Relationships
Humans are full of love. full of empathy at their core. they were born to love, not to hate. the state of hate costs a man more than loving ever could, loving prospers, hate drains. you can feel this in the texture of any given day. the meaning you pull from it, the power you feel inside it, it traces back almost always to the love you’re carrying. for a mother, a father, a brother, a sister, a lover. a man is full of those emotions.
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.
I have had this realization, knowing I almost ruined all my relationships. my childhood, teenage years and early twenties are all lessons of detachment and isolation, and I kind of never been hungry for relationships although I wasn’t so fully into them either, and that paradox was what confused me. that all this independence should lead to some desire of feeling what it’s like to feel the dependence you would feel in all sorts of relationships, all this alone time means I might need at least one loyal friend who I would need to talk to about everything. and it really isn’t that strange, but this was another form of walking contradiction. it confused me, but not that much. attributing factors worked as explanations, I might be fulfilled with the close circle I have, and indeed I have a very small circle where I’m fulfilled with life, satisfied mentally, intellectually and emotionally. my very few friends and family are all I need so I don’t look outside. but then also I shouldn’t cheapen bonding myself with others this much, and I wasn’t, I was genuinely fine in forming healthy relationships with others, but it was so messy. not the kind of messy that comes from a dynamic relationship, but in the mechanism I had of making new ones and then when I realized all the things that were holding me back from maintaining and establishing new relationships in my life, it was because of being emotionally detached.
Recently, a friend (North) told me something that summarized almost every failed attempt I had at explaining myself in relationships. he said although I wonder around and communicate, I am not dependent on being loved, and I am not dependent on being liked by everyone. and indeed I do not move through life chasing validation or needing reassurance that I matter.
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.
I remember that over the years a kind of resistance began to form between me and giving advice to others. at first I thought it was because they were too lost to see . sometimes I thought they were not ready to heal . but the truth is simpler and harder to admit. the resistance existed because I was different.
I have learned something recently that I can finally say without arrogance. when you are naturally good at enduring something, you underestimate how heavy it feels for others. there is a friction that happens when your strength becomes someone else’s weakness. and instead of recognizing that difference, I was projecting my own structure onto them.