Letter to Ibrahim

Anthony Chahine
Aug 22, 2017 · 3 min read

Dear Ibrahim*,

I’ve been thinking about you since last night. It’s been a while since you’ve plagued my thoughts, and, perhaps under the intoxication that new sensations bring, I had entertained the naively unsuspicious notion that we had parted ways for good. However, just as surely as my cigarettes return to scorch my already aching lungs in a moment of fear, my thoughts of you gnaw their way into my already saturated cranium, and in that same moment of weakness I welcome you both with the nausea that accompanies my perverse enjoyment.

I initially planned on writing to you in order to ask a question that I have yet to formulate, but driven by a desire to write more often and an exhausting faith in the possibility of a cathartic non-encounter, I decided to write to you anyway. Earlier today, overcome by the frustration of not being able to write, I decided to go for a drive to clear my head, and as I drove around with no particular destination in mind, I found myself driving along one of the routes my school bus used to take on occasion, particularly on those dreadful Saturday mornings, the air of which was always pervaded by the dissonant sounds of laughter and cheeky witticism forced through the shame of those of us who had been summoned to repeat an exam we had previously failed. The flood of memories triggered by the all too familiar scenery refused to pass by as unnoticingly as the trees that populated both sides of the rural roads I was traversing. I can vividly recall many a bus ride in which I sat in the back of the bus, knees tucked towards my chest, staring out of the window fantasizing about my future as an architect, or a painter, or a perplexed mathematician with little to no time to waste on the trivial details of every day life. Those bus rides mark the earliest encounters we had, you and I, but also, paradoxically, many of our points of departure.

In many ways, I envy you. Some days because I am and you aren’t, and by virtue of the fact that you aren’t, you do not suffer in the same ways that I do. You haven’t been forced into language quite like I’ve been, and consequently, have not suffered the loss of that which slips into its cracks. In not being, you are granted the power to be constructed freely, but in being, I can only construct you to the extent that the language in which I am captive allows me to. This is the paradoxical nature of our relationship, an encounter that can only be missed at the point of its establishment.

Perhaps this is why I chose to write to you today, a feeble attempt at recreating a moment which never was, at solidifying that which can only be liquid, at a dialogue which does not separate in the ways which dialogues are known to, but for now, my fingers are trembling with the desire to satisfy the addiction that you never developed, and so, I leave you in the same way that I always find you, in a moment of weakness.

Sincerely you,

Anthony

*Ibrahim is the name my parents initially planned on giving me, but after a series of quasi-contingent events, I ended up as Anthony, so Ibrahim is an imaginary construction of whoever I may have been if not for particular formative events that took place throughout my life.

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