Memory
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.
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.
My earliest memory of a real community is 249 Unit, a video editing group I joined in 2018, when I was around fifteen. I don’t remember how I found it. I only remember the texture of being inside it: the average age was seventeen, a few outliers in their early twenties, and the whole thing had the specific energy that comes when people are young and making things together before anyone is doing it for money.
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.
It is a month later now. Wren has been going through something that feels painfully familiar to me, something close to the days I once lived without understanding . today he texted me, excited, talking about learning psychology and trying to understand the human mind and anxiety. I felt briefly happy for him. he sounded genuinely alive, like someone who had finally found a door he wanted to open.
Wren is not usually the type to dive into these themes. he is into anything but interoception, so when he spoke with that kind of curiosity, it caught my attention. then he said something that touched me. he said there were no days he hated himself more than those days. the moment I read that, I felt tightened inside.
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.