Thursday, August 2, 2012

Home is where your heart is

Do you know how it feels when you challenge yourself with something in which you put all the remaining efforts that your body still have to achieve it then when you are about to give up, it comes true? That’s just how I found myself in the US. The hot and humid weather of DC combined to my loneliness in the first couple of days was a good argument for me to stick at one place and get back to one of my favorite activities that my office work was preventing me from doing it: monologue. Running everywhere in the conference next to spending some cool time with few friends over there were kind of break to my so confusing monologs. Yet, I could be taken away by my thinking from time to time on the table while taking diner or while crossing a long street. This tornado of mixed feelings maintains my mind far away from the realities of my world. A world that I am taking its days the way they come just like if tomorrow could be my last breath. Before my trip came to its end, I set already the lessons learnt from it. It is not my humble ordinary IQ which is getting higher, no, but just surprising myself by boosting my senses to see the important facts before it will be too late. In Algeria, freedom, the one that women from an Arab state would talk about is already affirmed in my case. That’s why I feel like fighting for a freedom that could be too much upgraded from what they are fighting for. Curiously, in DC I could have this talk with someone who just understood what I meant by this so repeated word: “home”. Yet, to meet what I am looking for, there was a real need to define it. I do admit that trips helped me a lot. Whenever I am far away, I know that I don’t want to go back, that having my two loved people who I left behind in Algeria will fix my mood no matter where I am. Then between the two extreme flagging feelings of the first couple of days that I spent alone desiring to get back to Algeria soon and the last ones that I wished if they could be slowed down was laying the answer to all my questions. Home is where your heart is and unfortunately I still can’t say much about mine. Nor it is here, neither it is there. It is such a confusing feeling when you know you shouldn’t be there, but you just can’t find this pencil to draw a way to your home. You realize at this point that the challenge is lunched again. This time to seek the freedom of empowerment, space, thinking and above all living peacefully a true feeling of your heart.

To whom it may concern

“I am a citizen of the world”. What a great sentence, but unfortunately buried with Socrates the same day. Few days ago, in a chat I was having with someone about the great Algeria and its diversity, an unexpected speech came in the middle to reverse the entire balance I was pretending to use to survive with strange people in this land. This sentence was: “ you are dam stupid, you are from the countryside”. At this moment, I felt like replying back. I wasn’t mad. I even smiled. There is a word I am using a lot these days –mercy-. Yes, I have mercy for all these people. I have for them some words that I really feel like sharing. ............. Dearest civilized................. "Yes, I came to this land from somewhere, that you consider as nowhere. I arrived at a very young age. I had no parents beside of me. I have very few memories about my childhood. All of them are bad. I had no one to brush my hair for me to go to school. I always went in a tragic style wearing purple with green. There are days in which I slept with the school blouse to wake up and go with it in the morning.If only you thank God for the tenderness you have from your family. For breaks, I used to eat half carrot. There was no one to get me from the bakery the sweet things that children eat. When the soap that mom sends me end, I used to shower with dishes powder. Crazy, right? But it is true. I had no one to take me or bring me from school and I studied alone. When the lights are switched off, I used to revise in silence under my cover and try to recapitulate my lessons for tomorrow’s class. I have never had friends. Well, nothing changed even now. I cried so much. I cried because my so beloved mom was away from me and I could see her very few. I cried because I never knew how it feels to call someone “dad”. I cried because when I was beat there was no one to save me and take me into his warming arms. My favorite game was building houses with clay. May be because somehow, this was and remains my most precious wish. I had always dirty hands. Many of my loved ones forgot me then died while I was away. Yes! this is how it feels when we come from this somewhere that you call nowhere. This is half of my reality because the other half is who I am by now. So while nothing was beside, I educated myself, I learnt a lot, acquired values, improved myself and reached the true feeling of empowerment and esteem. I knew how to have visions, dignity and principles and how to defend them. I learnt how to love truly without expecting anything in return. I learnt how to defeat the world with my shining eyes even if I feel alone. but curiously, no one of you can be compared to me by now?! I guess, you regret that you don't come from the same somewhere I come from, that you still call nowehre I came from a small poor land and I’m just thankful to God because this is just what made me strong enough to face today and tomorrow with determination and alone all what life is preparing for me. What lighten the sparks inside of me is surely something you would never know. That's why you are not. and that's why I am. Dearest civilized, remember: life is attitude, and this what you will never have :) by Z.B

The man behind my smile

I don’t know what does death look like to for dead people but for the remaining ones I know it is a piece of what most counts for you that goes forever. Once it happens, you will have to do the same things every day with someone missing inside of this imaginary frame that your mind sticks with and make you suffer. At the end, in best cases you forget with time or you keep crying inside for the remaining years of your life. I believe in love much more than what love itself represents. Love meant in my words isn’t what you see in movies or in the boring stories that most people ended up saying: “what a fake!” whenever they meet one. I mean this love of idealizing someone in your life and put it on the top of your examples just under your religion and values. In my life, I have always had a spring refreshing my winter heart with doses of inspiration and tenderness. This feeling that I kept meeting and loosing with death replaced at some point my dad’s absence which is not necessary something I think about but yet it is something that left inside of me the need to have set a “why “ for my smile. I am not sure of how men should be loved. However, the way I do it makes me even wonder if love isn’t actually under what I could feel when this spring comes and lighten my winter. How many of us know that the true relief lies in those moments where we realize how precious a person for us is. Then, it would definitely lie in each single beating of the heart whenever we know she’s so close or she smiled because we’ve done what made her smile. Love would be love if those we love could see it in the discretion of our smiles, deepness of our eyes but also the imperfection of our acts to remain their eternal servants. This is just how I love the man behind my smile…