The American Screw

Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop. 

- Lewis Carrol, Alice in Wonderland     

As I sat down at the table for a while I felt I had never been out of this place. Slowly the reality began to move up through the threads to the head to bang it hard and press the sharpness down. I am fine now but somehow couldn't figure out what happened. I suppose it was around 9 pm when my uncle dropped me at my apartment. Some minutes later a friend called me and I left for Denton. My friend who arrived from India a couple of weeks back came to pick me up with his brother. We went to his university. He is going to stay there now. I suppose University of North Texas is about 35 miles from my place. I am not sure when we are going to meet again.

I wanted to call my father to talk to him but I realized I had wished him his birthday just around 10 pm. I thought of calling up my mother but I had spoke to her too on my way to Denton. I like Dallas more than Houston for I know more places here and the place I call home in America is here. But back there in Houston I had my people. I miss them now. I miss my parents. This just seems to have become a routine habit - miss  a few people, get busy with something only to realize later that I was missing them. But it bleeds when I miss them. The head keeps getting banged harder with every memory moving in cycles and the sharpness getting more severe.

I saw the new schedule sometime back. My first class of this semester is at 7 pm. A professor from Washington DC will come over to UTD every Monday to teach us this course 'Semantic Web'. I had to take some elective, I wanted it to be something new and so I went for this one though I have little idea what it precisely is about. I have read some vague things about it and it sounded interesting. That's all I need to know to feel the need. I am not much into Computer Networks or Database Design though I would still go for one of these in the final two semesters as electives. The harder the head is banged, the deeper it goes. Someday it will break open this way.

As we left my friend at his university in Denton I recollected how I used to feel at the beginning of Fall when I was new here. He is new here now. I know he is going to think a lot, shed some tears, speak to himself, look in the mirror a few times but he will rise above the pain. That's what we all came here for. No success is achieved at the comfort of home. We all need to move out of comfort zones, let ourselves hurt, sacrifice and allow the groves to set in more firmly. The problem is with the head being hit so harder every few days. It's supposed to be driven in, not forced to cracks.

By the time we make this place our home the cracks gets filled but the head looses a lot of gloss. I haven't read much into what philosophy talks about religion but I do know something like abstractions are spoken about. Belief in God is said to be an abstraction, faith is called a high form of abstraction, love too at times is measured in abstracts like life and hope are. It's so soothing that Allah prescribes us straight forward rules which saves us from the pain of trying to find out what abstract which part of faith is or faith itself is. We have a set of rules and they take us to our end. Philosophy might help, prescription helps in concrete. Prescriptions fight cracks, smoothen the head and make the journey appropriate. Alhamdulillah.