Tamri Doha

Tamri Doha

Grateful for the Dark

Some steps coming up the path at the far side. My heart beat strangely. I sat silent, and did not pretend to hear. He was walking more slowly than usual, with a firmer tread. He was coming. I heard the steps on the plateau, and a voice came:

―Youarenotnormal! Somethingiswrongwithyournerves‖ Ileapedtomyfeetwithafeeling that was positively murderous. The old man had long since forgotten how he should destroy a girl‘s world without much damage. There stood my mom –pale, horrified, scared with red eyes full of grief, grief for my life, my being and my existence. Mom has always been the strongest one, but at one moment, she was a small girl sobbing silently, ashen, with wet eyes, her body stiff as a tree. I still sensed what an effort she was making to keep still, and to convince me that he is wrong, perhaps even joking with us, but it wasn‘t me, the eightyear- old girl who believed everything Mom said. No, at least not this time. He, on the other hand, with his continuous struggles to put a smile on his face, and to act as normal as possible while asking me gently to uncover the veil –my headscarf was the last bridge between me and my destiny. For me, crossing that bridge seemed the hardest duty that life had ever given me. I spent centuries taking off my hijab –my fingers were shaking and the palms of my hands were sweaty. I wiped them on my pants, and then grabbed the scarf with one hand while I was busy fidgeting my nails with the other hand. It seemed like the world stopped for a minute. The world was etched with pain. As I stare from the window next to me, the sky was raining as if it told me, I feel your pain. A strange, unruffled, brooding silence fell on the whole hospital. It was as if something hanging over our heads had fallen, it was noise exploding, then –silence again.

―Miss Doha, could you unfold your braids, we need to connect your brain to the neurological machine‖ said the old man with his shivered voice.

As the old man approached me, I clutched the Quran to my heart, and started reciting some Quranic verses, I wanted to escape everything and if death was meant to be my companion, then let it be. I closed my eyes, detached myself from this world, and plunged myself in a whole other world - my Utopic imaginative world. At a an April night evening, I was surrounded by Rumi and Shams of Tabriz in a Sufi cave, listening to their stories of faith and love, verses of life and death, quotes of hell and heaven, I was sitting between the two of them when thewordswereflowingfromShams‘ mouthlikeariver when he said: ―What does patience mean? It means to look at the thorn and see the rose, to look at the night and see the dawn. Impatience means to be shortsighted as to not be able to see the outcome. The lovers of God never run out of patience for they know that time is needed for the crescentmoonto becomefull.‖ Thesewordsfreedmefromtheunquenchablefiresinmysoul,and became a song to my ears, a smell of pure oud spread in all over the room made me dip into heavens of spirituality. ―Doha, Canyouhearme?‖,―Doha, Doha―, repeatedthe old man endlessly.

―Yes, where am I?‖ ―Aleppo?‖

Theoldmanwasstaringatmeweirdlyasifitwasthefirsttime, heheardtheword―Aleppo‖from a teenager wearing Nike shoes and some mascara in her eyes; He asked me to follow him where Mom and Dad were sitting. I put on my messy scarf, and then followed him barefooted, eager and curious to fathom what is happening? ―Yourlittlegirlhasaseverehypertension,andinthefollowingdaysshewillgetastrabismusthat wouldmakehervisiondizzy,unclear,andinsomecasesitbecomesdullandcompletelydark" says the old man with a pitiful face.

I felt heavy, my heart had undergone a thousand different emotions, albeit with a hazy filter on top of it, difficult to decipher as though engulfed in a fog for 24hours. A long introspection cut my emotions as I was imagining what it feels to look at the dark? What is darkness first? Is darknesseven a sickness, or is it what people usually live in? While I was grasping this existentialist idea, a voice whispers in my ears: ―OslaveofGod‖,―Is the blind equivalentto the seeing? Oris darkness equivalenttolight?‖thistimeItwasnotShamsor Rumi, itisoneoftheverses Iwastaughtinthe Zaouïa. Over time, my sight did not worsen because of the strabismus, it healed and brightened more than ever before. My mom was no longer my mom; it was a dizzy picture drawn in my mind that I cannot even remember her smallest details, what she wore, or if she was even laughing or sobbing in silence. My friends were no longer my friends; they were some distanced people wearing masks of joy and happiness, but inside each one feels pitiful towards me as if I were alreadydead.

Beyond life and death, I often find myself in between the unknown and the known. Is life so known for people that the unknown stays for death? Or, are people so ignorant that they think they know enough life? Life ends at the boundaries of death, but why does some death often start on the borders of life and not on death itself? My spirits remind me of Rumi‘s verses as he says:

―why talk about all the known and the unknown

see how the unknown merges into the

known why think separately

of this life and the next

when one is born from the

last look at your heart and

tongue one feels but deaf

and dumb

the other speaks in words and signs‖ What separates a dead person from a living person is not breathing. It is living. The day when I had a severe strabismus, darkness had fallen upon my eyes, but it was not real darkness; for the real darkness is not temporary, it is not

in the eye itself. Real darkness is in the heart and the soul. Our paths are never dark enough, our hearts are. The path is there for anyone to follow, but it is the one who lights the path for himself who wins against life.

I was going with the flow of life, until I reached the day when I was told my strabismus is gone. I have recovered. Little do they know, the human being never gets rid of his darkness. How life can be sometimes so unbalanced that you fell in its abyss and see darkness again; however, life has its wisdoms, apparently wisdoms you have no choice but to trust and pray that within it or by it, comes some sort of healing. I pray that you all be grateful for darkness. Darkness has taught me what light failed to do and, thereby, I pray you all reach darkness to feel the true meaning of light.