A Rook

“Life is a Game”, this is how the conversation started… “Try to look at things as if you were in a Game and make beating the enemy your sole target”… For quite sometime he tried to convince me with the idea… I have to fight for triumph… I have to be smart to win… and above all… I have to change my strategy… my way of looking at things… and again, I find myself stuck in the same corner… unable to make the right move and incapable of thinking about it… It is not easy for A Rook to act like the Queen and to move flexibly in all direction bypassing all rules and conquering all enemies… Each of us is a chess character moving according to his pre-defined role which is based on his values, experience and willingness to interact with other pieces… Black and white are the only colors of the Squares… and it is up to you to decide on which square you should exist and which square you should be heading by your next move… A wrong move at any time can cost you a lot… maybe your life and maybe the life of others… You have to plan your moves, sacrifice some pawns for a greater cause and you must learn how to maneuver and how to jump to succeed… Unfortunately, jumping and moving in diagonals are still not in my dictionary! And my only way out is… out of The Board.

Mena Mostafa

The Glasses

Whenever and wherever I look, I see things in a dark color… I am not sure why I can’t see the light although I am sure it exists… this is not a figure of speech as much as it is a physical fact… I discovered that most of the times my eyes are always looking to the floor… and by chance when I raise my head, I see some traces of the light… but only in the form of shadows… Life there might be somehow beautiful… but unfortunately, the last time I saw it this way was many years ago… Life is always what we see… it is the reflection of our thoughts and feelings… which means that I am a very gloomy person… because the way we perceive life is the way we see ourselves… The question is… do we only see through our eyes? If the answer is yes… how can I get rid of these dark glasses? And if the answer is no… what is the type of glasses that I should wear to see the beauty of life? My question remains unanswered and my quest for The Glasses continues!

Mena Mostafa

Open the Door

In that endless state of mind I keep looping… it’s been more than 3 years now and still the same… imprisoned in my own mind… trying to escape to another unknown island… Isolated from the outside world… I keep running from myself to face it again… we have to finish this together as we started it together… I have to help myself to get out… the choice is mine… but I either don’t have enough courage… or I am afraid… How coward I am! I am not sure whether the time came or not… but I have a very strange feeling… it’s approaching… I don’t know what it is this time… but it is almost here… Some days ago a friend of mine advised me to Open the Door… “look inside yourself, free your mind and Open the Door”… I still feel lost and I don’t know how to make use of his words… but it seems that this is my last way out…
I have to Open the Door… though I still don’t know to where it will lead me… but I have to free myself… “…Open the Door”… there might be light somewhere!

Mena Mostafa

Hope

For a while I consider as very long… I have not been able to write… I just feel and think… and believe I am the same… looking at things the same way and always thinking the same… till I lost my appétit to write… which in my opinion is a very bad indicator of boredom and in-adaptation… I can’t change things around me and I myself don’t change… I still suffer... think and suffer more and more… The weird thing is that I am still alive… I don’t know how or why… because sometimes I consider that my life in this world came to an end some time ago… I eat and sleep… and I am living but only in my physical form… not my mental one… I feel I am a dead mind in a live body… I am a partial human… I wonder why I am still there… what keeps me alive… I really don’t know why or how… but I am still there… whether I admit this or not… I want it or not… I exist… for an unknown reason I exist… some people call it… Hope!!

Mena Mostafa

Help

When you feel you are in need for light and you can’t see it… when you feel are drowning and you can’t reach a shore… when you feel you are lost and you don’t have a compass… when you are in need for succor and can’t get it… when you fight all waves to stay on the surface of the water in the middle of a wild storm… when you try to escape from a vortex and find yourself more attracted to the bottom… when you experience all this is and discover you are alone… and the worse is when you feel you don’t even know where to go if you survive… when you experience this is when you decide to surrender… to admit that you can no longer struggle… and you leave yourself to the current… not knowing to where it will lead you… not sure if you’ll wake up on the next day to watch the end… your end… It is when, for an unknown reason and for a fake hope, that you decide to call for Help… and you already know that no one is there for you!

Mena Mostafa

It

It’s ironic to wake up every day, assuming you were mainly asleep and not pretending to be, to find yourself thinking about the same thing and feeling the same way… I can’t stop thinking even while “asleep”… I always stare, watch, analyze, think, deduce and restart this endless loop of not being there while being somewhere with “them”… My fears remain the same… I only think about one thing… and I can’t free my mind of It… and as much as I know and am sure of its inevitability… I am terrified… although I want It very much and I think about It a lot… I am afraid… yes… I am… I can’t talk a lot about It… no one understands what I say or want to say nor how I feel… I even started feeling alone inside myself… the idea is hunting me… I know I am waiting… but for sure I don’t know till when… and I continue sleeping in the night to wake up in the morning to either find myself again or find It.

Mena Mostafa

The Answer

I’ve been asking myself for a long time why do things always look different… Why do I always see and interpret things unlike what “others” perceive, accept and become content and familiar with… I’ve been in this dilemma for a very very long time without reaching a reasonable explanation for what I feel and how I think… I asked myself a lot and finally found a very simple answer… the “simple” answer which in itself is the problem, the explanation, the main reason for keeping my mind blocked and for prohibiting it from understanding what was going on… As we were taught in school, and especially in mathematics… when it becomes very hard to reach a solution, think differently and you’ll always find another very easy way to solve the problem you are facing… And… in my case… with my life’s problems… the only convincing answer proved itself to be much simpler than what I’ve ever thought about… The Answer is that I am walking on my head and this is why I see, interpret, perceive and judge things differently… another rejected-convincing interpretation is that the world is turned upside down… And by the way… “1 + 1 = 2” is a big myth!

Mena Mostafa