The Retold Story of Y

I don't know if any of you remembers the story of Y. Six months have passed since Y set foot on american soil and covered his back with the rugged and dark cloak of loneliness and exile.

When he first came, he wanted nothing of America but the science and the skill, nothing of its dull and soulless life but the hand that kept pulling him and his memory back to his shaky balcony, the dried up tree behind his half-century old house and the brown humid sand of his childhood playground.

Yesterday, he was back in Nashville after spending ten days in a tormented, grief-stricken land. And for the first time in his life, the sacrilegious thought of living and working in America found itself a small nest in a dark corner of his mind.

"The air was thick with despair, Fouad. People have lost hope. Lebanon is in deep deep mourning. It was different when I left for the first time. My mother had me swear on the holy book that I would immediately come back after a year and a half. This time, she told me to stay in the states if I thought it would guarantee me a better career. That's my mother, who would do anything to have me by her side. I just don't know what to think or how to feel ya Fouad. I do love Lebanon. I will still love Lebanon in spite of everything a thousand times more than anywhere else in the world. But after what I've seen, it might just be better for me not to go back. At least for now."

I wanted to tell Y to stop the nonsense, to stick to his guns, the ones he held when he first unearthed the map to the new world, when he saw the sad truth behind the hollow and utterly meaningless american dream, when he fell more in love with his country than he ever did taking a huge leep away from its borders and its soil.

I wanted to. But I couldn't. In front of me was a man in love with a grain of sand, a cup of dark coffee, a strong handshake, a proud villager on a mountaintop, a thousand year old cedar, an off-shore fotress, and thousands of years of running after a dream that keeps slipping away, and away and away, just like it's supposed to. In front of me was a man in love, painfully opening his eyes to reality.

I could not tell him to close back his eyes only because I refuse to open mine. It would not be fair to drag him down a path of almost inevitable defeat.

Still, on the far-thrown path to my lebanese dream, the same dream Y is probably going to let go of, I choose to follow and abide. Because without it I won't be who I truly am, and to that, I might as well stick a knife in my chest and disappear.