My little Gaza Strip

A couple of years ago, I decided that I needed to take it easy and stop running around in my life and started saving for the years to come when you may not be able to do anything you want to do, run and play. I started to think of the days and years passed by while sitting in the table alone and sipping instant noodle soup on a shiny beautiful weekend afternoon.

Memory brings back the lived, loved, bad, good and worst days in my life. No matter where you were born, the years you spent as adolescent with the very, very best friends you ever had in your life, is the best town in your life. I can give a billion dollars to get those days back.

I remember the visit I had to the small town I grew up with my very best friends in my life. I never kept in touch with any of them except one friend, who also moved out of that town, even though I remember them very often and sometime in my dreams. It is a very small town, dirty, poor and unknown town full of very average people.
I never informed anyone in the town I grew up. Even if I wanted, it would be hard to search and find someone I knew as I did not know anyone there at that time.

I drove  near the block where I lived the precious years of my life and stopped the car one block away and started walking the roads where I used to dash to the shop near by when my mom asked me to get something from the nearby shop where you get almost everything. The streets where I used to walk expecting the girl you have crush on would show up. When she did show up by stroke of luck sometime, I remember that I could feel the blood pumping through my body from my fast beating heart.
 
Now I walked through the streets slowly, relaxed and enjoying every step of the walk. No one paid attention to me walking through the street. A small boy dashed behind me and turned at the corner and disappeared. In a few minutes a young mom crossed me from behind yelling aloud to the boy to slow down, even though she knows that he cannot hear her and even if he hears her, he is not going to slow down.

The streets I grew up with did not change much. That is the beauty of unknown small towns for those who want to revisit. 

In one of the houses in the street I lived, I saw a man sitting on his patio bench maybe ten or fifteen years older than me. He is retired a long time ago after the long and hard dog years, which I could see in his face. He started at the street without focus and as I approached, he tried to focus his eyes to see who it is as he could recognize that I am not one of the nearby residents from the way I walked.

For a moment he stared at my face and suddenly his face lit up for a second and the next second he looked away and continued to stare at the street without focus. The look on his face was like the look on the face on someone who recognized you but don’t know who you are. He could be one of my friend’s father or elder brother. I did not stop or talk to him as he went back to his unfocused stare and thoughts. Also somehow I felt he also does not want me to talk to him.

I continued to walk and it was a weekday busy morning and the sky was not that shiny and the smell of earth was filled in the air due to the small and short rain last night. The windows of the houses were open and one could see what is happening inside.

I sat on the small wall of the culvert in the corner of the street I used to sit with my friends and share one cigarette with nine other friends with the fear in the heart that some one would see us smoking. The open sewer behind the culvert wall smelt horrible today but it never bothered us those days as we spent most memorable days sitting there watching pretty girls pass by or discussing most interesting trips to the river or about the new movie in town.

Sitting there thinking of those days, I could see through the windows in one of those houses a small girl in school uniform was busy getting ready, arranging her books and putting them in her bag and dashing between rooms. She was looking for that particular book or notes that must have in her class today with the look on her face that anytime she is going to cry.

I got up from the culvert and continued to walk through the street after dusting my pants.

After a few steps I stopped and stared at the sky.  It felt like the days when I used to come out to play with my friends on the weekend morning and you don’t see any of your friends in the vicinity but you can feel that there are people in all those houses and you feel left alone.

I felt like a 10-year-old boy again and the time stopped for me for a few seconds. I could understand now why people love, live and sacrifice their and their children’s lives for a small piece of land or the dirty streets.

I continued to walk with the slowest steps and the small ray of smile came up on my lips as I was the only one who was enjoying the gentle breeze on a gloomy morning on a busy weekday.

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RD is a software engineer working and living in Silicon Valley, CA, USA and also a freelance writer.
a keen traveller, he writes about anything and everything from technology and travel journal to politics.