Parting Ways

My inspiration

Everyone, I believe, has equal amount of good and bad. Some people have more control to be good or bad.

As of lately, my best friend and I haven't been the same. We are not as close anymore, of course this didn't just happen, events lead to the separation. None the less, each day we grow farther and farther apart, becoming our identities we will grow into adulthood to be. I am an analytic and cautious person, and I am a converted Muslim. She now is a free-spirited person with no heed to tomorrow’s presences. Obviously these are conflicting characteristic, but I am in a slight denial that they are so conflicting that we can't still be best friends. With denial comes suffering, to which I am imposing on myself, willingly. Well, not exactly willingly, how exactly do you walk away from something you hold dearly to your heart? Knowing if you let go the wind will toss it away to a place I will never visit.

 Today I was offered to attend a party with my old best friend. The temptation was beyond over-whelming, considering I could take it all back, probably, in this night. I could change myself to her ever-morphing self. 

 Most people would look at me, and simply think I would decline being a Muslim. But that isn't exactly the situation; I converted to Islam after being friends with her for 4 years. Four years of relentless play and bonding, I had successfully eliminated anyone important in my life, so I could nurture my relationship with her. I never imagined it would come back to bite me in the ass.

I was always the person that was slightly detached, not her; I was the emotionless one, not her. Now the tables have turned and I have nowhere to go. It is weird, she tells me I don't know what its truly like to lose someone to death, but I feel like I am.

 What is worse knowing that person simply didn't fit into your life, or losing them to life?
I'm not sure I'm no philosopher, but I am going to have to start making some real life decisions, not just these teenage angst ones I am use to. 

Back to today, do I go the party and let myself go into the abyss of the present day?

Do I rekindle my broken relationship with my apathetic friend?

Do I push my morals down the drain to fix this ache inside my chest, this loneliness that fills my room till the windows explode?

No.

Sometimes when you love something you have to let it go. If it comes back then it was meant to be, if not then it wasn't meant to last.

I know that I am not alone, God stands by my side. Even when he is as silent as can be, and I feel like he is not even real. I know when I am at my lowest he will be the only one to give me a hand. I know my best friend won't be there, when she needs things I can't even understand. My sisters won't be there, nor my mother or father.

I do love them all, so dearly, but I can't make her a priority when I am barely an option for her.

My inspiration is myself, and the way God made me imperfect.
How I can go through this life with its trails. I will fail and I will sin, but I am not made to achieve perfection.
God simply wants me to try.

I like to pretend like I’m bitter that I wasted five years of my life being the best friend of someone, that won’t even look me in the eye. But I’m not bitter at all, because all I want to do is rewind and stay there for a while.  I am thankful I could share a “growing up” with someone that made me laugh till I cried. The end is bitter sweet, but you live and you learn.

The one thing that really honestly hurts is that it was so easy for her. By no means do I want anything to be hard on her, but the ease in which I just slipped out of her life , burns. The acceptance she has was in an almost bliss to let me open the door and leave. Maybe she is tired of having to keep people in her life, but I thought best friends were different.

Reading Response 6

I finished The View from Garden City ,and the ending was spectacular. I feel like I really met the women in this book. Huda, I watched as she struggle with accepting that she could not marry a poor man, her marriage to a kind man but not the love story all girls dream of, and I saw her get pregnant. Huda's mother Karima, I met her as a withering old women trying to marry off her children, but I got to read her story of how her father died and in the wake of his death she met her husband. Huda's grandmother, Selwa, I depicted as simply the sweet and blunt grandmother, but I got to read her story of love and the deaths of her many children through miscarriage and bad health. Afkar a brave and stunning women, who killed herself for the freedom her husband had stolen from her with his charm. Yusriyya, gave me a perspective of the farmers in Egypt. She was in love with her farm and wide blue sky and then was sent off to marry a man in the city. her marriage proved most unkind, her husband married another women and didn't often care for Yusriyya. The last story I read was the most interesting, Samira. Samira had everything she needed, a good home, a good husband, and a beautiful child. But all of this crumbled beneath her feet when she came in contact with her best friends husband, a man she was in love with in her youth. Her need for him is overwhelming and she could not control herself when she decided to meet him. They had a long passionate affair, that was always a secret. It all ended when both her husband and this man died within days of each other.

I loved how the author inner connected all of these womens lives and wove a beautiful story of what it is like to be a woman in Cairo, Egypt.

This pictured made me think of how the book was told from an American girl that was studying in Cairo, and how she met all these Muslim women.

5th Reading Response

The novel I am reading is, The View from Garden City, by Carolyn Baugh. Once again I have came upon an author that writes in serveral different perspectives. In, The View from Garden City, there is six different women's stories being told. All these women are living in Cairo, Egypt, and are dealing with different aspects of relationships with different men. So far, I have been introduced to Huda, Selwa, and Karima. Karima is the mother of Huda, and Selwa is Huda's grandmother. Huda is having to go through the pressure of finding a suitor to marry, but she is in love with a boy she attends the university with. He is poor and has to work two jobs, and this is not an acceptable suitor in the eyes of her mother, Karima. Selwa is not as unaccepting as Karima, she mysteriously tells Huda, "You'll see. You're not waiting for anything from anyone."

4th Reading Response

I have continued to read The Memory Keepers Daughter, Although it has began to drag, I want to finish it. The plot did take two interesting turns. First, Caroline has a real-life encounter with David at his art display. the do began to talk, but the damage David has done is not going away easily. Caroline silently slips out a back door and vanishes from Davids grasp. David then feels as if any hope he had of getting his daughter back in his life has been extinguished. Feeling lost and hopeless, David wanders back to his home, so long forgotten. His old house whispers of his dead sister June, and his dead parents simple lives. David falls asleep in an old bed, only to awake to being tied to that very bed. A young pregnant girl has been living inside the old run down house, and she is very suspicious. After talking for awhile and revealing all his secrets to this unknown girl she decides to untie him. David will return to his home with Norah and Paul, with an un-telling guest. 

 To say the least these turns in the plot have once again caught me. The only real connection I made was with how David appeared to feel when Norah has absolutely no understanding of why he must have brought this unknown girl back to his home. I have been in a relationship with another person, where they can't even begin to understand why I did something. Like David, I was unable to explain my reasoning, it was an action reigned by my hearts ambition. 
  
The photo I used was how I picked the unknown homeless girl looking. She was portrayed as vulnerable by strong and independent. David kept saying, "I'm a Doctor, a doctor won't hurt you." But still she won't untie him.

3rd Reading Response

         
            

        In past two weeks I have lost interest in The Memory Keepers Daughter, the book I was posting my previous reading response about. Since I lost interest I read and finished What My Mother Doesn't Know. This book was not interesting, but it was in my favorite format of writing. The author wrote each scene in the book through little passages somewhat like poems.

           What My Mother Doesn't Know is about a teenage girl going through normal life obstacles. The main character is a teenage girl living in Boston with her dysfunctional parents. Although her two best friends are typical and shallow, she tends to be the lesser one. The focus point of the story is to tell about the different people the main character falls in love with. At the end she falls in love with an ugly nerd named Murphy, and is magically converted to a mature person. I won't recommend this book to anyone, in less it was a person that didn’t enjoy reading higher level books. This may be a book easily related to, but its plot is very simple and self-evident.
           I made little connection with What My Mother Doesn’t Know. I did find that the main character was very similar to my own best friend. With trivial worries about boys and what to do next weekend.

2nd Reading Response

I am still reading, The Memory Keepers Daughter, but now I am almost finished with the book.

In the lives of Norah, her husband, and her son, everything is coming unraveled. Norah's Son Paul is a teenager now, and becoming ever more distant to his mother and father. Not without reason is he becoming distant though. Paul's father is obsessed with his work at the hospital and his photography, and Paul's mother is bitter and harboring the secret of an affair. Paul and his father both know Norah had an affair over their vacation. but no one speaks of it. Meanwhile, Caroline the nurse that took Phoebe, Paul's twin that was abandoned at birth, is working to steadily, but slowly teach Phoebe basic life skills. In this era of the 1970's Down syndrome is not commonly accepted.

The author of The Memory Keepers Daughter writes this book in pattern which each chapter switches the point of view. So far there has been four different point of views; Norah, Paul, Caroline, and David. I love this style of writing because you get so many different views on the story being told.

A line that I really connected with was, “Here, this did not matter. Only the dream mattered..."

The reason I loved and connected with this line, from Norah's point of view, was because I have been in countless situations where I knew I was doing something not acceptable but what mattered was the moment I was in. Norah was speaking of the moments where she was with the man she has an affair with. I never have done anything this extreme, but in moments like disobeying my mom to go to an event or friends, I did something I really enjoyed even though I knew my mom would be disappointed in me.

I decided to post this photo because Norah’s affair happened at a beach house, by the ocean.

The scenes described by Norah about her affair were very vivid, and I could feel the emotion she had when I read it.

Beginning of Narrative

The Story Of My Leaving

A jittering excitement climbed throughout my body as the clock turned over to midnight. I waited contained by my third floor apartment for my best friend Journey, to arrive and carry me away to an escape dripping anticipation. My suitcase lay awkwardly on my unmade bed as I snapped photographs of my bedroom and myself. I wore a particular outfit that I would never imagine I would be forbidden, by my own heart, to wear; simple shorts and a short sleeve T-shirt. I quickly sent the photographs of myself smiling in easy happiness, to my boyfriend Moustafa, faraway in Egypt. As I waited till 1am, I sipped on coffee, loving the caffeine banging through my heart adding to my thrill. This was the summer of 2011 that would change my life till it was stripped bare of nothing and built into something utterly different.

Reading Respones 1

I was reading a book titled A Suitable Boy. In the pages I read I could figure out that the book was set in India in 1950's. The characters that I was introduced to were a girl that was 19, that was attending her sister’s wedding. Her mother, niece, best friend, and brother-in-law were also introduced in the first few pages. The activity taking place was the 19 year old girl was talking with different people at her sister’s wedding.

I had a special connection with this scene in this book. I have a good friend from Pakistan that got married this past summer. Pakistan culture is much like in India and my friend; Sumiya's wedding was a perfect reflection of the wedding in this book. But only Sumiya was the bride and the point of view in A Suitable Boy was the brides' sister. After reading this I had a mixed emotion of bitter sweetness because it reminded me of Sumiya and me miss her, but I am so happy for her getting married.

Although I really enjoyed reading the beginning of A Suitable Boy, I would not

Recommend this book to everyone. It was a book that you have to be interested in the culture of India. I stopped reading this book after I read the first chapter because it just did not put me in like I want a book to. It was also a very large book and I found myself not curious about what might happen.

Since this book I was started reading The Memory Keeper’s Daughter. I have already read around four chapters out of this book. I love the descriptions and it is absolutely mesmerizing. The connection the author makes with human emotion is rich and satisfying.

 The Memory Keeper’s Daughter is a story of a baby girl that was cast out of a family because of her disease, Down syndrome. David, a doctor, and Norah, a pregnant house-wife, is a typical married couple in the 1960’s. Till the night of Norah’s birth to her two twin babies. Norah, David, and Nurse Caroline’s lives are transformed to never be the same.