It is a story about a young woman who was born into a family where the father was an abuser,  who would control everyone’s  life. The girl was not an ordinary girl,  she had  dreams of creating an independent life, finally at the age of eighteen she left her home to pursue a life of  freedom.

 

“Eid Mubarak, hope you are doing well, we miss you and I am sorry, will always be.” The message on her phone seemed to mock her entire existence, she wanted to throw her phone away into another dimension where the message could go missing with the horrid memories it brought with itself. Her life was turning out really well after all these years she had struggled with the ghost of memories that she had been trying to lay to rest, underneath the enormous layers of the stupor. The message brought back all the bits and pieces of her broken and malevolent past.

The more she tried of taking her mind off the message the more her conscience took a hold on her memories and the people that belonged in them, not every member of her past made her suffer but most of them did. She thinks of her mother all the time, the reminiscences of the tender touch of her mother’s lips on her forehead, the comfort of her embraces at the times of her sudden outburst at that man, those words of consolation when she felt lonely, the flavour of her hands, and the presence of her being around her. She lost her mother’s support at the time when she needed the most, at the time when she was fighting for her rights, her rights of freedom and happiness, she was protesting for the life she always wanted to create.

He took it all away, the care of her mother’s embrace, the shelter of her little brother’s trust, the support of her self-worth, the buoyancy of her dreams. She remembers the day as apocalypse, the day that made her leave everything and everyone behind.

she had left her so called home when was barely eighteen years old, she had no other choice but to leave, she went straight to her best friend’s house and lived there for a year, got a job as a waitress in a local eatery to pay for her basic necessities, things were hard to handle in the beginning but they were liberating for her existence and experience. At last she was not scared of being beaten up for having a dream, she was not being tortured to have asked for a better life, and she was not any longer being threatened for asking for freedom.

Her father had always been an image of domination; he has never been a father who loved his children, maybe he didn’t know how to love, maybe he didn’t know the essence of love, maybe he perceived love as control, maybe he was scared of losing his children to freedom. But he couldn’t realise his mistakes until he forced his daughter to live all alone in a world that was very new and strange for her. The realization came very late, when she had left for good, when she had created a life of her own. She did forgive him but couldn’t forget the things that she went through her entire life, the life that she now considers her own. She became a woman who wouldn’t enslave her dreams for any man, a woman who fought to live a life of independence, a woman who was self-sufficient, a woman who would love but wouldn’t allow love to strangulate her life.

 

Responses