Strings - Capstone Amal Al Shamsi (1)

Science of Cons
What was the feeling of coming home? Hamza thought of it as a promise that had been
kept. You are back, and you, you are the same as always. Nothing could amount to it.
He sat down on his couch for a while. Gradually, he closed his eyes. How unacquainted
he is with the back of his eyelids. He had trouble sleeping, his mind was constantly churning
stories. He hated to quiet it, to not hear anything. He had developed a method some time to fall
asleep, sometime after his children were born. That was how he knew he was maybe getting old.
The first step was to think of himself as a room, his eyelids were the shut curtains. Then, he
slowly pulled away from himself, seeing the room stretch out from a slim horizon. He didn’t
allow himself to decorate the room, only to inhabit it. It was him, for the time being. He just had
to keep retracting, not thinking of anything but the empty room until he eventually bored
himself until he fell into a shallow slumber.
A shrill ringing cut through some time afterward. It was hard to tell how long he’d been
gone.
The curtains come suddenly up, sticking once again to the ceiling. It was dark outside.
“Hello,” he said before the phone was even at his ear. He repeated himself, clearing his
throat.
“Hamza,” a woman’s voice responded, “I was about to leave the office when I saw your
call.”
Hamza suddenly felt ashamed of himself, thinking back to those heels on the street
banner. Why did he think of her? He really did want to call her before that, it just was a strange
connection he made in his mind. “Thank you for calling back. Am I taking up your time? It’s
okay if you have to leave. It’s nothing important.”
“You’re the only one that calls me and admits that what they have to say is not
important,” the woman laughed. “I was just in a meeting discussing the placement of the–”
“Don’t get me in trouble by sharing classified information,” Hamza told her before
pausing. He grinned a little bit as she laughed some more. He was also not in the mood to talk
about anything else, he wanted to talk about himself.
“Okay then.”
“Reem, do you actually like working?”
“You want me to answer that while in my office?”
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