Dear Doctor,
It’s been a little over two months since I last sent you a letter, but I realized you would want to know when my formidable plan that I have put into action since January 2019 has finally been accomplished. Yes doctor, it took a while but I made it. I know you’re not surprised but probably wondering how did I manage to turn the tables around in the last two months, or should we say.. in matter of a month. So, shall we begin?
There is this story that I haven’t told anyone about, probably because it was the only thing I wanted to leave for myself and not get used by it. The story goes back 6 years into the past, to a place that’s 5000 miles away, to Fayetteville, a small city in northwest Arkansas. Me and my mother had spent a week there with my uncle and his family when it was the time for us to go back to my sister in Milwaukee where we spent the summer that year. As my uncle’s car was steering towards the airport, I had been in my mind cloud thinking of a way to get back to this place, or -if the odds were by my side- to find a reason to stay. As you see, that week was the best week I had lived in my life back then and for a 17 years old teenager I wasn’t ready to just let such an experience go. My uncle noticed that I wasn’t focusing with whatever he was discussing with my mother so he told me a very simple proverb which has changed my life forever, a proverb which I didn’t want to believe and decided to challenge, a proverb that took me exactly 6 years to finally and full-heartedly fathom: “All the good things must come to an end.”
You do know that we humans are known for lying. No matter how truthful and sinless a human can get, everybody lies. What differs us is how good we are at lying. Here’s my theory on liars: On one hand the worst liars are the ones who believe their own lies. On the other, the best liars are the ones who turn their lies into reality. I know you’re struggling to find the difference between them so I’ll explain. Simply believing in a lie means that you won’t go any distance or do any effort to prove it, you know that the person in front of you doesn’t believe you but you still choose to lie and keep on trying to invalidate anyone who tries to talk any sense into you. What about turning the lie into reality? Well it’s actually simpler than you think, but you have to manipulate your own heart and mind upon the lie, you rebuild your own life around it and you make everyone see that it’s the truth. I’d like to call it the temporary truth. That’s why in my last letter I told you that some promises have to be renewed, because no matter how big and deceiving a lie can get, it will always be a lie and you definitely can’t renew your promises based on it. I believe that by now you have understood my last two letters to you. This lie that I manipulated my heart and mind onto is my greatest masterpiece and the last part of the formidable plan. To be a fair, the lie was in fact a dead truth that I buried long ago and had to revive when everything seemed desperate, when I screamed into the void of the ICU room on the 22nd of September 2019 like the world has thrown me into rock bottom, not to mention that I’ve already been struggling to find the reason that kept me alive and going throughout last year. And the lie was simply to relive the past one last time. As a wise book once mentioned: “When in doubt, I find retracing my steps a good place to start.”
Proceeding from that plan; when someone manipulates himself upon a lie, how can he come out of it? What does it take of him to find the truth? To answer these questions, we have to think beyond our own lives, beyond our own century even. You know the story of how the ottomans conquered Constantinople, right? Well, only a part of it is crucial to our story here. When Mohammed Fatih became the Sultan, his reign was at risk from his father’s old council. So, he had to find a way to prove his worth and despite that he could have settled for any other city than Constantinople and save himself all the trouble, he wanted to make sure that his power would never get questioned again. And the reason why he won was not because he had a stronger army than any other commander that tried to conquer the city before him, but because he didn’t abide by anything other than Victory or Death. Due to that he came up with one of the greatest plans to conquer a city the humanity has ever seen in spite of its craziness and impossibility. Fatih proved to the world that the impossible only exists when one stops trying.
Fast forwarding 500 years into the future, on the night of 20th of December 2019, I took a sip of my tea as I was looking at my hospital bed and beyond the hospital window which only glanced upon some big oak trees and sometimes -if lucky on a clear day- the winter’s sunrise, I couldn’t take out my friends warnings of how senseless and toxic my decision was and how it would put every step I made throughout last year at risk, but I was not going to run anymore, it was either I get my biggest closure or keep settling for those minor achievements. And as the Sultan broke down the fierce walls of Constantinople and built a city that is still standing until this very day, I faced the remnants of a star’s nebula, which beyond it lyed the truth that set me free and revealed to me that all that I’ve been through was nothing but a star’s ghost.
Dear Doctor, it’s odd how I was planning to visit my sister in Milwaukee and then my uncle in Fayetteville by September this year and how all these plans had to be indefinitely postponed, it’s even more odd how I hated this year for it, yet, all these turns made sense in the end. My uncle was right, doctor, all the good things have an expiring date in order to make place for better things, until you reach the perfect ones, the ones that will make you fight the whole world, face your greatest fears, go beyond your limits, unleash your wildest ideas and rage your soul for it. It’s the 15th of June 2014, our plane has landed in Chicago and we were waiting on our next plane to Milwaukee. As I was sipping on my Starbucks Cappuccino I gazed at the planes outside and wondered how my life will be like the next time I visit Fayetteville, in what shape will I be and with who will I come. And as the cycle of those six years has come to an end, I can finally say, that I’ve finally proved my worth, I’ve finally broke free from all the lies and I’ve finally earned the perfect things I’ve been searching for since the last glance I’ve had on Fayetteville. And simultaneously, from Chicago O’Hare airport and from the 13th floor of a student residence in Braunschweig, 17 years old teenager me and 23 years old me repeated the magic words: “All the good things must come to an end.”
From The City Of Lions, with grace
Your Patient, Abdel Rahman Abu Baker
June 24, 2020
