Sami - Somewhere in the desert

Where one looks

One does not find

Revelations and fears of being hopelessly behind

A loss or a win?

One must wonder, how did this all begin?

It took many years and a lifetime worth of heartbreak to come to terms with what happened to me. Even now I am not sure if I have grasped the entirety of it, or yet understood the layers of emotions and betrayals that came to pass. I cannot comment on the choices we make, or the competing intentions that conspire to make any one event a reality. I leave that to you, my dear Melanie. My mind is too confused, my soul too bruised. All I know is that my choices must have brought me here, somehow, to this low point of existence, and there must be some kind of lesson to be learned.

I will tell you my story and you may judge the truth of it, the scale of its purity, and the depths of its sadness. You are the only person I trust enough to share it all with and the only one who may understand the arrogance of my actions. What you take from it is yours to keep, for I am beyond your salvation. There is only one person that can save me, and I doubt very much that she will ever care to do so.

The truth is you will likely never see this letter. You will not devour its words as you do everything that you read. You will not lay awake deep into the night, as I do, contemplating its hidden messages and unraveling its every twist. Even so, the only purpose left in my life has become to write this letter to you, to contemplate it, nurture it and remake it over and over again no matter how many times it is stolen or destroyed. After all, it is the story of my illustrious life. Looking back at it all now, as I try to decipher the overlapping motivations and mistakes of my history, I recognize that it has been colourful indeed, this life that I have led.

At times it has been blessed; a life fuller than most could hope for. Since I last saw you all those years ago, I’ve been to many of the world’s great places, and more than I would like to remember of its worst. I have loved and been loved several times over. I have indulged in many a fantasy, and traveled many a dark road in parallel. I have sat with the princes of Arabia in their gilded palaces and enjoyed the famed hospitality of the Bedouin tribes of the Sinai desert. I have witnessed the magical whirling dance of the dervishes of Morocco and negotiated head to head with the business tycoons of New York and London. I am ashamed to say that I participated in some of their depraved pleasures, somehow believing the illusion that we were equal, friends even.

My passions opened doors that others would kill for and before I knew it, I was witnessing and participating in luxury that should not exist while so many unheard voices suffer in the world. I see that now, I did not then.

Like many a story, mine starts with a woman. A woman and a set of choices. I may have been able to live with that, a broken heart and a memory littered with wounds, but the trickster we like to call Fate rolled the dice on my behalf, setting in motion a series of events that landed me in my current sorry state; imprisoned and trotting inevitably towards the shimmering mirage of madness, day by day, every waking minute. Even that may have been bearable, but I could not, I still cannot, let myself be responsible for ruining the lives of so many unsuspecting victims. I can see her now, my old nemesis Fate, dressed in the playful bright outfit of a joker, that check-mate found in every deck of cards. She is smiling slyly, gesturing for me to advance a little farther into her lair, telling me to complete the journey I embarked on so many years ago. She offers solace, sweet solace from the torture of loneliness that is my prison, but I will not follow her yet. I have a story to tell.

Every time I write this letter, an unknown thief mocks me again. It will be the fifteenth time I begin committing memory to paper, and it is the fifteenth time my words are taken from me, providing nothing but idle entertainment to the wrong reader. I suspect there will be more to come. Sometimes it is the prison guards who take my precious scribbles from you, although they cannot speak English much less read it. More often though, it is a cruel and mysterious culprit from the ward, a fellow prisoner stealing my dreams for no other reason but the cruelty of men taking pride in crushing another. I have not caught him in the act yet, but time is on my side.

The prison guards and prisoners alike are cruel and petty. It seems that I am the running joke of the ward, my writing a beacon for mockery. They take great pleasure in taunting my fragile state with their insults and sneers and shared jokes. I am a foreigner to them, a khawaja, the only Canadian shackled amongst the political prisoners of Yemen and the United Arab Emirates, Sudan and Pakistan and Somalia. They do not care that my parents are from the desert. Still, I am a khawaja.

None of us know where we are, only that we are surrounded by seemingly endless desert dunes rolling away into the distance. At times, the sad beauty of the landscape brings tears to my eyes, watching it intently as I do through rusting iron bars. At others it serves as the executioner’s blade, cutting through my very being with sharp, calculated precision.

But let me start from the beginning, from just before a single phone call changed my life forever. Before I met the Sheikh of Sheikhs and was sucked into his magnetic orbit, before I betrayed my family and lost the woman that I loved and before the trickster took over my life’s trajectory for her own, molding and shaping it like a sculptor to the stone.

You were there Mel, the night it all began. You were there the night I met Evita.