I don’t remember when I started writing. My first ever journal was a palm-sized (at the time, it was probably closer to the length of my forearm) Hello Kitty notebook you tied up with a silk ribbon, and it only held illegible scribbles I can only assume were my 5-year-old self’s attempt at abstract artistic expression. I was always talkative, though, so I think it started there.
In primary English class, we were given these small black-and-white illustrations of everyday scenes (kids in a park, etc.) and asked to describe them. I remember being fascinated by them, and revelling in my little weekly window for creativity. So for the longest time, I thought I liked to write because I liked to observe, and describe, things I couldn’t quite talk about. Things that weren’t really there. Things that existed in the awkward little space between people.
But my first real journal says otherwise. This one, a Strawberry Shortcake notebook I once saw as sacred, was for recording. I recorded the first time I met my favourite fish in the fish tank in the ahwa my dad took us to when my mum was at work, and worked up a little diagram of her for good measure. I tried constantly to record everything: days at the mall with my grandmother, first nights of Ramadan when my dad didn’t come home, car rides I spent looking out the window. I wrote these things down because I didn’t want to forget.
I grew up a little more and found out that my childhood wasn’t as kind and welcoming as I wanted it to be (although at the time, I didn’t really know that). I forgot everything then I got sad about forgetting and I vowed to write then I forgot to write and so on and so forth. Some events, ones I was punished for experiencing, were particularly important to record. Just remembering was my own little act of resistance. So I decided when I was maybe 12 that I would write everything because I didn’t think I could live any other way. And how was I, at the time eager to take the world in in its fullness, supposed to let anything go?
Today, I continue to write to remember. I write to remember Youssef. I write to remember my grandfather. I write to remember the love I have for my friends who are still alive and with whom I live what I think may be the best days of my life. I was visiting Youssef last week and I felt some of my memories with him start to fade in and out of my memory. The memories I was so used to stretching across my line of vision were at some point, folded to the side, and now came to me as pleasant surprises as I strolled the streets of Masr El Gedida. That’s not supposed to happen.
I know now that when people die, this is how you forget them. This is how you forget your memories with still-alive friends too; you just let them fade out of sight. But the difference is that the dead can’t remind you of the good times. It’s just your hippocampus working the wheel now.
When I started my ‘For Youssef’ entry, the goal was to keep Youssef alive through my memory of him. I didn’t want to do it all at once, the same way I try to sip on my tea for the longest possible time before it gets cold. I am afraid that if I write everything down, I will let it all go and lose him. But now, as I struggle with my own memory, I’m realising it’s time I write again.
I’m also learning you can lose friends in more ways than one. Your friends could die. Your friends could get abducted from their homes in the middle of the night. It’s no use comparing the two pains, but the latter seems to be trickier to wrap my head around. Maybe I’m just new to it. My friend told me I’m “the best at grief”.
The grief from knowing your friends are scared and hurt and helpless is more hesitant. It’s like it’s almost a bad omen if I let myself be sad. They will get out, and then this sadness will be stupid. They have to get out. But the pain is there, and it is like a sharp object poking your chest and it doesn’t really let you breathe properly. I feel bad for doing things not out of guilt, but out of grieving over the fact that they’re not going to get to do that too. If being absolved of this pain means being absolved of the belief that they have the right to be doing that (that being something as tedious and unexciting as sitting through your final exams), then I’d sooner be buried in my pain than let go of the hope.
Saving my memories for a rainy day doesn’t work. What I don’t write down will eventually be forgotten, if not by me then with me when eventually my time comes. I can’t let Youssef be forgotten. I can’t let Abdallah be forgotten. I can’t let how it feels to forget be forgotten. This pain is new so I don’t know how to write about it yet, but I do know I have to write. Let this once again be my own little act of resistance.