Hamdy el-Gazzar | Black Magic

The events of my life are so trivial that getting them onto paper takes a tremendous effort. Writing is painful. It tastes bitter in my throat, more bitter even than the medications for cirrhosis of the liver that I used to taste before putting them in my father's mouth.

Writing is an unbearably laborious and exhausting aetivity. It is a permanent, chronic, unalloyed pain that invades my stomach, makes my throat dry and sour, and takes the taste from cigarettes and food and from the fruit that I play around with out of boredom and impotence on the table at which I both write and eat.

It may be that this is because it's a process in which each step leads automatically to the next, while what I am trying to describe is the clotting and the flowing of the blood, its boiling and roaring. Blood runs from a neck that has been stabbed with a knife whose blade is exceedingly sharp, hard, and fine. The distance between blood and ink is that between what happened and what I am trying to record here. My eagerness and desire for her are pretty much nonexistent, dead, and everything I try to write will remain for ever crass, mediocre, and superficial, with no depth to it, no breadth and no bottom, exactly like the garbage thrown into the trash bin in a corner of my room.

My room alone is enough to distract me from writing, a protective shell that I enter and live inside while I think over that little event that struck me like lightning. All I know are my bleeding wounds, my excuses, my explanations, my mood swings, and the terrible reverberation left behind when she left me tonight without kissing me. Who can make sense of such things?

I do not want to write and I have no desire to write. The one capable of writing my personal novel is another person.