Where a Memory Might Take Us
When I was little, I loved looking at the clouds, trying to turn their shifting shapes into things I knew. That was my favorite game to play alone—a small, quiet challenge I secretly enjoyed.
I don’t know why this particular memory is rising to the surface now. What is it that makes some memories appear before us again so vividly, while others slowly disappear into the shadows, as if they had never existed at all?
I really don’t know.
But perhaps the past never truly dies.
What I do know is that I stopped playing that game. I don’t remember exactly when it happened. Maybe it was when I started looking ahead and found myself watching the people around me instead of the sky.
I began anticipating their reactions.
What are they thinking?
Do they dislike me, or do they simply not care?
Or perhaps I am just invisible to them.
At first, realizing that hurt.
But now, somehow, it gives me a strange kind of temporary comfort.
Still, I love watching people.
I like trying to read their minds, wondering what occupies their thoughts, what makes them smile, what makes them cry, and what truly makes them happy.
Sometimes, I feel deeply different from most people.
Or maybe my dreams have simply become a strange, discordant note in a piece of music that life plays so well—or perhaps so absurdly.
Who knows?
Some people want a comfortable, peaceful life.
Some want success in their careers, while others dream of marriage, children, and a thousand other things.
But how many people actually stop and ask themselves:
Why do I really want this?
Why this, and nothing else?
As for me, what I truly want is to leave this country.
To travel as far away as I possibly can.
But what is it, really, that makes me want to leave so badly?
Is it because I want to escape a place where I have always felt like a stranger?
To leave a homeland where I never truly felt safe?
To walk away from a sadness that slowly became my companion?
Or to leave a sea that is so close to me, yet I have only visited once or twice in my entire life?
By leaving, am I betraying a heart as gentle as my mother’s?
Can I really do it?
Or is this just running away in order to survive?
I want to be free.
Maybe that is the simplest answer.
But right now, I feel stuck.
I don’t even know where to begin.
It feels as though I have tied a blindfold around my own eyes and forgotten how to take it off.
My thoughts never seem to end.
I live in a storm of scattered thoughts where everything feels wrong and nothing feels right.
Every day, I feel as though I am losing something.
Am I losing myself while trying to find myself?
How many times have I heard:
"No one is coming to save you. Save yourself."
I think that is as true for me as the existence of death itself.
And yet, I still don’t know how.
I really don’t.
Is it embarrassing to admit that?
With every word I write, I feel as though I am becoming more exposed.
I don’t even know if that is a good thing.
Maybe I will regret some of these words later.
Maybe one day I will look back and think that I shouldn’t have written this, that I shouldn’t have published it.
But I write anyway.
Because at least while I am writing, I am honest with myself.
And perhaps honesty is not always a good thing.
Perhaps sometimes we need to deceive ourselves just a little to get by.
If you asked me what quality I hate most in a person, I would tell you without hesitation:
Mocking others.
How many times have I told people,
"I'm going to travel,"
only for them to mock me in their blatant, revealing way? They look at me as if I wasn’t created to do what I want, but rather what they want me to do.
I don’t blame them anymore.
But I still feel something poisonous running through my body when they do that.
And yet, I promise you, my dear Nour—
I promise the girl you wanted to become when you chose this name for yourself, instead of the name you were given.
The name you never truly felt you belonged to because you never chose it.
I promise you,
I will do it.
I will leave someday.
I will travel somewhere far away.
Somewhere I can finally lift my head again, look up, and just watch the clouds.
Nour, there is something so tender about the clouds appearing at both ends of this. As a little girl, you looked up at them before you learned to watch other people so closely, and now they’ve become part of the promise you’re making to yourself. I hope one day you read this again from somewhere far away, look up, and remember the girl who wrote it before she knew how she would get there. 🫶🥹
She stopped looking at clouds
when she started watching people.
One day she promised herself
she would find a place
where she could look up again.
— AËLA