Looking For Gold | Be Careful What You Wish For

                                                                                                            Aliaa Nabil Hamad

                                    Be Careful What You Wish For

"Nnnnnoooooooo!" Once again the scream woke me up. It’s been happening every day now. Every day for almost two months. He usually can’t go to sleep on his own. I have to comfort him and slip him a pill every night. And even then, it takes him hours to give in. To succumb to his biological urge to tune out the rest of the world. I don’t think he’d fall asleep if he had a say in the matter, but it’s his heavy eyelids that shut down eventually. This peace doesn’t last long, however. An hour later, he tears the silence with his bloodcurdling shout. I don’t know what it is. What he sees that makes him so startled. He never talks about it. He doesn’t answer me when I ask him. He stopped answering me. Communicating with me. He doesn’t look me in the eye anymore. Like he’s ashamed of something. He avoids being with me in the same room for too long. He doesn’t go out. He stopped going out. He refuses to see anyone, not even his parents. He doesn’t watch TV, listen to the radio, or even read the paper. If it wasn’t for the food that I force-fed him barely once a day, we would have no contact at all.

Who was this person? This stranger. What happened to him? What could have been so shameful he can’t even face me? Why is he not fighting this? Why is he surrendering? When did he become so weak? Why is he not letting me help him? This is not the person I married…..This is a person who has willingly crawled into his own cocoon and won’t come out. This is a wuss who is too afraid to make contact with the outside world. This is a wimp who died the day he stopped living. Every ounce of my being detested him. I cringed at the thought of being associated with him in any way. He disgusted me. He repulsed me. Sickened me. I hated him! I loathed him. And soon enough, I discarded him. I stopped caring. I stopped comforting. I stopped trying. I didn’t give him the sleeping pill every night. I didn’t wake up to his shriek every day. I heard it but I didn’t get up. I just didn’t. What difference would it make anyways? What would it change? If he doesn’t care about his life, then why the hell should I?

And one day, I came home from work and found it: the letter. I call it a letter when it was one sentence really: "I just can’t live with myself". That’s it! No explanations! Not even an apology! Coward!

I learned my lesson. I made sure I didn’t make the same mistake again. This time around, I chose a guy who exuded masculinity. He oozed virility. You could smell it a mile away. You could see his muscles from a blinding distance. I loved it when he walked into the room and all eyes turned to him. Women and men. Women coveted. Men envied. And I boasted. I was very proud I had done so well. I spared no opportunity to show him off. I reveled in his valiant anecdotes. I had no fear. No anxieties. No worries. Why would I when he was by my side? Who could dare hurt me? I was untouchable! Who could even think about harming me when he was there to protect me? The happiest moments of my life were when hustlers would roam around me and then he would approach, and in a matter of seconds, the mob would disperse just at the sight of him. I loved it when he wrapped his strong arms around me. I felt safe when I lay my head on his husky chest. I went to sleep listening to his encounters with prime suspects. I was proud of how he forced them to confess to their crimes.

Until one day, he bragged about how he got his own back from a guy who lived next door to him. An idiot who thought he could outbid him for an antique diamond-studded watch that belonged to a deceased monarch. He boasted how he arrested him, threw him in jail for just a few hours, the memory of which would last his whole life. He laughed as he graphically detailed how he and his fellow officers watched while the lieutenant gave it to him sideways, and up and down, and all around. His face lit up when he recounted how they, with an office boy mounting him, made him answer to women’s names and threw a scarf around his face and snapped pictures of him with his own cell phone and sent them to all those registered in his phonebook. "Now THAT was fun! But in his defense, the guy took it like a man. He didn’t even put up a fight for it. You should have seen the look on his face: a mixture of horror, resignation, and shame. He did not even let out a scream. You should have seen him groveling when we told him we would pay his wife a visit if he didn’t comply. Too bad her number wasn’t on his cell. I would have loved to send her his picture underneath our boy!" he reveled. "Come to think of it, that watch looked a lot like the one you’re wearing. Where did you get it, by the way?" …………….