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Wonderful Dream                          

It was morning when he returned carrying his luggage. He hadn’t really expected to be greeted by anything except this silence. Though finally home, he was completely alone.

It was his mistake because he wanted to surprise his family after being gone all these years. But now he has to wait until they return. He knows that his wife will be back at exactly one o’clock in the afternoon, because she works as a teacher at one of the elementary schools in town. His kids no doubt are still playing in the schoolyard waiting as usual for the bell to ring before they return home. Alaa will start to chase Marah to tell his side of whatever she will say to their mother about his day at school.

After that they will join together in a childish chorus telling their mother to bring them something to eat. When they are done they will refresh themselves from the tiredness of the day with a nap.

Passing the doorstep, he sets his luggage in the living room. It is a relief to finally set them down after carrying them between flights for the past 23 hours. Walking slowly around the room he stops suddenly in front of a picture that his wife has put on the wall. Three years have gone since he took this snapshot of Kim’s horse and farm on the West Coast of America while visiting her in the hottest month of the year- August. 

He remembered exactly the details of his first trip abroad. He had called his wife from the Charles DeGaul airport to tell her about the first details of his travel to his strange place. He knew he had arrived in the United States the next morning when, instead of Arabic he woke to the smell of a large cup of American coffee.

He sat confused for a while without doing anything, then his legs start to take him to the second room and he noted how the decorations have changed. He remembered how years ago, he removed all the sand and stones from the house. He had worked on this small home, fixing it the way he and his family had wanted it to appear. Spending a lot of time and effort, he worked hard, more than six months to renovate his home. He remembered how his family would visit his workshop to check each step of the process. Marah and Alaa had chosen the smallest room in the house and watched the building step by step. Marah was always asking him: “ Where is the door? When will you put in the window? Where is the patio? When you will start painting?” Oh my God, when will this room see the light?

He continued step by step with his wife in on all the details and all the debt. It was a miracle to make this warm nest. Soon after that he left for the United States.

Even if you have intuition, you can’t predict what will happen to you in the future. You can imagine what will happen, and sometimes it really happens, but you can’t absolutely predict what will happen. It is an amazing thing that the days go fast even though we don’t have any power over them.

Each human is so tiny in front of what is going on, and yet humans have ability to do what they want to do with their own life. He started washing his face in the bathroom, when he looked in the mirror to see the details of the years in his face. In fact he has changed, there are more white hairs. The lines of the years have started to creep around his eyes.

When he left the bathroom he didn’t know what to do, but he found himself going to the smallest room, his kids’ room. Still felling his grieving heart, he remembered the last time he left this room after he kissed his sleeping kids. He had shed some tears and felt a lot of pain and sadness before he left for the airport. He had been gone for a long time on his first trip abroad.

He picked up the drawing book and skimmed the papers taking a look at the small pictures of his daughter Marah. His memory flashed back to when his daughter sent him two small pictures, which she had painted carefully; he still keeps them till now. Her pictures have greatly changed. They now showed many courageous lines and meaningful colors.

Oh how much he had missed hugging them and touching their faces and hair, and to hold them both at the same time as he was doing because they were so jealous and their tired mother couldn’t hold even one of them.

He wonders how much they have grown? How much has Marah’s hair grown? How tall has Alaa grown? He brought them some of clothes, but he’s not sure if they will fit. When he picked them out, he was sure the clothes were too large, and now he is not sure if they will fit them or not.

It’s impossible to stop our time, because it was created to move, and it will be forever. Getting angry won’t stop it for a special situation. Time will not stop ever, but you must escort it. Moreover you have to precede time in order to stay alive, so what will be if the time precede you at the same time you have to precede him, in this case you no doubt will be dead in your cocoon, even if you think yourself alive because your heart and spirit are still alive. You will know that the time has swept you as a violent tornado. Time has always tried to precede him especially when he has to stop in front of the daily routine for more than two years when he had to work in another field in order to get some money for his family, but he always succeed to escort the time and stay with him in a big long struggle instead of the hard time he has spend it in his emigration.

Now after he built up a new generation- his kids- he became stronger to defy the time, and he can’t, even if he tried again and again, bet, stop and tread him as he tread a lot of other people.

He opened the window, which looks out on a small yard, so he can see his family when they come through it. He looked into the sunlight how it became hard at noon with a small shadow for these large walls, and he remembered when he used to send them off to their schools bus, and when he used to kiss his wife before he leave her.

He has waited for a long time, but nobody appears. Damn this slow time, this last hour, which separates him from his family, has been extended too long. In such a moment, when what you really need is to breath a fresh air, to drink pure water and to look at the horizon with open eyes; you feel yourself strangled step by step. Your veins start to dry and you can’t see farther than the cage walls in which you live. This was his feeling in his emigration from his family, his home and his country. He is so lonely as he is suspended between the walls of the place of the stranger and the place of time. Perhaps his body has died more than one time and others have written on his tombstone: Buried here, a prisoner out of his place; buried here, one who defied time.

He stayed watching the ground for a long time, hoping to see his family coming through the walls. There is not even a shadow of anyone. He feels anxious because he suddenly fined himself lonely between all these large walls. After a while the jail becomes a homeland for a prisoner and he will adapt himself as a man with a small lamp faces an aggressive wolf. Sometimes he feels that the prison is the main thing in his life, like a warm home; then he feels it as natural enemy who separates him from freedom.

He walked out through the living room and lied back on the old couch looking at some gifts and souvenirs that his wife has spent a lot of time to arrange in a harmonious appearance. He was looking at each piece, when his thoughts began to steal him away to the past. Finally he finds himself surrendering to a deep sleep in this awful quietness.

At last he hears some uproar outside, and with it the voice of little steps and a big steps and he hears his kids laughing their normal noise. It’s only a few moments, when his lovely wife will open the front door to wake him up to start that holy meeting for which he was waiting for such a long time.

Then he heard a knocking at the door and the horn of a car several times. He doesn’t want to wake up by himself. Why does his wife have to knock at the door when she has a key, and what was that car horn?

Tow pictures in front of him are fighting for a place. The first one is of his kids and their noisy and holy meeting, which he has dreamed of for a long time. It starts to disappear slowly in front of the second picture, which is the knocking at the door and the car horn until he wakes up to the cellar phone voice. It is his friend who is coming to take him to work a usual in New Jersey.