Sentence
He lived as if he had been entered into a record before he even came into existence, with everything that he did being nothing more than an effort to convince someone’s penmanship.
To start with, it was a girl. However, referring to her as “a girl” felt like a blind reduction of an intricate system to a single equation that is easy to grasp. She was rather a fixed object that existed in his mind.
At first nothing decisive happened. It was not possible to indicate a particular moment of refusal. There was only an imbalance. One side was striving ahead while the other one remained stable. Nevertheless, in this imbalance he created a world. The thoughts that ran through his head became cliche as he kept repeating them all the time.
“If I become better, she will notice me,” he thought. “If I suffer enough, things will become meaningful.” “If I wait long enough, the outcome will change.”
He was unaware when he transformed love from a feeling into a repetition he had to go through. The process was similar to a machine performing cycles without a pause.
Think — remember — expect — fail — continue doing it again.
What’s odd is not that she stopped loving him but rather how life made him think that the circle can be broken one day.
Time flew but in a peculiar manner. It was not linear anymore, just like a long line of identical doors.
He departed from places. He altered surroundings. He attempted to return himself to a semblance of normalcy through discipline, faith, solitude, diversions, effort, and quiet. But each image of himself contained the same invisible thing within it — an incomplete statement pertaining to her existence.
Occasionally he convinced himself that he had omitted thought about it from his life, but it only went silent.
“Even when I forget about her,” he figured out, “the void still thinks instead of me.”
At one point he began to think that pain itself was the proof of the very existence of truth.
Thus, slowly and without notice, his life changed according to that principle.
He stopped questioning himself about happiness. Instead, he started pondering about authorization to move on in his life.
Then happened an event which apparently didn’t mean the end of anything. It was simply a piece of news: she got married.
No sign of something disastrous. No consequences either. Just a piece of information that can’t make any change in the situation.
And yet his mind perceived it as something violating written rules.
“If she is no longer present,” he thought, “then why am I still practicing my old habits?”
But he knew that the answer would not be given to him. What he experienced was just a process of going on with life.
He started to notice something worse than pain: endless repetition of similar ideas, only presented in different ways. The same memories come back to him as if they were new.
He tried to assign a meaning to these feelings through faith. He wanted to place God into the structure of his confusion, however, it didn’t work out. He prayed not like someone in distress, but like someone who is trying to find out where to look for missing elements from a manual.
Get nizar’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
In this framework, where do you belong? Who thought up the desire for outliving what’s real? What is it that gives attachment life without physically being there?
In the case of the silence, no response is found in the absence of God, but in the absence of an explanation.
One time he thought, “Even my prayers seem to be heard, but they are not understood.”
Then he started to understand that something much worse was going on, not that he was unloved, but that there was no fair distribution of love, and nobody informed him of the rules in this game.
He didn’t avoid marriage out of peace but out of devotion to a memory that was no longer in line with actuality, as if making another choice would mean that he somehow wasted the suffering he had already gone through.
He thought, “What if I start loving someone else?”
He could not provide an answer because of the assumption that the question raised that somewhere, at some point, the process were fair.
Years were piling up as dust on unread papers and he became a person acting externally but still being uncertain internally. Everything happened he talked, he made obligations, he continued many days but nothing was resolved.
Sometimes he thought about the existence of another him who had never met her, and this character appeared to him as a person whose life was extremely easy but completely unreal, as if it was a draft of some life that was never published.
The most frightening thing was not their sadness any longer, the most frightening part was the normality.
He woke up in the morning realizing he felt not an onset of pain but its continuation. It was as if everything was getting back to normal after a pause.
God does not exist anymore as a question of faith but rather a matter of location not whether He exists but where He is in this assemblage which answers nothing clearly.
And life kept going its quiet way.
Couples got married. People moved on.
Except for doing this. He was neither in nor out of this emphasis — just being.
There was no conclusive verdict.
Just the process going on.
He ultimately couldn’t help but comprehend the saddest realization he had ever encountered: nobody would issue an explanation. Kafka is not somebody who makes grand statements; he writes about inevitability, the feeling of estrangement, and the conflict that a person experiences. He eschewed romantic phrases in favor of the impression of inexorability and unnecessary pain.
It is strange to discover that regardless of which way Hechoose to go in life; every single way leads to the same place. He want to find a different ending, another existence, different feelings but all his attempts are in vain.
He has never felt tempted by Heaven nor by the warnings of Hell. He view them as remote bureaucracies where foreigners dictate how He should be punished, although they are completely unaware of who He is. Regardless of the sentence they might hand down to him, it does not change the fact that He has already issued his judgment.
Even if He inherited poverty and disgrace from his lucky predecessors, and nothing but the flavour of that infamous disgrace were all that greeted him in the streets, it seems to him that He would still carry her with him because He would remain true to her.
Even if her hands were the cause of his destruction, He would still gaze at them with the same familiarity as someone staring out a rainy window. This is not because suffering is good, but rather that there are some truths that simply cannot be escaped.
What He think terrifies him the most, however, is that, even though He was the one to pick her, the choice had, in fact, already been made long before He knew what it truly meant.
