Here,,,,,,Opening
"Appears to be sweet the taste of qat endlessly, didn't say it out of pride. I said it like someone placing a final seal on a document he knows will be burned shortly.
The words came out of me in fragments, because my lips had barely remembered how to part. It wasn't silence, nor dread… it was the "bajma" I had built in my cheek—a dense mass of premium **bayadh**, stacked leaf upon leaf with the care of a pampered man who believes precision is part of pleasure.
It wasn't a qat session.
It was a **monument**.
A green monument that trapped the air and made the face tilt left on its own, until you felt you were carrying in your mouth a weight fit only for a lazy king.
And in that hour—I truly was a lazy king.
My fingers held the next leaf as if it would add another stone to a small palace inside my cheek. And my mind… was floating. No complete thought, no complete conscience—only a gentle current pulling you to a place where you don't need to be a good person or a bad one. It is enough to simply… **exist**.
And it was a cheap existence.
But it was tempting.
---
I sat on the wall of **Cairo Castle in Taiz**, where the air learns the meaning of height, and where the people below look like a failed idea repeating without end. I leaned my back against an old cushion—I knew its smell more than I knew the smell of home—and my shoulder sank into it until I felt even the bones had rested.
Then I looked down.
O Lord… Taiz looked like a stray beehive. No clear purpose—only motion. In Al-Musalla and Al-Tahrir, humans were tense dots: running, stopping, quarreling, reconciling, then repeating the same thing the next day, as if they were prisoners of an old program.
I saw two young men shoving each other at a small vendor.
I saw a man yelling at a child because he had dropped something trivial.
And I saw a woman dragging a bag heavier than her back, walking like someone carrying a life that wasn't hers.
Everything was small from up here.
Even disasters.
And I… was above; nothing touched me except the cool mountain breeze as it passed over my face like a polite slap.
In that moment I didn't feel outright arrogance, but something darker: **a quiet contempt**.
Not contempt for people because they were poor or weak… but because they ran as if running would change the ending.
As for me?
I had stopped running long ago.
My life—if it could be called a life—had shrunk into three words:
qat. the my cushion. the view.
And inside mechoesce said: *This is enough.*
And another voice—one I had hidden for a long time—asked: *Enough for whom?*
I lifted a new "bayadh" leaf. It was thin, greenish, its edge gleaming with a trace of moisture. I knew the shape of that leaf more than I knew my own features in the mirror. I placed it onto the "bajma" carefully, as if I were adding a layer to a fortress that protected me from everything… even from myself.
Then I said calmly, like someone reciting a maxim:
"Whoever owns this view… and this bayadh… has owned the keys to happiness."
It was an easy sentence.
Its best part was that it required no proof.
---
The "taqreeha" began to knock on my head. It wasn't a gentle euphoria. My taqreeha was always like a heavy guest—entering without permission and rearranging the furniture of the mind with violence.
Eyelids grew heavy.
Breath lengthened.
And the veins of my neck stood out, but like the taut strings of an oud.
I knew that if I let the wave complete its path, I would reach the area where only one feeling remains:
**false peace**.
But this time… peace was not alone in the room.
At first, I thought it was an illusion from my blood pressure.
A strange word echoes in my ear.
Then an unnatural stillness… as if the wind had been trapped in the mountain's throat.
And finally… the silence of my head split open.
No human voice.
No jinn voice.
But a cold, dry voice with no emotion, as if it had come out of an official document buried for centuries.
It rang directly inside my skull:
"Do you want qat… or do you want a future?"
My fingers tensed.
A simple question.
But it was the kind of question that drags behind it an entire history of humiliation.
I laughed inwardly—a short, soundless laugh—like someone answering a preacher who arrived ten years too late.
*A future?*
What future is left for someone whose lifetime has begun to melt into his cheek?
But the voice didn't vanish.
It returned, more precise, as if testing me:
"Choose."
---
My hand was raised to add a new leaf. It froze in the air—not because I regretted it… But because my body refused to cooperate.
Then the headache came.
Not ordinary pain.
But a sharp blow—like a steel nail—driven into my forehead, lighting lines of fire inside me. For a moment I felt my head would split in two… and the question would come out between them unharmed.
"Ah… enough!"
I tried to scream, but my full mouth allowed only a muffled hiss. I rose unsteadily; the wall twisted in my vision and the ground swayed beneath my feet, as if the castle itself had lost its certainty.
I reached toward my pocket in an automatic motion.
Panadol.
One pill… just one pill.
But my fingers touched nothing.
I had forgotten the pack at home.
As usual.
I stood there, breathing with difficulty, cursing myself, cursing qat, cursing my head. Then… something I didn't expect happened: amid the noise and pain, an old part of my mind opened—one the "kayf" had not used yet.
A calculating part.
Cold.
I began to think—not like an addict in pain… but like a person seeing his life from the outside for the first time in a long while.
*What is happening?*
It isn't just a headache. The question itself is causing the pain… as if something inside is punishing me because I'm not answering the right way.
And with every pulse, images that weren't mine began to slip into my mind:
— A narrow room with no windows.
— A steady white light that didn't blink.
— A mais n placing a black mask on a table.
— A sheet of paper with a strange triangle drawn on it… pyramid-like… three points, as if it were a "mark" or a "seal."
— And a single phrase, crossed out again and again as if deliberately erased: **The future is not a gift. The fThene is a contract.**
I gasped.
These are not my memories.
I never entered such a room.
I never saw a triangle like that in my life.
And yet… the images were clear as if they had happened yesterday.
Only then—for the first time—did I feel the real danger:
not the danger of falling from the castle wall… but the danger of **the collapse of my sense of self**.
If something was putting thoughts into my head… then the world I saw as "small" from atop the wall was not the only world.
The voice returned, closer this time, as if whispering from inside my ear:
"You understand now. Your body is finished… but the show isn't finished."
I laughed a broken laugh.
*My body is finished?*
Maybe.
I know it better than any preacher. I know it from the tremor in my hand, from the smell of my mouth, from those moments when I try to sleep and nothing comes to me but a heavy numbness.
I'm not a man fighting to survive… because survival itself has become a cage.
But the "utilitarian" logic the editor spoke about—the kind that measures things the way a merchant measures a scale—woke up inside me with clarity:
If this voice is real…
and if these memories are foreign…
Then perhaps there is a third option beyond "qat" and "future" as people understand them.
Perhaps there is an **exit**… not from the castle, but from my entire life.
---
The headache eased for a second, then returned harsher.
And I—instead of fleeing—began to watch it like a phenomenon.
Every time I tried to return to Qat, the pain stung me.
And every time I thought of a "future," those images appeared: the room, the mask, the pyramid.
This isn't preaching.
This is a **condition**.
And conditions… are made with entities that cannot be seen.
I took a step, then another, until I was close to the edge.
Here I began to hear the city differently.
It was no longer merely "ants."
It became distant voices, as if coming from a well. At the same time, the castle above me—with its stones and history—became like a massive tombstone.
I brought the bag of qat out with my other hand, without realizing that I had taken hold of it.
The bag was warm, damp, preserving the smell I knew: the smell of a postponed decision.
I held it up before my eyes and said inwardly:
*If I stay here, I will die slowly. That is certain.*
*And if I jump… I will die quickly. That too is certain.*
But between a slow death with no meaning… and a quick death that might open a door to something else—even if it's an illusion—which is more logical?
The voice returned, as if smiling without having a mouth:
"Good. That is the correct calculation."
A coldness ran through my limbs. Not fear—clarity.
I said in a broken voice, barely passing through the bajma:
"If there is… a price… then let it be now."
Then I did something I had never imagined I would do while fully in the "kayf":
I let go.
I let go of the bag first.
It fell between air and stone, a small green thing, as if leaving my hand at last to judge me.
Then… I took one final step to where there was no step after it.
I didn't jump the jump of a brave man.
I'm not brave.
I jumped like someone signing a final paper because all the previous papers had been lies.
---
The air slapped my face.
The castle passed beside me like a gray flash.
The world shrank into two lines: above and below.
And in the fall—between one second and the next—the headache stopped suddenly.
Not because I had rested… but because something else began to work.
I heard a *click* inside my head, as if an old lock had opened.
And before my eyes—in midair—a thin layer of writing opened, neither a dream nor a hallucination: words transparent like compressed fog, appearing and then holding.
It wasn't Arabic.
But I understood it at once, as if understanding were being poured into my mind:
[TRIAL: FUTURE]
[CONDITION: CHOICE CONFIRMED]
[ERROR: BODY INCOMPATIBLE]
[INITIATING TRANSFER…]
I gasped, and my lungs filled with air as if they wanted to object.
*So it isn't only a voice…*
*It's a system. A test. A contract.*
The image of the pyramid appeared again—clear—then interwove with the image of a black mask on a table, and a hand writing beside it:
"Unmade."
Then… all the images went out, the way a screen goes out when the electricity is cut.
Stone was drawing near.
I saw the jagged rocks growing fast.
And I saw the bag strike first, the green splattering on the gray like a foolish wound.
And in the final moment—before impact—the voice returned, not as a question but as a pronouncement of judgment:
"Now… the future begins."
My body struck.
And all sounds stopped.
But instead of nothingness… something else was waiting.
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