Short story - Last seconds before dying

Last seconds before dying.

I felt the time within the walls of boredom was about to end. I knew I was out of place: the sand in the hourglass of my heart was shouting at me, obliging me to leave. The alarm on my cabinet went off. It was as if every little piece of my existence had decided it was time to take a change.

27 October 1989, 08:18 am.

I was just about to fall asleep after a never-ending night. The club’s music was still driving me crazy and there I was, once again time for me to go to uni. I had a coffee, a cold one left on the kitchen table from the previous evening: I was too tired to care, but sipping it slowly, I felt its sourness more than ever.

            For a second, my mind drifted far away from my attic in London. It span round a world globe that my imagination had just re-created: and in that precise moment I felt the working hands of a foreign exotic country pick that coffee. I felt it all in my throat; to this awkward thought I cleared it briefly with a cough and put the ambiguous feeling aside.

            The University Bar, once again, like every morning, was filled with tired talents-to-become and I was probably one of them. It had been the same every 7:30 am from too many years now.

            These were my thoughts that morning, the morning of that very day that changed my life. I attended my journalism course at the university as usual when an announcement awoke me from my far-away daydream. ‘An offer for an expedition in Saudi Arabia to write an eye-witness experience report’. In that moment the hourglass’s scream became deafening and finally clear, this was the opportunity to run away from that rotten world constructed on individual interests. This was the opportunity to start living: I applied without revising my decision once.

           

            And this is why I got here. In this place, life cannot be defined so, the situation is nothing close to fitting that word. The sun burns your soul, as has happened to every individual I got to know probably. The sand which I now feel scared about having beneath my feet, has absorbed all the possible love humans in this place had. I am not being cynic and I am not a coward, I want to emphasize and convince myself thoroughly that I do not regret my decision. I am not a hypocrite, because this might be hell, but at least it’s real and I have finally found a way to feel alive.

            I still keep my booklet and annotate what I see forcing myself to maintain the ridiculous point of view the journalists back in the fake world would have: I fail to do so. I can flick through my thoughts in these pages and notice how I have changed, how distant and unrecognisable my student figure seems to be. I can understand this, two years of non-stop LIFE have awoken my real ego inviting me to burn my aeroplane ticket back: I have done so.

            My personality change mirrors my new ID card. I have made others  believe a troupe of terrorists kidnapped and killed me through a video I was helped creating. I would have never imagined people could be able of dealing so professionally with technology out here, and in spite of the pain I must have caused my relatives and whoever loved me, with the news of my death, I am totally in peace with myself. This is exactly why I am in contrast with the scene happening around me: war, real war.

            However, every time this thought comes back to me, I justify myself saying I am a different person now and I tell myself it was the only decision I could have taken. I like believing this, it contributes to maintaining my peace.

Mohammed Sceab enrolled in the Saudi Arabian army on the 8^th September 1991.

‘أقسم أنني سيدافع عن المملكه العربية السعودية والحب دورته الارض ، فالله قد علمني الى

'I swear I will fight for Saudi Arabia and love its earth as God has taught me to do’

I still remember vividly those words sworn to the deep pure eyes of my captain; those eyes which taught me to love this nation: which is now my homeland. I love its earth as it stores the love which the people have been deprived of, and I love the breasts and the womb of the woman who fights to keep her love from the earth to give me it. Jasmia, the strongest and most beautiful woman I will ever know.

I have killed numerous times; only men, never women or children as they still have love in their souls. I imagine how much disgust people from my own actual country might feel for me, and I feel even more disgust towards them: towards those who’d write reports upon the soldiers of Saudi Arabia who are trained to kill. I hated how that world works, I hate the way people’s emotions are dealt with to make money, I hate how everything is planned but nothing is really thought about.

This is exactly why this time, against men from my own country I could feel the rage. I heard and felt them march on my country’s sand; they’d come too close into our paradise bringing their filthy world’s principles: I had to stop those devils take control of the hell and paradise which made up my world now. I fought my soul for the sand beneath my feet , for the sky and sun above my head and for Jasmia in my heart.

I will never know how the war ended. I will never know if I have succeeded helping prevent the deterioration of the country which has taught me the real meaning of ‘LIFE’. I will never know how the baby inside Jasmia would have looked. I tried to imagine how love’s smile might have been to try and picture my future son better. I smiled back at the image of him I had pictured in my mind, as I lay with the last crumbs of life drifting slowly out of me into the innocent breeze caressing my face. That breeze was thanking me, the breeze of a foreign country which had become my own.

I kissed it and tasted Jasmia’s lips.

I’d died, or rather I was dying, for that country and as I was gradually leaving this world, I was bringing with me a bit of hate, of destruction. I was loving the pain, it made me feel alive, if that makes sense…

 I was dying for a country which you ought to die for, unlike my opponents’ (which had once been my own) and I was proud. Proud to be able of saying, of screaming : ‘ I am dying but I have LIVED’.

Proud to die watching the only pure sky left in this world.