Lonely Nights

You’re sitting with a bunch of friends or family members; you talk and share some laughs and giggles over a meal or a snack. You feel the liveliness of your surrounding; you hear the different voices and tones, you also feel the motion that surrounds the place. Nope, you’re not alone. Not yet, at least...

Time passes. It starts to get late. People gradually surrender and leave. Finally, you are left alone. You just know that you will live a very long mind-numbingly lonely night. The worst thing is that you know as a fact that this will happen tomorrow and after that and the next week and the week that follows; just the way it happened last night and the night before for the past few years. I’m always the last person to sleep and sometimes I don’t sleep at all. This problem has been bothering me for years. I’ve tried everything. I read books, I wrote poems, I watched movies and TV shows, I download sleeping therapy audio pieces such as “Water Creations”… Still, I stay awake.

Some nights, I find myself begging people to stay on the phone with me till I have fallen asleep because the night sometimes seems to not reach to en end. It is scary. The wind seems to carry voices and whispers; your imagination then takes you to places you don’t want to go. The more you curse this solitude the lonelier you feel.

It’s not always bad. Sometimes, in fact, I can’t wait till everybody leaves and the night is all mine to own. There is something about the quiet of the night that feels magically soothing. Sometimes it feels like ultimate “peace”. However, it is ironic how this silence urges you to appreciate the lively persona of day-life if that makes any sense to you.

So you helplessly live the lonely hours. You take a walk inside your mind and you recall your past, analyze your present and try to imagine bits and pieces of your future. In this little journey you stumble, you tremble, you feel strong and sometimes weak, you smile and sometimes cry, you breathe smoothly and sometimes struggle to suck some oxygen into your lungs… and time just stops. Nothing else seems to exist but yourself. Everybody else is but a dead corpse. That is the freaky part.

Wait, there is a freakier part: somehow, you also die just like the rest. And just like them, with God’s will you also come back to life again in the morning.

Lonely nights do kill and they sure do set your imagination free to take you to places you don’t expect.

Tonight, my little brother is very sick. I’m taking care of him so I’m not totally alone. This reminds me of the Arabic saying: Ma9a2ebo 8awmin 3inda 8awmin fawa2ido. Poor Khalid. I do feel bad for him, don’t get me wrong haha.