✦ Special Series: Between Love and Survival (Part 1 of 20)
Did warmth in the beginning ever promise true shelter, or was it merely a passing lull before the tempest? In this opening installment, Dr. Ahmed Osama explores how caution is surrendered and the heart opens its doors completely.
#1. The First Time I Believed My Heart
«“There was an openness in your laugh I’d never known,
so I thought every narrow street had been leading me to you.”»
It did not begin with a loud noise, or a flash of lightning startling the air of the room. It began with a faint tremor beneath my ribs on that distant November evening, when you turned to me with a half-smile, your hand resting on the handle of the glass door propped open onto a rainy street in Downtown Cairo. The smell of wet asphalt mingled with the rich scent of roasted coffee drifting out of the small café, and the fringe of my wool coat dripped water onto the old floor tiles—and still, I felt no cold.
I sat across from you at the wooden table pressed against the window, keeping my leather bag in my lap the way a man does when he is used to leaving quickly. But you slid the hot glass of tea toward me with an unfamiliar calm and asked, in the tone of someone who had known me for ten years, “Tell me how you’re doing first—how was your day today?” That night, I closed my mind’s eyes of my own free will. I slipped off my old caution the way a traveler shrugs off a heavy coat grown too exhausting to carry, and watching the steam rise between us, I told myself: this warmth is real, it couldn’t possibly lie—there’s no way eyes this clear could be hiding a trap behind them.
I believed my heart all at once. I could still hear my close friends’ advice echoing in my ears—“Take your time, don’t rush in, leave yourself a safe distance”—and I would smile to myself with the quiet certainty of a man who had finally found his way home after a long exile. In your presence, I saw a refuge that didn’t interrogate an exhausted man about the history of his fear, or ask him to prove his strength before letting her lean against its wall.
When we stepped out together past nine o’clock and walked beside the lit storefronts along Qasr El Nil Street, you lightly caught my elbow so my foot wouldn’t slip at the edge of a small puddle on the sidewalk. It was a fleeting gesture that lasted barely two seconds, yet it brought all my walls crashing down. God, how naive I was the day I cupped my hands full of water and thought I could hold onto it for a lifetime without a drop slipping through my fingers! Every catch in my voice when I said your name felt like a postponed life clicking back into place, and every old silence in my days suddenly had a single explanation: I had been waiting for you.
It never crossed my mind, watching the yellow headlights reflect off the rain-streaked window of the taxi on my way home, that warm cities can change their locks overnight, or that the ground I walked across with such trust would pull the rug out from under my feet at the first passing autumn wind. I came home that night, draped my damp coat over the back of the chair, and fell asleep for the first time in years without running through the inventory of my fears before closing my eyes.
Even so, I don’t regret that distant night. I really did need to believe my heart at least once—with no calculations and no fear—even if it meant walking barefoot for a very long time afterward across the traces of old rain.
💡 Core Insight: “My heart wasn’t wrong the day it opened the door for you—it was only wrong when it threw the key into the Nile with its own hands.”
#2. I Used to See You as a Miracle
«“You never once claimed to be a prophet;
it was my own eyes that draped your shoulders in a light far bigger than you.”»
I raised you above what any human being could bear, and that was my first sin against myself and against you. I would watch you stir your cold cup of coffee with a small spoon, staring off at the ceiling fan, and convince myself your mind was holding questions too vast for this small world. When you cut me short in a dry tone as I told you about my day, saying impatiently, “And then? Get to the point,” I called your cruelty decisiveness. And when you left my message unanswered for hours after reading it, I invented twenty noble excuses on your behalf, telling myself, “He’s surely swamped and just doesn’t have a second to reply right now,” before my silent phone went to sleep beside my pillow.
Where did I find that endless capacity to polish an ordinary stone until I mistook it for a star? How did I convince myself that the coldness of your hands in the middle of our closeness was dignity and gravitas? And why did I apologize to you every time you hurt me, as if my sadness were an excessive nuisance unworthy of your stature? It turns out I’d been tailoring a wide cloak out of my own sleepless nights and worry, just to cover up your flaws from everyone else—and from myself.
Then one ordinary morning I woke up as unsparing daylight slipped through the gap in the curtains, falling across your forgotten glasses and the cup where last night’s coffee grounds had dried at the bottom—and I finally saw you with the naked eye, stripped of every metaphor: a thoroughly ordinary man who grows bored when a conversation runs long, dodges confrontation when cornered, forgets his black umbrella in the back of a taxi, and fears admitting his weakness like any other passerby. You weren’t a legend or a miracle the way I’d imagined; it was my own devotion alone lighting up what was ordinary in you. In a single second, the halo shattered—and all that remained was you.
💡 Core Insight: “You fell in my eyes the very moment I stopped holding you up in my imagination.”
#3. Messages Never Sent
«“In my drafts folder lie whole letters
that lived and died with no one ever reading them but me.”»
Twelve-thirty after midnight: The street outside my window grows quiet, leaving nothing but the faint hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen and the blue glow of my phone across the cotton bedsheet. I open our chat, stare at “last seen four hours ago” at the top of the screen, and pour out in a single breath everything I’ve held back in my throat all day: “Where have you been all this time? Disappearing since late afternoon without a single word left a cold weight in my chest, and I’m so tired of pretending I’m a tough man who doesn’t need anyone to reassure her.”
One-twenty in the morning: I read back what I’ve written and feel far too exposed before a man who is fast asleep right now. I add one small line pleading for your old tenderness, reminding you of the promise you made me as we walked along the Nile Corniche the day you said, “Don’t ever let us go to sleep at night with a bottled-up hurt sitting in either of our hearts.” I write to you about the cup of mint tea I made at nine o’clock that went cold on the balcony ledge while I waited for your call. My fingers are icy, and my eyes burn from staring at the tiny cursor pulsing at the end of the line, waiting for a single touch to reach you.
Ten minutes to two in the morning: The building’s elevator stops on the fourth floor and the neighbors’ apartment door clicks quietly shut, jolting me awake to the loneliness of the room around me. My pride startles awake in a panic and grabs my hand one second before the send button. I picture what your reply would look like if you read these long lines while gulping down your coffee in a morning rush: one clipped, cold word, a lifeless sticker, or an even longer silence that would leave me regretting, all week long, every single letter where I laid bare my fragility and my fear of losing you.
I rest my thumb on the backspace key. Letter by letter, the long, honest sentences retreat like tidewater pulling back from a rocky shore. The confessions die quietly, the tremor of fear vanishes, the cold cup of tea is erased, and I murmur to myself bitterly, “What’s the point of stripping my heart bare in front of a man who’s fast asleep without a thought of me?”
Two o’clock sharp: Instead of all that, I type a single short, polite, irreproachable line: “Good night—I hope your day went quietly and well.” I hit send, flip the phone face-down on the wooden nightstand, and pull the heavy blanket up to my chin, listening to my wristwatch tick in the dark. Those deleted messages you never read are the true anthology of my love for you—and the very same small bricks that built the silent wall between us months before we ever parted.
💡 Core Insight: “The words we erased out of fear of a cold reply didn’t vanish into thin air—they lodged in the throat as a lump that never dissolves.”
#4. When the World Began with You
«“I set my watch to the timing of your voice,
so when you ran a little late, the day froze overhead and refused to move.”»
Before the alarm went off on my wooden nightstand, before thin threads of sunlight slipped through the slatted wooden shutters into my room or the voices of commuters rose from the street below, my day would stand still, waiting on just one signal to begin: my phone screen lighting up with your name. A sleepy “Good morning” in your voice was enough to wash away all of yesterday’s exhaustion and make the cracked pavement, the packed morning transit, and the long lines feel lighter on my heart than a drifting feather.
Little by little, I emptied my world of its people and its routines to clear the whole place out for you alone, without a rival. I forgot the taste of the milky coffee I’d loved for ten years and started drinking bitter, unsweetened black coffee just the way you ordered yours. I begged off dinner with my friend Salma three times in a single week, thinking you might call at eight and I wouldn’t hear my phone over the noise. I canceled my Thursday ritual of visiting the neighborhood bookstore; the songs in my headphones became your picks, the movies matched your taste, and even fair weather depended on whether you were in a good mood.
If you were pleased, the whole world lit up; if you frowned, high noon went dark under a blazing sun. I shrank my whole homeland down to the measure of your stride—and the day you suddenly turned and walked down another road, I stood in the middle of my living room a stranger in my own home, not knowing which coffee to make for myself, or who to open the window for.
💡 Core Insight: “A woman who hangs her sun on the mood of a passerby spends the rest of the winter looking for a single match.”
#5. Small Details That Built a Great Love
«“Grand promises never once won my heart;
what truly stole me was your hand fixing my coat collar in the cold.”»
Great love does not descend upon us in towering bouquets of roses or rehearsed speeches saved for formal occasions; it slips in on tiptoe through the cracks of an ordinary day, building its warm nest out of small things passersby never notice:
1. The cup of strong dark tea with just half a spoonful of sugar that you used to order for me without asking, telling the waiter with a quiet smile, “One strong dark tea, and just half a spoonful of sugar—she doesn’t like it sweet.”
2. The effortless, silent way you stepped to the outer edge of the sidewalk beside the speeding cars on the streets of Heliopolis, so I could walk on the safe side along the trees and houses.
3. Peeling a tangerine on cold winter evenings and handing me the first half—with all its white strings carefully pulled off—right in the middle of conversation, as if it were second nature and hardly worth a thank-you.
4. Remembering the names of my childhood girlfriends and the small stories I told you only once in passing, thinking they had vanished into thin air.
5. That quick, fleeting glance you would send across a table crowded with people and noise, as if murmuring to me alone, “I’m right here with you—I’m looking out for you.”
Those humble everyday trinkets were what stitched my love for you thread by thread until it became a garment for my soul. And when everything ended between us, I didn’t cry over the grand promises we lost; I broke down crying alone in the kitchen the day I peeled a tangerine and found no hand waiting to hold the other half.
💡 Core Insight: “Memory forgets all the grand speeches, then spends years tripping over half a spoonful of sugar.”
✍️ By: Dr. Ahmed Osama Abdellah
Follow the upcoming installments of the lyrical memoir «Between Love and Survival» exclusively on El-Tahrir News.
Did warmth in the beginning ever promise true shelter, or was it merely a passing lull before the tempest? In this opening installment, Dr. Ahmed Osama explores how caution is surrendered and the heart opens its doors completely.
#1. The First Time I Believed My Heart
«“There was an openness in your laugh I’d never known,
so I thought every narrow street had been leading me to you.”»
It did not begin with a loud noise, or a flash of lightning startling the air of the room. It began with a faint tremor beneath my ribs on that distant November evening, when you turned to me with a half-smile, your hand resting on the handle of the glass door propped open onto a rainy street in Downtown Cairo. The smell of wet asphalt mingled with the rich scent of roasted coffee drifting out of the small café, and the fringe of my wool coat dripped water onto the old floor tiles—and still, I felt no cold.
I sat across from you at the wooden table pressed against the window, keeping my leather bag in my lap the way a man does when he is used to leaving quickly. But you slid the hot glass of tea toward me with an unfamiliar calm and asked, in the tone of someone who had known me for ten years, “Tell me how you’re doing first—how was your day today?” That night, I closed my mind’s eyes of my own free will. I slipped off my old caution the way a traveler shrugs off a heavy coat grown too exhausting to carry, and watching the steam rise between us, I told myself: this warmth is real, it couldn’t possibly lie—there’s no way eyes this clear could be hiding a trap behind them.
I believed my heart all at once. I could still hear my close friends’ advice echoing in my ears—“Take your time, don’t rush in, leave yourself a safe distance”—and I would smile to myself with the quiet certainty of a man who had finally found his way home after a long exile. In your presence, I saw a refuge that didn’t interrogate an exhausted man about the history of his fear, or ask him to prove his strength before letting her lean against its wall.
When we stepped out together past nine o’clock and walked beside the lit storefronts along Qasr El Nil Street, you lightly caught my elbow so my foot wouldn’t slip at the edge of a small puddle on the sidewalk. It was a fleeting gesture that lasted barely two seconds, yet it brought all my walls crashing down. God, how naive I was the day I cupped my hands full of water and thought I could hold onto it for a lifetime without a drop slipping through my fingers! Every catch in my voice when I said your name felt like a postponed life clicking back into place, and every old silence in my days suddenly had a single explanation: I had been waiting for you.
It never crossed my mind, watching the yellow headlights reflect off the rain-streaked window of the taxi on my way home, that warm cities can change their locks overnight, or that the ground I walked across with such trust would pull the rug out from under my feet at the first passing autumn wind. I came home that night, draped my damp coat over the back of the chair, and fell asleep for the first time in years without running through the inventory of my fears before closing my eyes.
Even so, I don’t regret that distant night. I really did need to believe my heart at least once—with no calculations and no fear—even if it meant walking barefoot for a very long time afterward across the traces of old rain.
💡 Core Insight: “My heart wasn’t wrong the day it opened the door for you—it was only wrong when it threw the key into the Nile with its own hands.”
#2. I Used to See You as a Miracle
«“You never once claimed to be a prophet;
it was my own eyes that draped your shoulders in a light far bigger than you.”»
I raised you above what any human being could bear, and that was my first sin against myself and against you. I would watch you stir your cold cup of coffee with a small spoon, staring off at the ceiling fan, and convince myself your mind was holding questions too vast for this small world. When you cut me short in a dry tone as I told you about my day, saying impatiently, “And then? Get to the point,” I called your cruelty decisiveness. And when you left my message unanswered for hours after reading it, I invented twenty noble excuses on your behalf, telling myself, “He’s surely swamped and just doesn’t have a second to reply right now,” before my silent phone went to sleep beside my pillow.
Where did I find that endless capacity to polish an ordinary stone until I mistook it for a star? How did I convince myself that the coldness of your hands in the middle of our closeness was dignity and gravitas? And why did I apologize to you every time you hurt me, as if my sadness were an excessive nuisance unworthy of your stature? It turns out I’d been tailoring a wide cloak out of my own sleepless nights and worry, just to cover up your flaws from everyone else—and from myself.
Then one ordinary morning I woke up as unsparing daylight slipped through the gap in the curtains, falling across your forgotten glasses and the cup where last night’s coffee grounds had dried at the bottom—and I finally saw you with the naked eye, stripped of every metaphor: a thoroughly ordinary man who grows bored when a conversation runs long, dodges confrontation when cornered, forgets his black umbrella in the back of a taxi, and fears admitting his weakness like any other passerby. You weren’t a legend or a miracle the way I’d imagined; it was my own devotion alone lighting up what was ordinary in you. In a single second, the halo shattered—and all that remained was you.
💡 Core Insight: “You fell in my eyes the very moment I stopped holding you up in my imagination.”
#3. Messages Never Sent
«“In my drafts folder lie whole letters
that lived and died with no one ever reading them but me.”»
Twelve-thirty after midnight: The street outside my window grows quiet, leaving nothing but the faint hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen and the blue glow of my phone across the cotton bedsheet. I open our chat, stare at “last seen four hours ago” at the top of the screen, and pour out in a single breath everything I’ve held back in my throat all day: “Where have you been all this time? Disappearing since late afternoon without a single word left a cold weight in my chest, and I’m so tired of pretending I’m a tough man who doesn’t need anyone to reassure her.”
One-twenty in the morning: I read back what I’ve written and feel far too exposed before a man who is fast asleep right now. I add one small line pleading for your old tenderness, reminding you of the promise you made me as we walked along the Nile Corniche the day you said, “Don’t ever let us go to sleep at night with a bottled-up hurt sitting in either of our hearts.” I write to you about the cup of mint tea I made at nine o’clock that went cold on the balcony ledge while I waited for your call. My fingers are icy, and my eyes burn from staring at the tiny cursor pulsing at the end of the line, waiting for a single touch to reach you.
Ten minutes to two in the morning: The building’s elevator stops on the fourth floor and the neighbors’ apartment door clicks quietly shut, jolting me awake to the loneliness of the room around me. My pride startles awake in a panic and grabs my hand one second before the send button. I picture what your reply would look like if you read these long lines while gulping down your coffee in a morning rush: one clipped, cold word, a lifeless sticker, or an even longer silence that would leave me regretting, all week long, every single letter where I laid bare my fragility and my fear of losing you.
I rest my thumb on the backspace key. Letter by letter, the long, honest sentences retreat like tidewater pulling back from a rocky shore. The confessions die quietly, the tremor of fear vanishes, the cold cup of tea is erased, and I murmur to myself bitterly, “What’s the point of stripping my heart bare in front of a man who’s fast asleep without a thought of me?”
Two o’clock sharp: Instead of all that, I type a single short, polite, irreproachable line: “Good night—I hope your day went quietly and well.” I hit send, flip the phone face-down on the wooden nightstand, and pull the heavy blanket up to my chin, listening to my wristwatch tick in the dark. Those deleted messages you never read are the true anthology of my love for you—and the very same small bricks that built the silent wall between us months before we ever parted.
💡 Core Insight: “The words we erased out of fear of a cold reply didn’t vanish into thin air—they lodged in the throat as a lump that never dissolves.”
#4. When the World Began with You
«“I set my watch to the timing of your voice,
so when you ran a little late, the day froze overhead and refused to move.”»
Before the alarm went off on my wooden nightstand, before thin threads of sunlight slipped through the slatted wooden shutters into my room or the voices of commuters rose from the street below, my day would stand still, waiting on just one signal to begin: my phone screen lighting up with your name. A sleepy “Good morning” in your voice was enough to wash away all of yesterday’s exhaustion and make the cracked pavement, the packed morning transit, and the long lines feel lighter on my heart than a drifting feather.
Little by little, I emptied my world of its people and its routines to clear the whole place out for you alone, without a rival. I forgot the taste of the milky coffee I’d loved for ten years and started drinking bitter, unsweetened black coffee just the way you ordered yours. I begged off dinner with my friend Salma three times in a single week, thinking you might call at eight and I wouldn’t hear my phone over the noise. I canceled my Thursday ritual of visiting the neighborhood bookstore; the songs in my headphones became your picks, the movies matched your taste, and even fair weather depended on whether you were in a good mood.
If you were pleased, the whole world lit up; if you frowned, high noon went dark under a blazing sun. I shrank my whole homeland down to the measure of your stride—and the day you suddenly turned and walked down another road, I stood in the middle of my living room a stranger in my own home, not knowing which coffee to make for myself, or who to open the window for.
💡 Core Insight: “A woman who hangs her sun on the mood of a passerby spends the rest of the winter looking for a single match.”
#5. Small Details That Built a Great Love
«“Grand promises never once won my heart;
what truly stole me was your hand fixing my coat collar in the cold.”»
Great love does not descend upon us in towering bouquets of roses or rehearsed speeches saved for formal occasions; it slips in on tiptoe through the cracks of an ordinary day, building its warm nest out of small things passersby never notice:
1. The cup of strong dark tea with just half a spoonful of sugar that you used to order for me without asking, telling the waiter with a quiet smile, “One strong dark tea, and just half a spoonful of sugar—she doesn’t like it sweet.”
2. The effortless, silent way you stepped to the outer edge of the sidewalk beside the speeding cars on the streets of Heliopolis, so I could walk on the safe side along the trees and houses.
3. Peeling a tangerine on cold winter evenings and handing me the first half—with all its white strings carefully pulled off—right in the middle of conversation, as if it were second nature and hardly worth a thank-you.
4. Remembering the names of my childhood girlfriends and the small stories I told you only once in passing, thinking they had vanished into thin air.
5. That quick, fleeting glance you would send across a table crowded with people and noise, as if murmuring to me alone, “I’m right here with you—I’m looking out for you.”
Those humble everyday trinkets were what stitched my love for you thread by thread until it became a garment for my soul. And when everything ended between us, I didn’t cry over the grand promises we lost; I broke down crying alone in the kitchen the day I peeled a tangerine and found no hand waiting to hold the other half.
💡 Core Insight: “Memory forgets all the grand speeches, then spends years tripping over half a spoonful of sugar.”
✍️ By: Dr. Ahmed Osama Abdellah
Follow the upcoming installments of the lyrical memoir «Between Love and Survival» exclusively on El-Tahrir News.
