How did i go so wrong in loving you?

Octopus is busted and therefore, I have nothing to do but sit and reflect. My ruminations started last night while I was praying as part of 27th Ramzan. While I was praying my thoughts were all jumbled up and I was trying to find some place to start. It was then that I realized that ten months of this year have lapsed, simply drifted into history. Last year during ramzan, I was a different person, I was a hopeful person. Now I am just wistful. I have so much to look back at and so much to forget. For one glorious evening, I was the luckiest person on this planet. I had a family that loved me, somebody marvelous who wanted me and most of all, I had faith. I remember that morning so vividly when I dressed up not because I wanted to look good or had some place important to go to but because I felt beautiful. I thought I had stumbled onto true bliss this year, it turned out to be a mirage. And it shook the very foundations of my dreams but then again, dreams never require foundations and never make a solid foundation for anything, do they?

I have time today for some reason so I took to doing something I have been putting off for a long time. Cleaning my cell phone directory, my hand bag, and my yahoo and msn accounts and organizing my year planner…lol, ten months too late. I have this really bad habit of saving even one lined e-mails. Yahoo is very supportive in that but even my hotmail has e-mails as much as four years old. My cell phone has over two hundred contacts, I know only very few of them really well. My life has been cluttered by useless nostalgia. So today, I deleted numbers I know I will never use again, my brothers’ old numbers, friends that became acquaintances and acquaintances I don’t meet anymore. I deleted my old e-mails, some that I know by heart now. I know its weird but they meant something to me and I couldn’t let go.

And now I need to let go. I need to change.

This whole year has been about change and though if I look closely, the changes have mostly been in me. And yet, I haven’t changed essentially. It’s a line from some old song that truly marks my personality and predicament…

‘Like a fool who will never see the truth, I keep thinking something’s gonna change’.
But I have tried to change and I don’t think I have been very successful. And there have been numerous moments when I realized that somewhere in the past 23 years, I went very very wrong. In becoming what I thought would be someone Allah would love as His true worshipper, being a good muslim and making my family especially my parents proud, I lost my way completely and for that I can never forgive myself.

And then the questions originate. Is my self abhorrence so potent that I subliminally feel that I have to absolutely obliterate all that I am and eliminate all ties to that being? Am I such a slave to the moment that I am incapable of enriching my current environment? Do I even know where I am going; is it a worthy objective if I have to forgo everything and everyone I have ever cared about and dreams that I have nourished to become this improved individual? Aren’t people at an advantage without me in their world in my present state?

The petrifying panorama of this speculation is the one concern that I am most apprehensive about: am I tough enough to become more than I presently am? I have the requisite talent but latent and taught by time and experience, but I wonder if it'll be sufficient to stir up the old flames and relight my aspiration. The only thing that seems to be invariable is my resilience; for all of my blemishs (both inherent and taught), I am not a defeatist. It's just not me.

So even if there are no tomorrows for my squandered dreams and abandoned relationships, they were a part of my life and for that reason and that reason alone, worth remembering. So even if I clean up my inbox, my directory, my memories don’t require suitcases. And with me they shall remain for as long as I exist.