My heart hurts. I feel like I’ve been abandoned here in London. Noor left to America today to start the beginning of her life. I hope that she does so well. I will miss her so much.

Many kids get a chance to have fun in University. Not me. I wanted to go to AUB, that is all I needed. I didn’t care if it wasn’t Harvard or as good as UCL or anything of the sort but I don’t care… At least I would have been HAPPY. Although I know my parents always meant the best for me… I will never forgive them for not letting me go. MY life is there in Beirut not here in London. I guess they thought they knew what they were doing. And when my dad said “At this point in time your happiness does not concern me” I guess he thought he was saying something relevant, something that should have marked me and motivated me to do the best I could. Well it did mark me, but no in the way he thought it would. It marked me in the fact that for the first time in my life, I understood that my father had no clue what I was going through and in other words wanted to pretend he did. I guess he thought he was being funny or something. Well I didn’t laugh. I am still not laughing.

When I saw my cousin’s graduation in Jordan I looked straight ahead at the stage filled in an ordered fashion with around fifty lovely young, innocent and fresh faces. No matter how experienced they thought they were, no matter how much they thought they saw; they hadn’t seen anything. They were still mama’s boys and daddy’s girls. They were standing together and waiting for their lives to finally start. After a long year of anticipation, their graduation had finally come. I sat there behind my ridiculously big Vintage Linda Farrow glasses and cried uncontrollably. My family thought I was crying because my little cousin was graduating and I was so proud of him. That was one of the reasons, but not the main one. I was mainly crying because I wished I could start over. It was as if these young kids had just been handed a fresh, clean, new notebook with pristine crisp pages that were now opened for the first time, along with a new pen from which the ink within it had never flowed. It was as if they were being told, “Go ahead guys, it’s only just beginning. Start writing!”
And people tell me, “Oh! Don’t be silly your so young, only twenty! You can start over too!” I think that is a completely ridiculous statement. How can I start over, my notebook has already been used, my pen’s ink has already been running. I’d have to rip out my old pages in order to start over. And you cannot rip out the pages because this notebook is not a normal notebook. Memories that are written in it are not easily erased.