A Shock I Met with Laughter

Yemenat

Ahmed Saif Hashed

“Haifa” was engaged to a classmate at the very height of my love for her at university. I hadn’t known about the engagement, but I happened to glimpse the ring on her finger. The shock struck me like lightning, splitting me in two, crushing my soul beneath the treads of a tank. My head shattered like glass hit by a boulder hurled from a mountain peak.

I felt that the ring on her finger tightened around my neck like a hangman’s noose. The earth, vast as it was, shrank to the size of a needle’s eye. A crushing disappointment strangled my dreams with an iron grip. My eyes reeled beneath the blow, the world dissolving into a blackness like death. The mountains themselves seemed to press upon my chest, choking the breath from my lungs. I felt that my very existence had dissolved, that the future of my love had been reduced to ashes. A despair swept over me like Noah’s flood. Regret seared me, limitless and boundless, a grief that stretched beyond the edges of the cosmos.

I remembered a proverb our lecturer, Dr. Ahmed Zain Aidarous, had often repeated in class, a sharp and biting saying about the shame of a man too timid to speak to his cousin. Another proverb came to mind, this time African: The man who circles a beautiful girl without declaring his intentions will one day fetch water for the guests at her wedding.

Despair seized me, and reality struck with a force I had never foreseen, though I should have, given my hesitation and passivity. What happened was, in truth, the natural outcome, the price of standing still, of waiting endlessly, of never choosing, never daring, never setting a time. The disappointment was immense, my failure in love