Strings - Capstone Amal Al Shamsi (1)

“Step one is usually to just start speaking. About anything. My advice to clients who are
more withdrawn, which doesn’t seem to be your case, is usually to vocalize the fourteenth
tangent you would go on if you were just floating in a void, no end in sight.”
“Is this something that helps?” Hamza asked, incredulous. “Was I by myself in this
void?”
“Yes.”
Hamza must have still looked confused.
“What does this sound mean to you?” She pulled open the drawer and then shut it, it
whined on the way back in.
The inside of his mind felt warm, like it was panting.
“When I was young, I watched a street cat being thrown around in the darkness from my
bedroom window,” Hamza began, without meaning to. “It was making such a terrible sound. I
can’t forget it.”
“Listen again.” She repeated the motion. This time the drawer screeched and fought, but
it eventually opened and shut. It was the sound of air being stolen from his veins, it was the
sound of Jasem.
Deniz looked closely at him. “Can I ask you something?”
Hamza wanted to say that he was paying her to ask him endless somethings. “Yes.”
“The accountability we mentioned, and this feeling of always being watched, I can’t help
but see them as related.”
Hamza took another sip and waited.
Deniz drank from her cup as well.
“I was waiting for the question. I guess you are right. But I don’t mean it in that way. It’s
something else entirely,” Hamza told her. “Why, although there are no consequences otherwise,
do I feel that I am supposed to do certain things or be a certain someone?”
“That’s a question that cuts right to the core of philosophy,” Deniz said, “In a game with
no rules and no winners, why do we feel bad when we don’t do ‘good’ things?”
Hamza shrugged his shoulders.
“You’re right, it’s not even a game. But I want to know, what is that certain someone you
feel you have to be?”
Outside of the window, behind her head, there was the faded facade of another building.
It seemed to be leaning towards them. “If I knew, wouldn’t I have been that person?”
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