The Unknown

Driving along the road to the Abdali-Safwan border crossings into Iraq, I stop on the road that was dubbed “The Highway of Death” just after the allies bombed it into obscurity during the first Gulf War in 1991. The destruction was unfathomable. The annihilation was inhumane. Iraqi solders and civilians were trying to leave Kuwait as a last ditch resort. They were trapped by America and the rest of the allied forces’ promise to allow Iraqis to leave Kuwait without violence. The outcome, however, was nowhere close. Unrelenting aerial bombardment decimated entire convoys of Iraqi peoples trying to make it back into Iraq. The result was incineration of bodies, displacement of humanity, and an unnecessary massacre of hope.

I am there now. It’s late. It’s about midnight. It’s dark and frightening. I sit alone and think back to what had happened almost 15 years ago. I keep on thinking. In my thoughts, I lose home. Instead, I am justified by the empty and howling road’s haunting death. My mind slips into the recesses of my subconscious. I am there and faint into it. I leave this reality. I sense the blackness. The rawness. The unclearness. The exquisiteness that paints over my existence. My curiosity is stunned by it.

Soon, I dance with fear until fear knows how not to dance back. Soon, the horror seeps in; creeps and leaps in until the horror becomes me. It can’t dance back because I do not fear it. I surprise it because I allow it to consume me. I invite it to have me. I, as the unknown. I, as fearlessly unproned; unproned to any fear out there.

There is something tantalizing about the unknown. The unknown as no man’s land where the animalistic human surfaces and where the molded social personality is tucked away. The Highway of Death is an appetizer and gateway into this. This is where the concrete is reciprocated into the abstract as definition is yielded into verballess submission. Hesitation cracks and opens way to beautiful decay. A blackness reigns in with such a grace of exuberance that it actually renders love. This unknown darkness that so many fear is such an integral part of the human psyche. The unknown hovers without sympathy and with little mercy. It is nothingness yet somethingness because of its void; devoid of any linearity but full of an attractive abstraction. Within its realm resides fearlessness, and deep in the recesses of this fearlessness rests conditioning that is free of definition.

As I contemplate further, the massacre seems very delicious as I empathize with the bombers who wasted so many lives and covered their lies to the media. The Iraqis’ deaths seem primitively tasty now. Their deaths taste so human now. It is as if I am digesting and rationalizing how death is alright because I as a human may have a killing spree that is natural in all of us but is rarely shown and exercised.

The darkness. The shapelessness. The pure fear. Primitive and barbaric. Uncivil and delirious. It’s God in as much as Godlessness by bringing and taking life. It’s human in as much as inhuman. It’s personal in as much as residual. The familiar horror of it all.

The horror.

Written by Tantalize 2006