Grief
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.
Oh you don’t have to carry the guilt or to blame yourself for hurting others, they say.
and I smile because I wish that landed somewhere in me. I can’t, my friend. you are looking at me but you are not seeing what I am seeing, and that is not your fault, you were not there, you did not live what I lived, you came into my life somewhere in the middle of the story and missed everything that happened before the page you opened on.
I have observed many stories. friendships. partnerships. families. I have even lived inside some of them. And I noticed something. Relationships rarely die from one dramatic moment. They die from a hidden cancer.
It grows quietly. invisibly. accumulating over years. no one sees it. no one feels it. until one day, it is strong enough to turn love into resentment, and resentment into distance. I gave this cancer a name in February 2022. I called them small black dots. One black dot is harmless. almost invisible.
A friend sent a link to our group chat at midnight on the last day of 2025. I joined along with everyone else. Mahmoud was there. it had been a long time since we were all in one place, even if it was virtual. the call lasted three hours. we caught up, we laughed, we updated each other on life in the casual way people do when they pretend time has not passed.
I keep thinking about this. a deep, returning feeling of longing for my friend Abdalwahab. I keep imagining a scene where we are together again, in the same town where we first met, walking the same streets. I miss him more than I know how to say. he is a missing essential piece, and what I feel when I sit with his absence with this imagination of going back to the places, is something close to grief, for the years we have had to live apart, growing apart in different directions, in different places, while still carrying each other somewhere we don’t talk about enough.
Life will always find a way to bring you back to your knees, not with something dramatic. not with a perfectly timed tragedy. sometimes it is something small. something unexpected. something careless in its timing. a single comment. a memory. a failure. and suddenly you are back inside your head, remembering how hard it used to be to live there.