"Tell me, Sami, what is your dream?"
Mr. Saleh, the head of the mail department at the city office, asked me about my dream and my vision for my future out of the blue, just like that. For ten years he had made a habit of asking sudden questions, quite casually. And on that particular day, when he ambushed me with this question in a calm tone, his face puzzled by my frozen bewilderment, I was clearing the last of what remained of me from my desk, to say goodbye to the place that had witnessed my stumbling and my finding my footing while I clung to a person who was still alive.
Now, when I call that day to mind, what strikes me as strange is that I cannot remember this question being put to me even once at the earlier stations of my life: not when I applied for my first job at the electronic watch shop at the age of seventeen, but when I left it for my second job, the one closer to home; not when I began university, but when I withdrew from it and moved to another city, where my older brother lives with his family, to save on rent; not when I took my mother out of the care home and we moved together to the village, far from the heart of the city, but when she passed away and I had to return, where job opportunities are noisier and more haphazard, where every creature with two legs and two hands is wanted for the work.
For those who lived through the same stations alongside me, those were endings; for me, they were nothing more than procedural steps toward a task that had to be done. I wonder: why do people connect endings with dreams? Will a person always find a dream to justify abandoning what he could think of no better course than to abandon? As if an individual would never face anything compelling him to leave his job except a bigger dream, would never be forced to withdraw from school except because he had come up with an entrepreneurial project, and would never find a reason to leave home except the experience of a new life somewhere else. We live different lives within a single life, and every day we still marvel at other people's paths. And I say this, how I wish I understood what I am saying... I do not like it when someone corners me in the corners of dream, desire, and future, yet I have never stopped imitating the man who is absorbed in other people's lives.
The truth is that a dream was never present in anything I lived through. Responsibilities alone, driven by fate and divine will, drew the paths of my life. It was not that I lacked imagination and ambition, or was unable to picture what I wanted, but those were stations of greater weight, greater danger, and greater sensitivity than to be thought about from the standpoint of the emotion of dreams, the enthusiasm of desires, and the aspirations of youth.
And now, having settled into a permanent job in the capital, having acquired a cheerful home in a pleasant neighborhood, having built warm relationships with my brother's children, and having tightened the bonds with my relatives, I believe I have arrived at the place for the sake of which people have dreams and ambitions. So perhaps not having either of them, or not having the luxury of stumbling and searching for them in my youth, was not as catastrophic as all that.
But sometimes I wonder: what could I have done, I ask myself? What future would I have dreamed of, had I dreamed? And what goal would I have pursued, had I had the option of pursuing something beyond the necessities of life?
Ever since I became aware of myself, living with dignity and honor has been what I work for; I carry work on my shoulders to spare my loved ones want, so that nothing defeats me except the Creator's will, and nothing empowers me except His help. Even so, I wonder: what kind of dreamer would I have been?
The emptiness around me is like an insulating bubble inside which I cannot even hear my own voice. Sometimes a person imagines he feels empty because he does not know what he wants, and so he undertakes a journey of self-discovery, the journey that the heroes of films and dramas take, which ends with them finding true love, or solid friendship, or the outlet they had been seeking from the start. Then he discovers that he cannot hear himself because he is drowning in emptiness. That emptiness between his body, which toils and works, and his soul, which contemplates and senses, cuts off his connection to his hidden desires.
And the feeling that I must achieve something, while not knowing what I must achieve, is worse than all of this. If these desires whose fulfillment haunts me were among life's necessities, I would not have to go to the trouble of searching for them and tracking them down, because I would not be able to live without them, like all human beings. But when desires are personal and touch something within myself, then I realize how helpless and weak I am at reading my own truth.
I remember Walid, my nephew, the youngest of his siblings, staying over at my place for the weekend after a long fight with his parents, because they know very well that the reason he insists on sleeping at my house is to stay up late and eat sweets between meals or before lunch.
One of the nights of his stay, after winning the battle of nagging and insistence, he sat in my lap and began looking through photographs of my mother in her youth with me. When we reached one photo in which my mother was giving a presentation in a lecture hall, he said innocently:
"What was Grandma's dream, Uncle?"
As if I knew... How would I know?
My mother and I never once talked about our dreams, because we were busy with everything that had to be done. And I know what she sacrificed for me and my brother, just as I never saw any point in talking about something we could not do, and could not sacrifice for after we had chosen to sacrifice it.
To be able to care for my mother, I gave up much of what I do not even dare to call a dream. Likewise, I do not think my mother would have felt confident enough to ever tell me about her dreams.
And what made me burst out laughing was that this little boy sitting in my lap, whose childhood scent I could smell in his black hair, was not Mr. Saleh, and that this living room was not the office; I could not say goodbye to him, and I could not resign from him.
And what saddened me was that when my mother was alive, no one asked her about her dreams or the future she looked forward to. The question I always carried to her was whether she had taken her medicine, or whether she was all right. That, simply, was what I asked her: only how she was, to be reassured that she was well.
I had always postponed the subject of the dream until the right moment, so much so that I regarded thinking about it as something sacred that I would do once I was done with my responsibilities. But perhaps waiting for the right moment took more than ten years, and perhaps now I think and say to myself: Sami, which dream are you talking about now, at thirty?
I do not know who planted this idea in my mind, but why do I find myself, every time, believing that dreams ought to be revealing of one's destiny, dazzling, glittering, by standards that win everyone's admiration, at a single point, like climbing to the moon! I believe this, and then my belief leads me to hesitate and put off acting on the dream, because, most likely, the distance between the years of postponement and the ripening of the dream was enormous, and the dream was tiny compared with all that waiting and long caution.
That night was a kind of awakening; not an awakening of positive change, but an awakening to that emptiness I spoke of earlier. The credit goes to Walid, to his mother who gave in to his insistence, and to my brother who pretended to object to his son's habit of staying up late and sleeping away from home so that his wife would not get angry about their disagreement over household rules, when in fact he does not care as long as Walid is at my place.
I remember that I went out the next morning as usual, but I got out of bed without waking from sleep. I took Walid to school and left for my new job at the newspaper house. And as I walked down the street among the passersby, swaying right and left to avoid bumping my shoulder into all of humanity, my thoughts were thrashing against one another.
Dream... dream... dream... future and dream... dream and future.
That was all that occupied my mind, and I did not like it; I resented the crowding of my thoughts with these intruding ideas, in place of my thinking about work, taxes, and the weather. These three are the pillars that keep me alive: something I must live in order to do, something I must work in order to achieve, and something that is not in my hands to fix alone, yet thinking about it is a pleasure for a lonely person. It is enough for a person to find something to occupy him, something to talk about, and something that makes him feel part of something bigger than himself; then he can stay alive within this circle, even if the emptiness remains inside him.
What about you? What future do you dream of?
"Future?"
"Yes, any tomorrow... the future is simply the unknown... What do you want to do in the distant time ahead?"
"I want to eat sweets, and go to the park, and stay up late, and also skip math class! Uncle, don't tell Mama this. And, right, not in the distant time, but every day. I want to start doing this from today!"
When I asked him about the future he dreams of, he answered me with what he wants to do. And I kept walking and thinking about Walid's answer, and with every step I took, moving away from the features of the city I had known and closer to the unknown, I found myself nearer to understanding.
If my future can be an embodiment of my desires, then that is what I want it to be, and I want nothing more from it than that.
I want to have ample time for sadness, for anger, and for happiness. To have time to refine my thrashing thoughts, and not to silence them when I open the office door, so that they can go back to thrashing when I retire to bed.
I want to be able to sneak out at night with Walid and eat sweets, and to pick him up from school to play in the park. I want to be able to lie on the grass, gaze at the blue of the sky, and chat with friends.
I want to travel and roam the world, and to visit the city where my mother grew up. I want to eat pizza tomorrow, and I want to keep my job at the newspaper, and I want to resume my university studies.
For the first time, I walked into my office happy, aware that what I have in my hands today, although I did not deliberately seek it, and did not seek any particular part of it so much as its benefits, is something I want with everything I have.
I want to live.
I do not want to reach the moon.
