Grief
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.