Agrippina Bitar - Flying in the cloud

Translator Darya Khudavets

Editor Bruno Krasnoscokovs

© Agrippina Bitar, 2017

© Darya Khudavets, translation, 2017

ISBN 978-5-4490-0621-9

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

As Teresa of Calcutta once said: “People lack love much more than bread, and this hunger is the strongest hunger”.

But at the same time we are afraid to love, because love makes us vulnerable and defenceless.

We are afraid to be rejected, to feel the pain, to have our hearts broken.

In the era of lives on display in social networks, we want to be successful at any cost.

Our greatest fear is to fail, so we disguise ourselves in the clothes of success and upload photos of artificial celebrations of life on our pages with nothing but emptiness behind them.

It’s so easy to pretend to be strong and have a meaningful life online while hiding behind a beautiful mask.

Love, however, is always about your soul being open and even naked. Love brings pain and pleasure all at the same time.

It’s like flying in the clouds, when you can’t see where you’re going and don’t know where the wind will take you.

You can either go to heaven, or fall back down to earth. Even the clouds themselves come in different kinds. There are thunderclouds, cirrus clouds and heap clouds.

Some of them are softer than feathers, other are heavy and leaden.

And they can, like a tornado, sweep away everything that’s in their path. Everyone has his own love and his cloud.

In our times, the whole world is entangled in the global web of the Internet, which, like a huge cloud of chaos, gives birth to many things.

Some of them unite and divide people at the same time. However, in the same chaos, in the same cloud, like Aphrodite from the foam, love is born.

This online love can connect people from the most remote parts of the world. It connects people of different races, religions, cultures and ages.

A few decades ago these people would have never been able to communicate and wouldn’t even know about each other, and now they chat, cheer, suffer, wait and love together.

Moreover, that love is absolutely real. It’s the same as before, it’s as old as the world, and at the same time, it’s brand new! And most importantly, it’s true love!

After all, it doesn’t matter where it’s born, online or in real life, it will always remain the jewel of human life.

When I say: “I love you”,

I’ll be the book you’ve never read,

The song you’ve never sung,

The kiss you’ve never tasted… 1 1 Board of Wisdom

It was the voice of the stewardess that pulled her away from her thoughts: “Can I help you?”. Nina turned her head and saw a man sitting beside her, trying to fasten the belt, which didn’t want to wrap around his plump stomach.

The flight attendant helped the man, flicking the extending strap with a professional gesture. Nina thought about the inconveniences that this neighbour may cause, when she, for example, would need to go to the WC and would ask the man to let her pass by.

She quickly glanced over his oversized belly and thought that she’d never been with a large man before, but didn’t let this thought develop, turned away and stared in the window again.

The plane entered dense clouds, and nothing else was visible apart from a thick milky fog outside the window. What a troubling state of uncertainty!

Her land with its towns, forests and rivers was left far below the plane, while above it there was a bright blue sky with a shining sun!

Yet now there was only fog and uncertainty outside and so in her life.

“Will he show up this time?” thought Nina and remembered the previous two times when he didn’t…

In fact, the idea to meet in real life came up in one of their conversations after a year of chatting online.

After a year, which Nina had lived like in fever from the constant with him through pictures, messages and calls.

Love hit her like a tsunami, and it was even more powerful than her old real first love.

It was about sleepless nights of chatting, and then, offline, music, music, music… and trembling from thoughts and fantasies.

It was so real that it seemed that the air around became thicker and more, so to speak, velvety and it was all love!

And it was suffocating her so that she almost couldn’t breathe anymore. It seemed to her that she suddenly had wings and that even if she jumped from the top of some high tower, she wouldn’t fall, but fly…

Moreover, while at work, Nina was constantly thinking about him.

He also sent her short messages during the day saying: “How are you? Where are you? What are you doing? I love you’”

These simple primitive messages in English which was native neither to him nor her drove her crazy. They pierced her like a lightning, down to the toe, she was trembling when she saw the cherished avatar with a green light of activity in the chat, and she felt butterflies in her stomach.

His name “Ismael” sounded like sweet music to her. And his full name was Ismael Aziz.

She once asked what his childhood short name was. He said: “Soma”.

“May I call you Soma?” asked Nina. She wanted to caress him somehow despite of the distance between them! As she couldn’t touch him with her hands, she could at least caress him with words, intonation, with the name his mother called him.

It was a maternal feeling in Nina, because he was a very young boy of eighteen years, and she was more than mature…it was even scary to say it out loud, she was fifty-four.

In addition, this void that divided them, this abyss of time seemed to her to be an irreparable misfortune, a black hole into which she was slowly and steadily falling.

Until then Nina was proud of her age, the fact that she was already a mother and even a grandmother, that she had succeeded in life and had a lot of victories in her artistic and professional lives, and, most importantly, the way she looked (forty years, no one could have given more).

However, now her age seemed to be a curse. She actually deleted her age from all her social media pages leaving only the day and the month.

How did that happen to her? Was it due to loneliness that she fell in love like a girl? No! There was someone beside her.

It was a man with whom she lived together for nine years. He was also younger than her, but the gap wasn’t that huge.

Their common friend have never even noticed the difference. Lately, Nina even started looking younger. She noticed it while looking through their photos. It was just that he became bald with years, and had a beer belly, though he was still full of energy and, like all southern men, was a great lover.

So how did this boy appear in her life?

"…So much time has passed. Aladdin has turned fifteen. And once, when he was playing with other boys, as usual, a dervish, a wandering monk, approached them. He looked at Aladdin and said to himself: “He’s the one I’m looking for. I’ve been through a lot of misery, before finally finding him.”

This dervish was maghribian of the Maghreb. He called one of the boys with the gesture of his hand and asked him who Aladdin was and who was his father. He then approached Aladdin and said to him: “Aren’t you the son of Hassan?”

“I am,” replied Aladdin…”

“The magic lamp of Aladdin”. It was Nina’s favourite fairy tale. The name of this tale always made her heart beat faster and awakened her imagination, and she started feeling somewhat hot in her chest… Nina even wrote a poem about the feeling.