Though it is a very insignificant matter, yet it insisted on disturbing me every morning… Some ridiculous thoughts concerning the gatekeeper of the company I work for…

Am I a nervous overweening person with a darkened soul as those losers everywhere keep on saying about me…? Or is he just another disrespectful and spiteful man…?

It’s this grudge that such low standard people hold in minds towards higher social classes… I’m sure he can’t stand the look of my luxurious car with its murky windows and its loud horn… I bet he comes to the company every day clinging to a pipe in an overcrowded bus that blinds his eyes with its awful smoke… Or, even worse, he might be coming everyday walking the long way from where he lives, and as his sweat comes together with the dust everywhere it must turn into an unbearable malodorous… Do you think after all this he wouldn’t be feeling malice towards me…?

How does he feel while standing in the burning sun and seeing the drops of vapor condensed on the lower part of my car windows – resulting from the chilliness that the air conditioning system of the car provides…?

How does he feel when he faces my arrogant inspecting look at him each morning and sees his own poor reflection on the surface of my dark costly sunglasses…? He is trying to imitate even this… and he wears an apparently cheap sunglasses when encountering me at the company’s gate every morning… a very dark one…

Gosh! That silly smile again… He is trying to provoke me… and he does it intentionally…But he would never be able to achieve anything with all these trials… For, I’m simply in a very higher social standard than his…This dimmed glass windows of my precious car will always separate me from his dusty venomous environment…

It’s only one minute or less every morning, and as I see him slowing down in pushing the button to open up the gate, the noisy horn of my car gets louder as my anger gets higher… Ah… It’s this envy again!

He’s newly hired; just a week ago they say …

It’s all because of that idiot who owns the company… He thinks that by hiring such people he will be entitled Mr. Kindhearted! Complete Nonsense!

I can simply raise a complain and fire him immediately… But… who the hell is he to let everybody know that such an insignificant person bothers me!

I can’t really understand… It doesn’t need to be smart to press that silly button… we never needed a gatekeeper in the first place… I can’t find any logical reason to hire such an old man standing on the edge of demise, and holding such a spiteful soul…

How come he doesn’t stand to salute me when I arrive in the morning…? May be then I would open my car window and kindly get into his surroundings for a few seconds as I give him a tip … I may even smile at him then…

How did it cross his sick mind that by holding this place beside the gate button he would become equal to me and that such position will permit him not stand immediately at my arrival…?

This envy he holds inside his soul has blinded him it seems!

We will never be equal… He will stay in his smudged environment and I will always be behind my luxurious car with its gloomy windows…

***

A week has passed… And I can’t but keep thinking about this matter every morning… I don’t know why I’m giving it that space in my mind…? I’m not supposed to be thinking of such inferior issues that much…

Nevertheless, I’m quite certain that just my presence ruins the peacefulness of his life… Or else why would he be envying me that much…?

Does he think that this uniform he wears will provide him with the needed prestige to fill into the huge social gap between the two of us, or even balance the feeling of deficiency he feels deep inside…? Just like the little child who begs his parents to buy him a policeman uniform with a plastic pistol… to live into the illusion of having a power for a few hours…

Does he think that just sitting beside the gate for a few hours daily, makes him its Master…?

We are NOT equal… and I will no longer stay silent about it…

I will go early in the morning to give him a lesson he won’t forget… and open up his eyes on the reality he fails to see… that me and him… will never be equal!

I won’t step off my car, but would talk through a very small opening in the window… an opening that won’t exceed the space that someone like him should take off my mind…

Here I am approaching the gate…

He never looks at me… The noisy loud horn of the car is a must for him to turn his face towards me…

“Hey you… Gatekeeper… Come over here…”

I aggressively called him through a very small opening in my car window; this is all the space I can allow to communicate with such category of people…

He opens up the door of the small wooden kiosk he stays in, and moves towards me… leaning on a stick… and his slow movement really gets on my nerves…

“Yes Sir”

So, you know that I am the master here… Yes I am the one with the upper hand here and you are not the master of the gate…

I raised my voice with the arrival of the rest of the employees… “Do you know who I am, you spiteful old man…?”

And without leaving him a chance to reply and with a very loud voice I started degrading and humiliating him in every way with my sharp mortifying words… and the affect went far beyond my expectations with the presence of this small crowd of employees that started to gather around to understand to whom I was shouting and for what reason…

I kept on this for another few minutes… and it was when the old man started to weep… that somebody murmured in my ears… “Sir, he is war-wounded old man… and he is blind……………”

Rehab Ragaee

November 5, 2007

In a dark wood, where no one dares to be at this hour of the night, there was a girl; a gorgeous one wearing a beautiful soiree dress, and high-heeled pair of shoes… and she was running…Crying in pain, her face was covered with tears mixed with small traces of blood resulting from the tree branches that were cutting her face as she ran, and one of her shoes heels was broken. Despite of all the pain within her, she kept on running while her mind was in another world… somewhere near… In a Casino called “Passions”…

It all started that morning…

She was taking her daily shower when the telephone rang; she got out and picked up the phone.

-    “Hello,

-    “Hey sweetie!”

-    “Who is it?”

-    “Guess who?”

-    “OH, MY GOD, NO WAY, NO…”

-    “Yes honey, it’s me”

-    “I miss you so much, I miss you and I never thought that you might call me again”

-    “Mmm, let’s say, that I’ve tried not to, but I couldn’t, your love has bewitched me, and even after all the previous months of trying not to… I couldn’t resist anymore… I had to call you…”

-    “I don’t know what to say, I’m sorry for all the hurt I’ve done to you, I was convinced that you’ll never forgive me, so I didn’t even try to apologize. But deep within my soul, I was lost, waiting for the day you might forgive me, baby I’m sorry, I’ve made you suffer a lot, I’m…”

-    “Please honey, don’t say anything, I forgive you and I wish we could forget all the previous painful period and turn out a new leaf… Please, let’s just consider it the last time we will talk about this, ok?”

-    “Ok dear”

-    “Can I see you tonight?”

-    “Don’t ask me, you know that I would give my all for this…”

-    “Same place?”

-    “Sure thing, ‘Passions’ is not just a Casino, it’s a place that had witnessed our love, our first date, and our future plans…”

-    “That’s right dear; 09:00 pm is ok with you?”

-    “Yesss! Oh! I can’t wait to hold you in my arms; we shall dance all the night, baby…”

-    “Sure, I’ll spend the whole night just holding you and staring at your pretty face…”

-    “Me too sweetheart…”

-    “See you there then; don’t be late… Bye for now!”

-    “Bye my love”

She hanged off and stood at her place for five minutes mumbling with strange words, then screamed her lungs out…….

“IT WASN’T A DREAM, IT WAS TRUE, OH GOD, OH MY GOD!”

After spending another thirty minutes crying, screaming and laughing she began to concentrate and started to prepare her self for her date…

Two hours passed while she was completing her shower, she washed herself like she never did before… Then got out, started drying herself and enjoyed watching her self in the mirror…

Like everyone who is admiring her beauty, she loved her own face too; actually she was fond of her beauty…

“I have it all now…” she thought with a lovely smile on her face, then she got the make-up kit, and started to make her face even more fabulous…

By eight o’clock she was getting out of her resident, walking to her car like a queen walking to her throne…

-   “Gosh, check this beauty! She’s out of this world!”, she heard a man telling his friend.

-    “Yea! Lucky him!”, his friend replied.

She smiled to herself, knowing that all this beauty will be for only one man… a man who tried to forget her but couldn’t.

The way to ‘Passions’ took a full hour, since it lies at the high way which isn’t far from the woods. At nine o’clock sharp she was parking in the car park area of ‘Passions’, when she noticed that there were so many cars parking, some of them were decorated with roses and ribbons.

“There might be a wedding here tonight, this has never happened before, ‘Passions’ is just a Casino, not a wedding hall”, she thought…

“What a bad luck, we won’t be able to dance tonight!” she sadly murmured to herself.

“But, it’s not a problem… He might suggest somewhere else to go, it doesn’t matter with me”, she thought again.

Feeling shy, she entered ‘Passions’; she has always hated crowded places ever since her childhood; when she faces people in a crowded place or even a party, she sweat a lot and her face turns red, and she loses her ability to utter a complete sentence, that’s why she hardly ever attends a huge birthday or a wedding party.

“You have a social phobia, you need to overcome this fear within you, or else it will take a long time to be recovered!” That’s what her psychiatrist said.

But now, nothing really matters, as long as her lover is in the Casino waiting for her, she will never feel shy or nervous. She’d even kiss him, without caring about the crowd around them, she thought.

People were stuffed there as if they were in a salmon can; it was a real wedding party. She started to search for him in the guests’ tables, rolling her eyes quickly between the faces.

“mmmmm, where are you, where are you!” she nervously mumbled.

She didn’t find him, so she decided to ask the waiter about him. The waiter must know them both; he saw them together many times. She waved to him, with a smile on her face.

He approached her with eyes full of surprise.

-    “Hi, how are you, do you remember me?” she asked.

-    “Yes, sure”, he replied.

-    “So you must remember the man I used to come here with, don’t you?” she asked again.

-    “Is that a joke or something!” he replied with a confused look upon his face.

He pointed at the other side of the place, where her lover was sitting up on the chair of honor… Holding the hands of a lady dressed in white as if she was a bride… Actually she was a bride, his bride……

A few seconds passed on her without taking a single move… she was standing there like a statue, standing still with an opened mouth and eyes full of tears… till he stood up, took a move to where she was standing, and held her by the hand while saying:

-     “Common, don’t you want to say congratulations to me and my bride!”

-     “…………!!”

He took her to where his bride was, and said:

-     “My dear, I would like to present this beautiful woman to you, she is the one that I’ve once loved, the woman whom you asked me about several times”

-     “………”

-     “I told you many times that everything was over, with me at least, and we needn’t talk about this again, but you always had a doubt that I might be still in love with her, so I decided to invite her and let her wish you a blissful wedding”, He added.

-     “………”

-     “Won’t you say a word to my bride?” he toughly asked her.

-     “I …, we were, mmmmm, so you are, lllieeeer”, she mumbled.

-     “Are you ok? Do you feel sick or something?” asked her the bride while looking at him with a blameful look.

At this point she was shivering. This was the most acute social phobia symptoms that have ever happened to somebody.

“It is a dream, a bad dream…. No, it is real…. He was lying on me… He didn’t forgive me… He brought me here to make fool of me… Could anyone be that cruel……….?” She was thinking while switching looks upon the bride and the groom.

“Please have a seat, and I’ll order a glass of water for you”, said the bride.

All what she was thinking of now was to run away…. from the crowd surrounding her… from her pains….. to a place where nobody can see her…. she was in a desperate need to sleep…. she wished she could sleep forever….

She stepped back… went down to the guest hall… then ran as fast as she could as if she was in a race, and her only goal was ‘Passions’ door. She hit one or two, but she didn’t care. Finally she reached outside.

Quite, dark and chilly was the scene. She went to the parking area, reaching for her car, only to discover that she had forgotten her handbag inside on the guests’ table… with her keys inside it….

“Should I go inside and bring it?” she thought.

“No way, I won’t go back again to this place in my whole life”, she screamed inside.

She stood in front of the door, thinking of a way to go home. Through her tears she read what’s on the casino’s door; it said:

“Passions; Heaven on Earth”

She laughed and laughed… Cried and screamed, then laughed again…

She turned her back to “Passions” facing the woods…

Took the move…

And ran………