To the 15 soldiers who died because of our monumental levels of neglection and corruption [If I hear Extreme Heat again I will literally explode myself].
Rest In Peace. May God have better mercy on you than your own country men.
Update:
An explosion in a Liquid Gas Containers Warehouse in Raqqa leaves many wounded, this time due to electricity blackouts.
He writes with ink, he uses white paper with many small watermarks splattered all over it, and writes with ink. The ink takes a long time to dry, absorbed by the wet paper, it feels more vivid with time. Some of these papers have been lying here for years, some of them might still need many more years before you can read them.
I picked up one of them and started going through the smudgy lines.
…He would lie there next to her, for hours, watching the subtle movement of those lines on her back, as she breathes ever slowly on her way to sleep.
His fingers used to caress her skin, drawing lines slowly through the sweat. His fingers never felt more confident than when they’re touching her back. Listening to the faint sounds of their hearts and breaths, breathing in all the odors in the room and going through the delicate details of her curves takes him to one of the many fairytale worlds they’d laughed so much about. Her dark, sun colored skin never fails to make his heart stop beating, for many hours, waiting for this body to speak, to tell a story of a world. He imagines how history took place between the small curves of her body. Right above her neck where her hair grows ever so soft, that is where Egyptians fought the Hittites in Kadesh. There, where a little drop of sweat was making its way down to her belly, was probably where Achilles had his last battle. Peace and war, love, life and death, revolutions, all couldn’t have taken place no place else other than her beautiful skin… The lines of her back form a different world from that we know. They tell Homer’s Iliad and Neruda’s Saddest Poem with few subtle moves, they explode with colors and words that he doubts anyone will be able to put into paintings or poems.
The ink-smudged papers fill the whole place around me, on the walls, over the television. Some were ripped apart but u can still see the ink seeping through them.
I try to make my way out, stepping on as few as I can. When I close the door behind me, I wonder, whether I might ever find my way back there again, and maybe, just maybe, write some of my own.
Who can imagine what goes through their minds as they lie there, while the whole world goes bustling around them behind these walls…
Alex from Creative Syria, has launched this month’s topic for his blogger forum,
If you had the choice what would you change in Syria?
This was my own addition to the debate… [Read the whole article here...]
To define what kind of change is needed in a country like Syria is not an easy mission, and most definitely it is not one without controversy.
I would say, among all the fundamental issues that our country (Syria, in the tightest geographical sense that is) is suffering from at the moment, whether it is a failing economy, a rising sense of consumerism, the issues of democracy and human rights and the constant retreat of secularism against conservatism, among many. The disintegration of our sense of Identity strikes me as the most alarming. (The space is too limited to go into the clear signs of this disintegration.)
Everybody perceives his own identity in a completely different manner. And even within a collective identity, there will always be not-so-subtle differences within every other person, whether it’s his choice of religion, ideology or even his choice of music. That being said, for a country, a society to function at its full potential there has got to be a sense of belonging, a collective choice of belonging, that is.
In essence, the kind of change that is needed is one that brings up that topic to the debate. In very few words, one that allows us to do some soul searching.
With all due respect to the lord. It would’ve taken me more time to create this world, but I would’ve definitely done a much better job.
