Memory
My memory has a specific shape of unreliability. its not about forgetting phone numbers or struggling to hold a long Quran verse in place. it used to be harder to name. It is about people. It is about places. Somewhere in the background of living I was always slightly elsewhere, I used to call it, absent minded, running scenarios, processing, clearing out some cognitive overhead that never fully cleared. And the people around me, and the rooms I sat in, they registered as peripheral. I was there, technically. but I wasn’t looking.and I think it is about that the memory doesn’t fade later, it never fully forms in the first place. that’s the clearest description I have for what I have always felt before. and you can’t retrieve what you didn’t absorb. I spent a lot of time blaming myself for this, as if the problem was a character defect rather than a pattern I could understand and maybe do something about. but the blame didn’t help the gaps fill in, and the gaps kept widening. There are places I have been where I now retain only the feeling. not what anyone looked like. not what the room smelled like or how the light fell. just a general emotional residue, like a color with no shape. places that mattered. people who were real to me. This is a repository. I want to capture what I remember, people, places, fragments of who they were and what it felt like to be near them. before the blur takes the rest of it. some of these I will share. some are just for holding. but the act of writing them down is its own thing, a way of training a muscle that was always a little underdeveloped in me. presence as a practice, even retrospectively. even now, after the fact. it all ends.
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.
There are things I carry that I never stop to examine. Experiences I walked through on autopilot, with enough presence to function but not enough to remember . GDSC was one of them. It has been almost two years since I left, and this is the first time I am actually stopping. maybe subconsciously I was avoiding it, maybe the experience was painful in a way that needed distance. or at least that what I thought back then, but mostly it is because I have a self pattern of moving forward and forgetting to look back, and this is me deliberately breaking it, for once.
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.