Every day I question myself, why I am here? Why I was here? My will to bear, my will to survive is not what it was some 6 dusty and consuming years ago. I am the oldest person of my age. I came here to better my life and that of my family. It has been so many years since I last saw them that they have become some distant shadows to me. They are some people who I use to know. They grew without me like the running water does to a stone laying in its way in a river. They touched me and moved on but I stayed believe me even today I am there, at my place. This was not my place, I deserved the journey too. The reality is that now they know a life without me. I am a distant part of their life. They tell you come here and you have to work like a machine and a day comes when you become a machine; all emotionless, only responding to particular set of commands, performing the sole objective of your creation with few moments of malfunctioning along the line but you return and the same chain starts again, nothing much and nothing less.
The reality of the matter is that you do not become a machine. You are not that big. The fact of the matter is that you are small as you are just a cog, just a replaceable cog, nothing much and nothing less.
When the surge of the emotions dies down and when I am my comparative usual self. I think about the life after my return can I survive their? Can I live their? All of them are no longer habitual of having me around. It is not like I am past or forgotten I am part of every family WhatsApp group, their favored Skype contact but now I am only this; not a part of any family group photo, not a part of their sorrows or merriment even our Eids are not on the same day. I feel all kind of emotions for them but alone here in my overcrowded and messy solitude.
It is not like that I do not have a life here or something like that. I know people who share my condition. Some of the days, I think why not all of us the “pardesis” of the world get unite like Marx wanted for his workers but instead of establishing some dictatorship we will build cities; cities full of people like us who feel the same way and share the same agony and pain. Until then my job is just to survive and living by all that which after all turned out as nothing. I hope that nothingness and futility of all this exercise does not turns me into a nothing. Believe me that life will be worse than this one; a life in which you are not even a shadow.
#CreativeWritingContest #2
