Grief on Ahmed Alghali Blog

Eid Is Nothing But My Friend

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0300

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

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0300

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.

Small Black Dots

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 19:21:52 +0300

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.

I Ran Because You Mattered

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 21:04:49 +0300

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.

My Friend, The Places, and Myself

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0300

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

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 07:10:00 +0300

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.

Mahmoud Biography

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 03:13:17 +0300

I have had a unique friendship with someone who, on the surface, could not be more different from me. his name is Mahmoud. when I first met him at the university of Khartoum, I was almost certain that we would never become close. not because of conflict, not because of incompatibility in values, but because he represented something I was instinctively afraid of.

What Wren Carried — 02: Who He Chose to Speak To

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0300

I told the story of things we never expect to happen to us to a friend today. while listening, he paused and made a simple remark. he asked me why, out of all the people around him, he chose to talk to me about this.

I had not thought about that before.

The question forced me to re examine that friendship, or me and Wren, and the role I played in his life. honestly, it was not much. we enjoyed each other’s company. we hung out only a few times. nothing that would normally qualify as closeness.

For Three Years I Have Been Somewhere Else

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0300

I’m slowly starting to form an answer. the three years I wrote about were not random. they were shaped, heavily and quietly, by days I still don’t understand , and I keep discovering this, a little more each day. those days are becoming one of the most important chapters of my life. so dense, so unprocessed, that it has taken me years just to begin understanding what happened there. and I still don’t have the full image. there is something I haven’t yet confronted, something I’m not ready to name, sitting at the center of it that I keep circling without going in. What I do know is this: I feel like I got caught there. like I locked myself inside those days without realizing it. like there is a version of me that I left behind in 2023, specifically at the University of Khartoum, and never went back for. a version I am too afraid to think about clearly. I didn’t choose to abandon it consciously. I just never processed it. and when I try to understand why, I find nothing. not resistance, not pain, just absence.like a self discontinuity: when something ruptures so completely that the person you were before it and the person after it don’t feel connected, just splitted. it is not like growth, the I outgrew something. but like.. the way I imagine it, something that was never finished, yet I closed the door.

What Wren Carried

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0300

About This Series

This story is about the gentle collapse of Wren, and I’m watching it all from a distance.

Wren is someone I’ve known for a few years now. the kind of person who doesn’t take up much space in a room. he’s older than me, a little more worn, a little more faithful, not just to God, but to the version of himself he’s been holding onto since long before I met him.

The Moment I Realized What He Meant to Me

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 16:06:01 +0300

I remember coming back to Sudan from Saudi Arabia when Abd Alwahab told me he had secured a scholarship in India and might travel to pursue it. After a lifelong friendship, growing up in the same district our entire lives, the time had finally come for him to leave for his undergraduate degree. I don’t recall thinking deeply about it at first, because it seemed that he hadn’t fully made up his mind yet. When I returned to Sudan, I got busy with university, and suddenly things became real on his side.

Last selife

Taking Things For Granted

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 04:10:00 +0300

I’ve taken things for granted before, and I always do. it doesn’t mean I don’t recognize the value of someone or something in my life, it’s just that I’m mostly busy and never able to find time to reflect upon the things I have in my life.

He Would Be Mad If I Didn't Call

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0300

And I remember telling one of my closest friends, hey just out of the blue it hit me I turned to him and I said: you now, you are one of those friends if I was really in the shit I Would call you, and his reaction, is he didn’t say thank you, he said, I’d be mad if you didn’t, when you don’t call me and say I’m in the mud, you deny me the opportunity, the honor of setting in mud with you. - Simon Sinek

I Keep Failing the People I Care About

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 19:12:13 +0300

Things I was wrong about

Recently, I came to the realization: I’m not giving people what they deserve. I don’t make it easy for them to stay close to me, not only strangers, but even the people who care about me the most. I build walls, my mood is forever changing around them, and constantly not around. And I know this is wrong. I noticed that at the beginning of relationships, I can match people’s energy effortlessly, but over time I gradually drift back into being distant and cold. It feels unfair, it’s hypocrisy. either I shouldn’t appear friendly in the first place, or I should remain consistent with the way I start. which is being friendly forever.

The greatest tragedy in life

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sat, 29 Jun 2024 08:43:00 +0300

I once read:

“one of the greatest tragedies in life is that you will always be loved more than you will ever know, someone in your class might find your presence inviting and warm even if you’ve exchanged a few words with them or maybe none at all, someone on the street loves your smile and it brightens their path for the next few blocks, someone who regularly comes to work is disappointed when you aren’t there, someone missed you today, someone noticed when you’re gone, someone loves you when you’re there, someone loves you when you’re nowhere to be found at all, you might think you have always disappeared when you’re no longer in the picture, but you never left the frame”