyes however, always pushed to speak louder.
Of course my words were sharp, immature, and questionable in ways that earned
me contempt of the theological school that I was forced to attend as an
elective. Religious people saw a stranger, and the common culture a naïve
without hustles they owned.
One day the director of education called to assign me a part
time at a well-known damascene school. At a flash of sight, I was teaching in
two respected schools, while also, still chasing an opportunity to complete my
study at the conservatory. I held hopes for a chance to study aboard with the
masters. The first school was owned by university instructor, while the other
was public school. The public school was originally built by the French secular
missionaries and it was commonly known as Lycée Laïque. It was massive, a
universe unto itself, housing more than a thousand student with hungry minds.
More of a cosmos of children, youthful men and women at upper grades.
When I went there to meet the admiration, the principal
seemed, or as the rumor suggested, to act as retired intelligence officer been
assigned as a warden for both, the students, and their parents. He at least
acted like one, stern, controlling, and bossy. In those days I was known as
“the spoiled teacher” in every school I served in, and perhaps I was. Everyone
used to like me, my spirit, the way I treated students, their parents, and the
stuff. Many became friends. I didn’t know why many had the assumption of being
a son of some important person, or came from a privileged family. Though there
might be some truth in that, but never was the way they thought.
As a young man, i had a strong firm personality, very
respectful, and I had to admit now, there was some bourgeois spirit inherited
inside the both side of families. It was in the way we looked down at something
that doesn’t fit the equities we been raised to think it was the minimum
standard. I treated all as extension of me, maybe a little bit hard on the
children as I used to treat them as an adults. I thought it was a purpose for
my vision. My students were always forced to be the most distinguished ones in
everything, including the way they talk to parents, teachers, peers, all in
exchange of a secret agreement between me and them. Children from all grades
liked to be part of something larger, someone treat them as an adults. In
return I helped them to escape punishment or disciplinary ways of other
teachers. The teachers also used to complain to me about the students and also
had the agreement with them to talk to the students. They were forced to hear
my long lectures about manners, importance of education and what it means to be
a human beings. I was pretty successful in all those negotiations. Manipulative
but effective. Everyone were happy and they were like a family.
I remember when the teacher who supervised my training
period attending one of my classes, she was so impressed, but she had to listen
to my long lecture too, she described me as someone filled with the social
slogans. Of Couse I didn’t what that meant back them, but in somehow I took
that as a complement. Perhaps it was the way she saw me treating the students,
pushing them to the edge of their abilities, challenging them. I didn’t wait
for complements, she knew better that teachers earned nothing. We all lived on
pennies. The motive was more meaningful for me. I was building something I
wanted. A community based on my beliefs. Perhaps that why they thought I was
privileged. That blend of soft Syrian, Lebanese manners and etiquette. I always
been proud of my Lebanese mother and her inherited pretentious French attitude,
even when people used to give the look during my childhood when they knew. The
Syrians and Lebanese always had that kind of relationship of looking down at
each other, more of a nationalist problems.
The principle, nevertheless, heard of me through a the university
instructor. When I met him he seemed amused, perhaps, surprised, not by my
carless spirit or refusal to be bridled, but maybe by the fact that I was a
young man who his students seemed taller than him. But I think he got the idea
when he tried to show me the authoritative, huge, controlling man that wanted
to dominate the room. I was the type he couldn’t be a leader in front of him. Yet,
he always was respectful with me. he told me I am only answered to him,
exempting me from the staff meetings, and all the nonsense of teachers meetings
and discussions, even my paycheck would come through him directly, not the
ministry.
Though it was a short period in that school due to my busy
schedule, it was there where I met Joana. The most brilliant child I ever met.
She was a true projection of my imagined picture of the perfect human child. A
radiant soul filled with intelligence and curiosity. The very natural gentle
innocence as if she a premanufactured soul, crafted to represent the power of
the divine that seemed that he had token his time to form it. The way she
engaged with world was always an inspiration. I always like her confused light
colored eyes, even her mischievous toothless smile. She was my favorite
students of all time.
I never treated her as special. I was harder on her. I tried
to protect her from becoming the teacher favorite. Yet inside me I wished if
she was my own daughter, and perhaps it was a profound with that altered the
way I saw her. Like many her parents became a dear friends too. But I was the
one as proud as a father seeing all of his children being taught what he wish
to teach them. Even the elder one.
While life has its own forces to change the direction of a
person, I had to quit teaching when the world around me grow claws and teeth.
The start of the war forced me to quit everything in life, even my own. The
vast excess of my soul was forced to fit the four walls of my room. It was like
a forced confinement by all the side of the crises. Tyrants, Islamic
terrorists, and everyone in between tacking sides as if they were their own
extension. I became a walking danger to everyone, and my own self. Though there
were times of desperation, not courage, where I took the risks, I was always
under the danger of get arrested, kidnapped, or killed. I lost contact with the
outside world. I was a danger on feet wanted for my words, hated for who I am,
and there was no room for me everywhere. I lost my friends between the slogans
and flags, and everyone were afraid of everyone. Even moving from place to
place was a secret mission of survival. I hardly was able to know anything
about anyone. I was drowning in the loud silence of myself.
Among that terror, I was becoming numb, the pieces of me
barely holding together with the help of cigarettes, alcohol, and books. I couldn’t feel anything around me when a
phone call arrived asking for me. my mom terrifyingly suspicious hammering them
with questions. I, never the less, was exited to hear that someone remembered
me after all that time. It was Joana’s father. Flattened, devoid shaking voice
with no any kind of greeting delivering the news “we couldn’t leave, and Joana
was gone.” It was the only thing I could understand from his voice. In those
times I almost forget how to speak, I didn’t know what kind of response he
expected. Maybe a comforting words from a ghost already lost inside himself.
The kidnapping incident seemed to break my soul, my arrogance, the very
personality of the dreamer, and so it was the last time I heard his voice.
The time past slowly in those years, full of events and
terror until a day a chance emerged allowing me to cross the border. Somehow I
was so determined to forget everything. It felt like a way out of hell, filled
with hopes to build everything I lost from the ground. I had an absolute
decision to stay away from teaching, I had different view about my life. Yet I had to in my first year. It was a good
school that given me the same privileges, but, I was a different teacher. I
needed the money to survive with my brother. I didn’t care about the student, I
needed my paycheck. Soon I was in school again chasing my degrees, patiently
waiting for a time I could be both, safe and free with my brother and though
eight years past trapped inside a bigger dark room called Lebanon. A room where
the stories continue to teach me about hell.
The years passed and after what I thought love coming from afar. I was in Byblos, my mother’s home town,
with an American woman whom I thought was mature enough to understand. It was a
fragile love affair built on different hopes. She was a person who pretended to
be a shallow evangelical missionary, while I believed she was genuinely trying
to become an English teacher for non-speakers, that I found a home for my soul.
But as all religious I was just the trophy for her imaginative need that she
probably acquired inside for her hurtful miserable pervious affairs and life as
a traditional wife. She with a scares i either chose to ignore, or
misunderstood. However, When we reached the bay, nevertheless, and as the coincidences
was designed to water the seeds inside my unconscious mind, a little Syrian
kids were selling flowers gathered around us to buy from them. of course, I who
had always loved roses, tried to impress my companion. Then a little Syrian
girl wearing homeless clothes, almost begging us to buy a pen. It was a cheap
almost worthless pen. I didn’t know what happened to me. why there was a compelling
feeling to buy from her. why I wanted to talk to her. and so I bought the pen
asking her to remember the name of the woman who seemed amused to talk to her.
When my companion went to use the public bathroom on the
corner of the bay, I stood there watching the girl from the distance. I
couldn’t understand why? I couldn’t relate the pain inside me. I thought it was
because my companion were about to live later at night after she admit her
affair with me. I watched he walking on the bay’s pavement, slightly dancing as
she was singing. There was radiation coming out of her that pulled my eyes to
fix on her. she was a ghost. I thought I could understand kid’s selling flowers
in a street full of yachts and what the local consider a luxurious restaurants.
Lovers might buy from the, but pens that worth nothing it was something else.
The thoughts were interrupted by the return of my partner who wanted to see the
sunset in Lebanon for the last time. In the local bar, while we sipped the
white wine that test like a paint stripper, I felt a wave of pain I couldn’t explain.
The tears almost explodes from my eyes asking my partner to never trust anyone
in this part of the world. I was too tired to explain any other tragic story to
her, especially at time that she was nervous and about to comfort her family
latter.
In our way to the airport I was full of silence, despite all
the kisses and the understandable pain, there was something else going inside
me, an elusive ache, more of sorrows. There was a grief I couldn’t’ relate.
While the time followed was full of her tragic stories, and conflicts with her
family and friends, I channeled a fund to secure a life saving heart surgery
for a child whom I never known. I was thinking that it might take some of pain
inside me out. I used the American woman’s name to not get an attention. I
thought she might understand and though I was wrong, after the incident of the Turkish
earth quick I asked her if could gather her friends to sponsorship families and
I will be taking care of all the finance. It was impulsive decision. My
applications for the PhD was already filled, and I thought I might use the
money in better ways than spending them on the beacuatic universities just to
be in the united states. I never liked the united state culture. I only wanted
to be there for her. I always seen the culture there as Hobbesian state of nature,
lack of any taste or life other than the foolishness they call it the American
dream. I always wanted to be in Europe.
A year latter I found myself in Byblos again. The air was
full ghosts but I dared to ask about the flower boy and Maryam. I though it
might be the last story I could add before leaving Lebanon to my destination. A
final, desperate plucking at stings I was leaving behind, more of final brushes
on a masterpiece I tired to create. Even the brushes were frazzled and the
paint is expired. I leveraged my connection to get her back to school. Tyrannical
action dressed in robes of ethics. It didn’t affect me to hear later that her
father pulled her out of the school again, and likely returned to Syria. I knew
that such societies made me think they might to be swallowed by the chaos. It
was their customs and I had no right to influence or inforce my own. It was
their ways of life after all, but still there was that pain that couldn’t be
redeemed.
The pain I was feeling, the way it was attacking me demanded
solitude. It was mix of many things that I couldn’t find the answer too. the
way the woman’s friends attacked me on social media, showing me with biblical quotation,
the way she convinced her family and friends that I succeed her made me write all
that on paper. I was trying to study that cult, so I went to a monastery in the
Mounties and fasted for a week. While I started to see my journals splayed open
like a wound, and there was the eerie parallels. I dared to make myself a study
case.
Those seven days were full of questions that had no answers.
I was questioning if Pascal was right the heart have his own reason. Still I
had to know why I did all that? Why that woman was able to enter the crack of
my soul? Was am trying to impress her? was it her bling ignorant certainty? Why
did I supported her Oxford corticated to have the knowledge of how to teach?
Was it for her or was a reflection of my hopes abandoned intellectual ambitions
to save my brother? Why I needed her to do that? Why Maryam? Why I accepted to compromise
myself like that knowing I was already in danger?
There was endless question poured on paper, with endless possibility
to cheat myself with answers I knew won’t grasp it all. But they were all
connected, and to some point I had semi answers.
On the surface, I always acknowledged the pragmatism of my
attempt to sponsorship families. It was a fair deal, a more satisfying one than
losing my money on a university I knew it won’t help. The deeper truth, however,
was gasping breath of the ashes for me. I was still trying to find a place
where I could belong. What I saw in those people was a community I tried to
build as one exiled soul at a time. I was afraid of being there alone. I tried to impose the same condition in the dying
days of Syria, “help given must be help paid forward.” It was a chain of
salvation for me, a daisy of kindness that might, somehow, reach back to pull
me from the abyss. All while get my brother a fair chance.
The other recklessness of my attempts, Maryam, the little
girl with the defected heart, was the unresolved pain of Joana. The motive,
nevertheless, a buried knowledge. The thoughts that feasted in my unconscious.
Back when I returned to school, my knowledge of Lebanon, and the feverishly
research of the world’s darkest places that I saw with my own eyes in Syria and
Lebanon. human trafficking, children, drugs, mob working under the eyes of officials
was behind the children in the street. One in particular was so connected. The
article of an Oxford professor, Franklin Lamb “why I bought four Syrian
children off a Beirut street” was devastating for me. the police reports detailing
women being sold in their primes for as little as couple of thousands. Children
for their organs. My Canadian friend and professor who advised me to never take
any other step inside the darkness. The fear I lived to protect my brother when
I felt my health was falling apart. They were all factors contributed to my
reckless action thinking it was a redeeming charity. I wasn’t afraid to play
God for a while, the god I missed my whole life, I tried to change the nature
of people, to bend their paths towards the light I believed. But all for my own
Simth-ian benefit, as rational decision to protect my own family.
When I forced myself to meet my own shadows again in the
solitude. By my own will this time. I saw myself as walking complex contradictions.
That much I knew. I knew my inner world was chaotic, crumpling down on itself
sine my life forced to end by the war. but also there was more hypotheses.
The way I treated my students, at that time, was the way I wanted
my teacher to treat me. Perhaps it was more of meandering bond, more of kindred
spirit of my own childhood. I wanted them to become more of the version of the
kids I wished to friend with. The perfection I always been asked for. The loss
that followed, then, was more than just sadness. It was a shattering fracture
of an image I dreamed of. Joana, despite my love of her, was the version of my
first friend, Maral, and losing her was losing my friend when I changed
schools. That loss was altering path of a man already had those seeds inside
him, the fear of loss, was always uncontrollable force that harmed me by making
accept to be hurt by others.
Perhaps I never been the good guy, though, ironically I never
tried to be. I was always natural, never talked about my stories, or tired to
be one. I was a man trapped in gray, messy reality between different societies
and my whole life I was trying to adopted to the version needed to do the right
things I had beliefs of using the flawed
bloody tools at hand. I wasn’t allowed to make mistakes because all the eyes
were on me. Maybe I was had the advantage
as I came with many privilege place over others, time to collect myself each
time. Maybe I was my mother’s son. The one who helped everyone. A decadent of history my family claims to
have. Perhaps the pureness that I been
taught was based on choices considered as luxury few can afforded, the same way
I can no longer afford the illusion. But when I look deeper I don’t see a privileged
man, I had lived worse curlbes, harder catastrophes, the lease can be said I was
a stranger with razor sharp abilities to analyses, and cursed preeminent
memory. And all that couldn’t answer the question the screw into deeper places
inside me. not about my relationships.
The American woman, maybe, found in me the messy shaky ground
she had, or she convinced herself to have. A weak person who only knows how to
describe things. a target she could find both a sexual tourism as trophy for
the victory she might have achieved by converting someone like me to her faith.
Meanwhile I saw in her a home for my soul. A gift for my own soul. She wasn’t that pretty, I knew prettier
women, old and won’t get any younger, lost, and hurt by her pervious affairs
the way she dealt with me, but her maturity and dreaming of becoming something I’d
support, seeing the abundant child she told me she was, the way she lost her
way. she was honest, at some point, she was the prettiest of all. was a reflection of me, my relationship with Maral, and my Russian girlfriend.
I saw myself in her. Oxford was the connection I wanted to support to reach my friends,
and her language the thing I needed the most. Maybe her name to hold the work I
have done. I ignored the fact of her insecurities that drove her to be a serial
cheater, to be the villain in her story, and everything because I thought I had a
vision for both of us. Because of my ideals, and fears of leaving someone
behind.
Perhaps, I am not the hero, even in my own narrative, I see
the selfish behavior to free myself from my own actions, the mistakes I had because
of my own long lived loneliness.
Perhaps the study is reached it finals end with this conclusion.
The data I had played across my 12 years journals only revel that much. Perhaps
I was wrong all the way, the problem was never the people who feasted on
principles, the blood of god, and ethics without actions. Perhaps the principle
themselves are not meant to be human. Perhaps they were mere arrogance of a
broken spirit. The central problem lies in foundations themselves. The part I believed
was a coherent, purposeful self exists to be found of built. Maybe I was trying
to build a monument to the ghost, mine, Maral, my mentor, the boy I was before.
I tired to condition the children to be part of my world, desperate for them to
be the version of my life where connection didn’t end in abonnement. Maybe my idealism
was a terrified monumental effort to control the narrative of my own existence.
The contradictions were always there. I saw them when I used
to draw my plans for life away during my forced isolations. The man who played
God in many people lives, is the same who tired to bend the American woman into
a “home for my soul”, the same teacher for the classroom, the terrified boy
trying to build a world where loss was impossible. Though the tools were might
be different, but they the same blueprint drown from a single, childhood fracture.
The boy who always forced to be an idealist.
I hadn’t failed. It was the preconditioning. It was where my
frantic beautiful doomed Ships lunched
into the of the deep, silent ocean of hopes. It was were I left with the deep remaining
question who was the “I” that remains? I am not a hero. I am not a villain. I
am not the victim.
I was only the collection of the adaptive patterns, etched
by trauma that fueled the truth I believed in. I was more like a system that
learned to seek purity and purpose as defensive mechanism against the chaotic
truth of meaningless reality. I was the man with broken heart who believed in the
deception people created as fantasy to show themselves as victims. And while I was
building a community of conscious, I was only building a labyrinth to hide the minotaur
of my loneliness.
I wasn’t seeking redemption or any kind of salvation I always
been gods killer, I always had a plan for my own end. The few links I found
what mattered, to find clarity between an infinite regression pointing toward the
void form which it was formed. All that in hope to point towards the heaven I believed.
Still the final questions remain unanswered. The most of all, how it all came to
place?
Journal: June 3rd, 2024