A man of losses

These zombies in the park they’re looking for my heart. A dark world aches for a splash of the sun.
If I could find a way to see this straight, I’d run away to some fortune that I should have found by now. 
I’m waiting for this cough syrup to come down.

Young The Giant – Cough Syrup 

I am a man of loses, and for that, I can’t trust fate anymore with happiness. Everything that I ever loved something so much, that my heart would burst with flashes of joy that will cover the world around me; I tend to know that I’m at loss. That time may come when I’m losing this very thing that is making my existence matter. For that, I try my best to avoid loving completely: I had two long relationships and two short ones without really loving the person I’m with to the extend of happiness. That fearful feeling that I’m going to give my all to someone has been long lost in my mind; years passed and I did not really completely loved someone to the extend they might have loved me.

Mistake me not, I did love both my Egyptian boyfriend of two years and my Italian boyfriend of three years; however, the more comfortable I was in the relationship; especially with the Italian, the more fearful I feel about loving him; the more I feel that I might lose him in a sad twist of fate that God has planned so perfectly to break the remains of my already shattered heart. I remember sitting there, in a hotel room in the middle of the Egyptian revolution; and while people are demanding freedom from a dictator, my Italian boyfriend was demanding freedom from the ghost of our relationship; here comes the day, a month or two before that, when he arrived on an early afternoon from Yemen, or Libya, or Jordan, or wherever the hell he keeps travelling to for work; to find me sitting there on the bed; fully dressed and with my stuff gone from our bedroom. He wanted, that night in the hotel room, answers to why! Why did I leave him? Why did I have to cut short a seemingly perfect relationship between two men from different worlds that came together as one; then suddenly were shredded apart.

In our breakup day, I think I told him the usual cliches of “It’s not you, it’s me,” and “let’s try to be friends.” I might even have held him near, as his surprised face break a bit by bit into tears, and asked him that we might, after couple of years, decide to go back together. However, deep inside I wasn’t sure about anything anymore.

In that hotel room, I told him stories of my mother; how I had to abandon her to her sickness under pressure by her family; how I had to let go of every memory I had with her; how the feeling of loss made me incapable of loving someone completely. I never told him that the most horrible thing he ever screamed at me, in the middle of a fight, is what lead to our doom. A chain of events started when he screamed at my face that his friends are asking him how come he, in his mighty glory, can put up with someone like me. “Why are you dating him, they ask me,” he told me, months before our upcoming breakup, and while I was hurt to an extend I did not know how to react; the question did make sense to me later on; as I was laying in my bed at night; in the days when he was travelling; and asking myself; why indeed? Why would someone like Ray date someone like me? incapable of loving, a snub, yet over attentive, a person with so many sad backstories that he is broken beyond repair?

I discovered; the day before he returned from his travel to God-knows-where, that I wasn’t giving that relationship the best of me; simply because I didn’t have it. I did not have the best of me simply because it was taken away from me; over the span of years and years.

I remember asking Eyad not to leave that morning, I told him, so softly, that it’s raining outside, that I’m not feeling good about his trip; I told him to stay with me in bed; and promised him to order chocolate cakes and watch hours of Friends. He left, never to come back, and whenever I pass by that road that he had that car accident on over 9 years ago; I feel the rush of pain going through my veins; the pain that my boyfriend, my lover, my partner in crime, my mother’s best friend, my everything, was dead; sitting there on a table among friends in collage, 9 years ago, the news shocked me; I thought that everyone around me was joking; I thought that they are being nasty; and I threaten never to talk to any of my friends; gathered around the table silently, if they are prancing me with some lame ass joke.

I remember how my mother placed me on that plane and told me to go; to leave and never look back; her brother, standing next to her, was squeezing her shoulder as I was looking back at her; freshly shaved after months of staying home crying over a dead boyfriend and hugging every shirt I find of him for hours. Destroying painting her painted of us in bed; crashing frames with pictures of us that I shall never find again. For three years, I won’t see my mother again, I won’t even talk to her on the phone, mad at her for burning all the memories I had with Eyad, forced to stay away by her family who refused to allow me as part of them; being the homosexual son of a Muslim man.

The day she died; I was in Damascus and she was in Beirut; her sister called me to the office and told me about her death; noting that I shouldn’t go; that I should stay in Damascus. “We as a family feel that it won’t be appropriate if you were there in the funeral,” she says, and I’m not listening, “Let me know if you need anything.” she says, “I need my mother back, is that too much to ask?” I reply.

That night I sleep in my bed after hours of crying; I relax my body and mourn the losses I had; my shattered heart and my loneliness that I feel. Back in the hotel room, with Ray, he asks me why, and all I want to answer is with “I don’t know how to fix me. I just don’t know.” I still echoed that same statement the night my mother died.

Now, as I’m opening up to a new relationship, lasting seven months so far and carrying the hope of real fixation to my problems; I stand there in the middle of my living room; waiting for my boyfriend to rent from his job; wondering at every turn of the clock if he’ll make it safe and sound; and when he returns, and while he is falling asleep in my arms while watching the latest episode of “How I Met Your Mother”, I ask myself, will he still love me tomorrow? I believe that the love I have for my boyfriend now is unconditional and evergreen; but will fate leave him be to me? Would I be able to grow older with him? Would he stay in my arms every night? I’ll download him all the silly sitcoms he likes; and wash the dishes after every meal; I’ll tell him I love him a million time a day and I’ll protect him with my own life. Just, fate, please, keep me fixed; don’t break me again.