A Romantic Vision

A Captive Of Maerifa

I took small scared steps to him.

"Awan please you are scaring me," I said running my hands over my arms, the cold terrifying place pinching me.

"But I always stay until you are finished why don't you until I am?" He said in a voice breaking out.

I had chills running down at my spine.

A part of me wanted to run away, a part of me wanted to stay because how could you leave a man that smiles so much to an abandoned place?

"What is it?" I asked.

He sighed.

We set aside, the sun had not set yet, there was still the night to come.

Abigail was still on her phone, she was having a bad day.

"Your father?" I uttered picking out the remaining grass from the ground.

"Don't" he held my movement.

"You want to share something?"

" a part of me...." He rubbed his arms, I nodded. The chilled floor made the base and the breeze twisted along in the lines, a story to come of someone, a part of someone's life.

"My father was a professor at The City University. He was a man of words. A philosopher, a thinker, a romantic. He married my mother at a young age, he was charming and delightful. Chicago University, their meeting place. They eloped and built a house in the city. However, my dad was suspended from every college he taught at. He demanded freedom and taught freedom. He was a complete romantic from an age passed. His ideals were in opposition to the stringent society. He wanted to bring back the age of elegance and emotions" he cleared his throat.

"Your father..." I pictured him.

"He wanted to transform the society into a colossal ferocious perception. He dazzled when he spoke. He wanted to revive the Romanticism, to bring back that literary movement of the 18th century and resurrect in the crowd the new air of ideas and freedom" he sighed.
" After failing to gather a group of new thinkers, he took thousands of dollars from my maternal uncle and built this place.
'Maerifa' which means knowledge, awareness, and learning.
He wanted to find the generation which would change the inhibitions of society and make this world anew"

"A school...?" I asked

"A home. For learners where there would be no need for papers and sheets to measure worth. Where would be no interviews just conversations... My father wanted to cater to the individualism. To raise the height of education to people who wanted it, to acquire it who were ready to not learn but endure this fashion of life. He made this... Isn't it beautiful" he sighed touching the dust on walls which left the imprint on his brown hands.

"I always wondered Awan where did you get this from. You are like your father" I spoke in the fumes of his story.

He looked at me with misty eyes, his mouth half open and eyes wide.

Had no one ever told him this before?

"What happened?" I asked touching the walls of a past life.

"He failed. He could not gather any students. He was in debt and soon it took his life. There were not many people like him. It is not always great to be exotic. To be rare and precious. He died of his dreams. My mother hated him when he was near his death, he was totally devasted and had no money or food to keep us alive. He had a thing for white women, he was always behind one or the other. He had larger than life characters he wrote and pity before his death he burned them all"
He smiled.

It was sad but the story took a turn from a great man to one with faults.

"You might be thinking why did I highlight this great story with his fetish of white women to spoil it. It is because of laraib no man is great, which no defect can spoil. To live amidst sins was man's fate but to endure with ambition is the greater death. Ambition tastes better when it swallows you whole" He dazzled when he spoke.

"Like Icarus"

"Like my father, he died a martyrs death" he smiled as his tears dripped one after the other.

I pitied him.
The sadness of undone, incomplete everlasting wishes.

"You are the son of a Revolution" I held his hand.

"So corny" he laughed.

I hit his shoulder.

We both laughed.

We sat in the car with Abigail who was nonexistent to us. I sat in the front seat and all way who could stop Awan from smiling.