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Humans are full of love. full of empathy at their core. they were born to love, not to hate. the state of hate costs a man more than loving ever could, loving prospers, hate drains. you can feel this in the texture of any given day. the meaning you pull from it, the power you feel inside it, it traces back almost always to the love you’re carrying. for a mother, a father, a brother, a sister, a lover. a man is full of those emotions.

Today I went to change my fragrance. the first choice wasn’t available, Bleu de Chanel, gone. so I moved to the second tier, and those weren’t there either. I ended up at the third tier, which is where I found the Afnan Supremacy collection, and after trying another two options or so options, 9PM Afnan, a few others from the Afnan line, I landed on Supremacy Oud, paid, and left.

My friend Yahia once asked me how I coordinate between everything on my plate. not how I manage the volume, he understood that part. what he wanted to know was how I handle the context switch. one hour I’m deep in SQL queries and database design. the next I’m reading a machine learning paper. how does that work, he asked. how does the mind move between places that different without losing something.

When I was a kid, I wanted to learn almost everything. theology, physics, chemistry, computer science, artificial intelligence, biology, not as curiosity for curiosity’s sake, but as a genuine orientation. I was drawn toward knowledge as a category, not toward any subject inside it. I wanted to understand how things worked, and I wanted to understand how they related to each other.

The problem was the people around me. not their fault, but they were the evidence I kept looking at. no one I could see excelled at all of it. not even close. the picture the world was showing me was that you pick a lane, you go deep, and that depth is where the results live. every system I was in, school, university, the way people talked about careers, rewarded the vertical. the specialist. the one who knows one thing completely. and I was not that. I was the one who kept moving horizontally, touching everything, carrying a general picture without owning any particular depth yet.

I miss Abdalwahab.

He used to be the only colorful thing in my grey days. and this Eid I felt his absence, not constantly, but every time your heart tries and search / looking for something familiar and finds nothing there. I was surrounded by people and I’m, and none of it touched the specific place he occupies. that is what frightens me about this kind of missing. it isn’t general loneliness. it is targeted, I can’t search for something, the ache for a particular person that no number of other people can fill the space the left, because they are not a type, they are a person, and there is only one of them.