A Shock I Met with Laughter

Yemeni mp

Ahmed Saif Hashed

“Haifa” was engaged to a classmate at the very height of my love for her at university. I hadn’t known about the engagement, but I happened to glimpse the ring on her finger. The shock struck me like lightning, splitting me in two, crushing my soul beneath the treads of a tank. My head shattered like glass hit by a boulder hurled from a mountain peak.

I felt that the ring on her finger tightened around my neck like a hangman’s noose. The earth, vast as it was, shrank to the size of a needle’s eye. A crushing disappointment strangled my dreams with an iron grip. My eyes reeled beneath the blow, the world dissolving into a blackness like death. The mountains themselves seemed to press upon my chest, choking the breath from my lungs. I felt that my very existence had dissolved, that the future of my love had been reduced to ashes. A despair swept over me like Noah’s flood. Regret seared me, limitless and boundless, a grief that stretched beyond the edges of the cosmos.

I remembered a proverb our lecturer, Dr. Ahmed Zain Aidarous, had often repeated in class, a sharp and biting saying about the shame of a man too timid to speak to his cousin. Another proverb came to mind, this time African: The man who circles a beautiful girl without declaring his intentions will one day fetch water for the guests at her wedding.

Despair seized me, and reality struck with a force I had never foreseen, though I should have, given my hesitation and passivity. What happened was, in truth, the natural outcome, the price of standing still, of waiting endlessly, of never choosing, never daring, never setting a time. The disappointment was immense, my failure in love complete and crushing.

My love for Haifa became a burden that crushed me. I could not free myself from it. It inhabited me, consumed me, until it became my whole being, my every detail. That great love, once a gift, had turned by its loss into a doubled calamity that shadowed me wherever I went.

I became a victim of my own love, trapped in its snare, unable to escape. I lived in a prison with no key, no rope, no ladder, no saving hand to lift me from the pit. Who could rescue me from this abyss?

The love that began as something exalted had become a tormentor, scourging both body and soul. An incurable affliction, how many years would it take to recover, if recovery were even possible? It loomed before me as vast as the impossible. I felt trapped in a suffocating exile, encircled on every side, besieged by grief upon grief, walls upon walls. My sorrow towered higher than I could bear, and what remained of me was too frail to carry the ruins of myself. Who could carry me, who could bear the weight of the grief I bore? I could no longer shoulder my own wreckage, nor gather the scattered fragments of myself from the dark abyss into which they had fallen.

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Yet despite my wreckage, my scattering, and my crushing grief, I gathered what remained of my will. The fire within me felt larger than any humiliation, more terrible than any defeat. I resolved to defy fate, even if defiance led me to a grim death. I longed to seek a woman unlike any other, to find love that would restore my lost pride, the pride I had once laid aside for love.

I wanted to reclaim my stolen existence, my trampled dignity. I wanted to seek out hope again, to wrestle it back from the jaws of despair that devoured me day by day. I resolved to search for a love greater than the one I had lost.

As I described to my friend, Obaid Saleh Al Shuaibi, the kind of woman I longed to find as a wife, the picture I painted seemed almost impossible, too rare to exist outside dreams. Yet he surprised me with his words, “I’ve found a girl who suits you, with exactly the qualities you seek.”

It felt like a miracle. His tone was so serious, so full of certainty, that I said to myself, What great fortune is about to come my way. A love that will transcend and scorn every failed love of my past. This will be a sweeping victory, unmatched in love or in war.

I nearly soared with joy. The world brightened before my eyes, after having grown dark and suffocating. I thought destiny was about to compensate me for all my suffering, with something better than what I had lost.

My friend Obaid, with those words, revived me from my ruins. He painted her with the brush of a master artist, unaware of the torment I hid, the love that had left me prey to endless lashes of pain. I thought she must be a maiden descended from heaven itself. Yet the question hammered inside me, though I dared not voice it, How could a girl like that escape every eye, and most of all the eyes and heart of  Obaid himself?

The words “I found the one for you” struck me like Archimedes’ own cry of “Eureka! I have found it!” I urged him again and again to hasten our meeting, while he delayed. I told myself that for a woman so described, patience was a price worth paying, even as my longing grew sharper and more relentless by the day.

Finally, the promised day arrived. We stopped in Zafran Crater. My eagerness outpaced my steps, carrying me toward what I thought was heaven’s compensation, the final resting place of my choice. Suddenly, Obaid halted, stepped aside like one laying a trap, and pointed toward a grand women’s clothing boutique. He whispered in my ear, “There she is behind the glass.”

I looked, but saw no one behind the display window. When I failed to understand, he pointed again and said, “That’s her, the one you’re looking for.”

But she was not a girl at all. She was a mannequin, shaped like a beautiful woman, dressed in elegant clothes.

For a moment, fury rose in me at the cruel prank my friend had staged. But in the next breath, laughter erupted, loud, unrestrained, irresistible. My laughter thundered through the street, drawing startled stares from passersby. People turned their heads toward us, their eyes wide with bewilderment, their faces etched with surprise. In that moment of absurdity, we too realized where we were, laughing like madmen in the middle of a crowded street.

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