But I have been felled by trouble so why pile
Fruitless complaints on the dumb winds which lack
The feelings to hear
My words and respond in kind?
He is almost mid ocean now,
No human shape is visible on dull seaweed.
So far does cruel fate mock me in my desperate
Times and begrudge even ears to my complaints.
— Catullus, Catvllvs LXIV (trans. Daisy Dunn) [1]

A whole year has passed since this series of events took place. I would not be telling the truth if I said that it is completely behind me now, for the past is never over. As Eugene O’Neill said: “The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us.” [2] Furthermore, it is inadequate to start from the beginning, so let us take a step backward to describe a week before it all happened.

I was a researcher in the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research back then, working on problems in computational imaging and light-scattering in the atmosphere. I also had a law and economics side project that was exceedingly taking up more and more of my time. I was also writing up the draft of a novel I would publish in the upcoming year. My life was packed, and there was no room to add any other activity, yet I kept adding projects left and right, leaving me in a state of exhaustion. I barely had time for myself, and the excessive load, plus the promises I gave, left me little room to breathe. This stress was crippling me, and it was not an uncommon experience for me to be short of breath just sitting down, reading or writing. And to add to this inscrutable pile, I was mentally preoccupied with securing a scholarship for my Ph.D., a task I firmly believed was not within grasp due to the broken opportunity system we had. I just could not economize on time or energy, and this state of constant mental preoccupation was the main driver of my fatigue.

Every day consisted of ten simple tasks for this or that project, progressing in each at a snail’s pace. It was a tutorial on inefficiency. What a remarkably ironic thing, that one of my projects was an elaboration of the efficiency of the private property institution as an optimal resource-allocation scheme. One day, I decided to focus: I paused all of my projects in order to work on my novel. And in one of the poems, in the novel, the main focus is mobile games. (The novel is about a poet in modern Halicarnassus, Bodrum.) As an exercise, I started playing a silly mobile game that I fully understood to be a useless and futile activity, and soon, due to mounting pressure, it consumed me. Three hours a day or more were dedicated to pressing all the red buttons in the game as a trained Skinner Pidgeon.

On that fateful week, my Bahraini friend surprised me with his arrival in Kuwait. I spent the weekend with him, not knowing he was sick back then. We sat down for many beautiful hours with other friends, and I had a break from my routine. I picked up smoking again, where I was previously vaping — always promising myself to quit after this one, or the next one, or when the juice from the one after would be empty. One cigarette lead to another, and then to another, and soon enough I was buying small 10-packet cartons of cigarettes.

As the well-read might have noticed, smoking, especially after one has quit for a long period, can scar the tissues of the esophagus. Couple that with the frequenting and close contact with a friend down with the flu, one can be sure that a week off for rest is forthcoming.

My friend returned home on Saturday, and I resumed my work on Sunday, as usual. However, by the end of the day, heaviness weighed me down, and a warm fever overtook me. I left work at 3:15 PM, and on the way back home it dawned on me that I was getting sick. The hospital was nearby, so I figured I should get the week off to rest as much as was needed to conquer the malady and get back up to speed by the next week. It was a cool November afternoon, and the sun was light and the air refreshing. I sat on the bench, waiting for my number to come up; usually, I would read a book until the digital bar shows me my number, however, after my friend left, I resumed my obsession with that stupid game.

It took me maybe ten seconds to realize that my number was up. I clicked my screen off and went to the doctor’s office. Something happened to me when I knocked on the door and entered. There was this absolutely normal doctor, that I would have seen any day with indifference, sitting on her chair. None of my friends or family would find anything special in her, not at least anything that would have me petrified at her sight. She was focused on her screen and called my name. Her voice an alloy of crystalline depth of tone with squeaky softness holding the sound bits intact. She looked me in the eye and I felt a weird thumping in my chest, a hollowness of the stomach, a lightness. Two eyes penetrated into the shell I hid inside, two well-oiled orbs in their cavities; residual somberness and solemnity percolated her countenance; defenselessness, I might have called it, but inner fortitude I would also say: She became that tabula rasa where my deepest yearnings were inscribed, a portrait of beauty to haunt me for months to come.

It seemed to me that she was a woman I just had to see again, and again, and again. Her image made its print where I can see it any day in my mind’s eye. If someone asked me what is it about her that makes me blush so, “I would look at them, smiling, and say nothing.” [3] Although my short visit was nothing but routine. I knew I had to plant a seed somewhere, leave the same string Ariadne gave to Theseus. I asked her a scientific question that broke her concentration from the screen and back to me. We had a sequence of interchanges, for which I left Ariadne’s string on her office to come back to when the moment is ripe. For I have become Ariadne now, remembering the moment her life changed forever:

The moment the virgin princess clapped her
Widening eyes upon him –
Her pure little bed was still protecting her in a soft
And motherly embrace, breathing sweetly
Over her the fragrant breath
Of myrtle such as the
River Eurotas puts forth
Or the breeze spring plucks from flowers of many colours –
And averted her hot eyes from him only when
Her whole body had caught the flame of love
And she burned deep inside to the depths of her marrow. [4]

Back in my office, my work was waiting for me. I set up my laptop, had a sandwich to eat, and put my article on the screen to edit. Nothing could be accomplished that day, however. As I was feverish, I stood up, went to the couch, and laid down taking one cigarette after the other. She was not about to leave my mind; it was becoming ever more apparent to me that I ‘fell in love,’ that these were butterflies fluttering in my stomach. Here is that woman who I have been dreaming about: Smart, mature, motherly, beautiful — nay, gorgeous, attractive with her alluring voice and petrifying visage and angelic complexion, one that, had I not known any better, would thought that she was my better half, and remembered Zeus’ resolution to man’s impudent hubris: “Methinks I have a plan which will humble their pride and improve their manners; men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers; this will have the advantage of making them more profitable to us. They shall walk upright on two legs, and if they continue insolent and will not be quiet, I will split them again and they shall hop about on a single leg.” [5]

Now, this feeling was so glorious to me because I dated many times that year, and I never felt that sinking feeling of admiration and helplessness; of want and untainted desire; an infatuation pure of lust and carnal motivation. Now, it was in full swing. She was just an angel, and nothing could sway that thought away. I have sculpted her personality and character out of thought as Pygmalion have fashioned his Galatea.

In fact, I wanted nothing more in the world than to go and talk to her again, but it was precisely that which I could not do if I wanted to accomplish any progress with her. That it was possible, within reach, as I have estimated, made it all the more sweeter. It was my goal to be closer to her. Oh, would I that I could hug her or hold her hands. I realized that there was something bordering on the insane brewing in my head. Resuming my night routine, I brushed my teeth, flossed, took a quick shower and went to bed.

I could not sleep that night. She was my simple preoccupation. Am I becoming mad, I asked myself? And to have asked that question was to answer it. I tried to get rid of her image from my head as much as I could to no avail. This, I have heard, is a curse God damned the compulsive obsessives with, and here I lie in bed for hours, wanting nothing more than to rest but unable to secure my passage to the land of dreams. That is, until after some hours that my surrender to rest melted into darkness.

Lo and behold, she was there in my dream as well! The dream is still as vivid today as it was precisely one year ago from today. We were, me alone, and she with a friend, in Jabriya near Starbucks and the Irani Kebab shop. While waiting outside, in incredible omniscience, I knew she was being harassed there by two young men. They did not like her going into a Starbucks after the inception of the Hamas-Israeli war, and they thought it was honorable to harangue her, being the dilatant punks they were. I rushed in and told them to leave; they were young and stupid, and one came to me thinking he would intimidate me. I broke his arm and threw him out, and told his friend I would rough him up just the same. They both left and entered two young women of equal irritation and sanctimoniousness. How they knew she was there, and why they targeted her remains an enigmatic fabula to lay rest in the empire of dreams. When I told them off just as I did the two men before her, one took a pepper-spray from her purse, and I quickly snatched it and emptied it in her now swollen with redness eyes. They both left promptly. I went to her and told her to have a nice day, where she appreciated the effort with the same smile she bid me adieu the day before. It was at that moment that I woke up from this fever dream.

I did not open that stupid mobile game afterward, as I was writing one poem after another, inspired (and motivated) by her. I felt in those days that she was a calling just as important, if not much greater, than all the projects I was working on then. There was a conflict now: Can I see her again, or should I lay this all to rest? I know I would not forgive myself if I haven’t at least tried. And tried I did: Although I wanted to ask her out, I wizened at the prospect of her thinking I was harassing her. Oh, what to do, what to do!

The rest of the story, I cannot relate to you, anonymous reader. I can just share my realization after rejection and dejection. That these infatuations of mine were that with a ghost. I have been possessed by insanity, rushed and scared her away. When one thinks he has met an angel, the one to put all others to shame, he would sacrifice more and more to her, until one has in the end to sacrifice himself to the unknown, and that, precisely, is what one has to avoid at all costs.

How much should a man lose of himself just to be with another? My best friend, seeing me in that sorry state, wrote an article titled: “To my loving friend, who forgot how to be himself.” And I knew that to be with her might be possible, but it would be at the cost of everything I held dear to myself: All my values, beliefs, time, etc. Surely, not one person on Earth is worth it. And for what, might I ask, should I come to hate myself or any other — for the attention and reciprocation of someone who, for any reason, could not love me back? The line should have been drawn so far back, and reaching a pathetic state of helplessness is way beyond that line.

A week after her rejection, I have dreamt that her family invited me to cook dinner for them. When, in that dream, I was there, they were all so happy. I realized that I just wanted that family life of which I haven’t had, and perhaps any good women would perfectly substitute her. And it was, then, that I knew what to make of my obsession, and there, I have scattered it and moved on.

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[1] The Poems of Catullus, by Daisy Dunn;
[2] Long Day’s Journey into Night, by Eugene O’Neill;
[3] Vita Nuova, by Dante Alighieri;
[4] Catullus, Catvllvs LXIV (trans. Daisy Dunn);
[5] The Symposium, by Plato.