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    Just One Day
    Just One Day
    Just One Day
    Ebook143 pages1 hour

    Just One Day

    By Rabie Soubra

    ()

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    About this ebook

    A short story about the fight with destiny, finding happiness, finding love, recognition of roles and the futility of it all

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRabie Soubra
    Release dateApr 5, 2012
    ISBN9781476363608
    Just One Day
    Author

    Rabie Soubra

    Born in 1964, in Beirut, Lebanon, married and father of two boys. A marketing and communication specialist. I love literature, especially Russian. Favorite authors include Hemingway, Joyce, Orwell, and many others. I read everything.

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      Book preview

      Just One Day - Rabie Soubra

      Just One Day

      Rabie Soubra

      Copyright 2012 Rabie Soubra

      Smashwords Edition

      Just One Day

      Chapter One

      Ziad and Lara sat quietly in the car as they were heading back home from a dinner function they have just attended. There was silence in the car, except for a faint stream of radio music, slightly audible, seeping through the audio system, and the occasional slush sound that was produced whenever Ziad drove over a puddle on the wet road, as there was a slight drizzle that night.

      He felt something of a childish joy every time he drove over a puddle, and he would always get consciously amused at the fact that even now, at 45 years of age, he still felt that boyish joy.

      The silence was not heavy, or embarrassing, they were used to it. It was the kind of comfortable silence between good friends.

      After 15 years of marriage the topics to discuss were few and far in between. Ziad was not much of a talker to start with.

      He always told his wife that he is completely unable to conduct small talk, and that he feels the urge to run away every time he was dragged into an inane conversation, and breathless whenever this kind of conversation carries on for more than five minutes.

      He reached out and held her hand. The love was still there after all these years of marriage.

      When he first met her, he loved everything about her. She was exactly his type. Beautiful petite frame, just like he prefers. He never liked tall girls. There was an air of haughtiness about her that he liked. She carried herself well, knew what and how to dress, and knew how to always look good.

      She was close to 40 now but she still looked great, he loved that about her, but what he loved the most was that on the inside she was an eight-year-old girl. Innocent, simple and incredibly pure, completely alien to the vileness of the world and totally oblivious to the struggle that people have to go through in order to move forward in life.

      She did adapt and mature and started to accept the string of disappointments that came her way one after the other, and she did develop an immunity towards those disappointments and found out a way to deal with them. But she maintained that little girl innocence.

      When he first saw her almost twenty years ago, he knew immediately that he wanted her to be his wife.

      They went out together for five years before marriage became the obvious outcome of their relationship. She saw in him a strong, solid man who has a solution for every problem. And he valued in her that innocence and purity that were so rare. He sincerely pledged to make her happy, not because she demanded it, but because it pleased him to be able to be in a position to do that.

      All those years went by, and two children and two miscarriages later, he was obsessed, haunted with a feeling of not having done enough, contrary to his best efforts and intentions.

      His career faltered on many occasions and he found himself having to pick up the pieces and start anew. This took its toll on their relationship inevitably because it introduced a consistency of disappointments for both of them. He because he wanted to do more for her, and she because she wanted more out of life but couldn’t get it. But with time they learned to live with that and accept that things in life don’t always pan out as planned.

      Ziad was self employed, has developed a career in engineering and he was doing quite well, living a decent life, putting the kids in good schools and so on. But it was a struggle; the coveted feeling of safety was never attained.

      Both of them were living in the shadow of the hope that one day it will turn out for the better and their situation will improve and the safety and luxury levels they so crave will actually and finally materialize.

      That hope took many hard hits over the years. And they each dealt with it differently. He managed to immune himself, armed with literary influences from various characters and stories and great literature books that he has read, and became a sort of a stoic. Hardening up in the face of calamities and increasing his resolve as time goes by and as challenges got harder and more serious. He resolved that he was a combination of a Hamlet, a Tom Sawyer, and a Winston Smith.

      His wife, his peers, all thought he was too idealistic, an adjective that he carried around most of his life and did not necessarily object to. He was idealistic, and he knew it. He was also aware of the perils of being idealistic and the difficulties this poses in real life. But that was the zone that he was in harmony with himself in, and he was content with this adjective and willing to deal with life’s problems from this perspective.

      As they were heading back home, he firmed up his grip on her tiny hand and with a little affirming shake their eyes met and he smiled at her and said:

      It will all be all right.

      With a nod and a smile she responded as they drove into the night.

      Chapter two

      Daddeee?

      This is how his little boy, Danny, customarily woke him up, to his utter delight. And he responded by hugging him and feeling the warmth of his body as his boy tucks and huddles in and sleeps for another hour in Ziad’s arms.

      This was Ziad’s favorite part of the day. He was an affectionate father generally but he was especially and madly attached to his boy.

      He had two kids. The eldest was his daughter Dania, 14 and Danny was 4. Dania was born just within a year of his marriage. It was an unwanted pregnancy, too quick and hasty, but nevertheless welcomed and cherished. He was not ready to be a father, nor was his wife. But the girl was born and she was loved and cared for whole-heartedly.

      He missed her childhood completely though. He missed raising her up and playing with her and even bonding with her properly.

      He was still an employee when she was born, and he was working in a firm that was notorious for its politics and inner struggles, something that his idealism sharply clashed with and could never enable him to cope with. But he had no choice and he held on and tried to make the best of it, at the expense of great exasperation, frustration and stress.

      He used to tell his wife that he felt he was on a huge battlefield, and thousands of people were slaughtering each other, and he was standing right in the middle of that battlefield, getting shoved, pulled, and splattered with blood, all the while not knowing why he was there standing in the middle of this mayhem, nor was he aware of the reason all those people were butchering each other in the first place.

      Those were his feelings working in that firm, and with other firms before and after. As a matter of fact, as he grew older and matured and got to discover his inner self, he remembered that those were his feelings, but to a less dramatic extent, when he was a student at school. When he was a little kid. He was an observer, and he had a strong solitary characteristic stemming from a sense of bewilderment towards everything that surrounded him.

      From a very tender age he used to wonder about observations he had towards his society and peers. He was particularly struck by how petty people can behave and how he thought that everybody was missing the big picture and a broader perspective on life.

      This outlook did not paralyze him, but it just reinforced his solitary constitution and affected his social skills because he simply could not relate to the superficiality and the falsehood that he felt so strongly around him.

      He remembers an incident right at the very beginning of his professional life, the first job he ever occupied, right when he graduated from college.

      He joined a firm that administered the regulation of legal and operational affairs of airlines. Supervising tariffs and laws and stipulations and provisos and so on. It was a low stress job, involved a lot of traveling and coordination between airlines and regulatory bodies. He enjoyed it and felt that it is an ideal start for his professional life.

      It was a huge office that could have accommodated 60 people but was only occupied by 13, so there were a lot of empty spaces and desks and the staff were scattered around without a visible order or hierarchy.

      They gave him a desk by a window and he settled in nicely and got along with the people around him. It was a quiet atmosphere in that office, all the people were busy reading and reporting and preparing manuscripts.

      The sole inconvenience he felt was that the window behind hem let in the sun in the early hours of the morning and it oppressively struck his back and made him sweat. He had an aversion to brightness and to the heat and it irritated him.

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