Failed Attempts to Escape "Breaking News"

One turns his eyes between a torrent of news that does not stop, in which the local collides with the international, and the Arab against the foreigner, as if a spinner hit the world, causing him to throw all the urgent and non-urgent stories and news that you receive, whether you are sitting, standing or sleeping.

You flip it over, you read it, you panic about some of it, and some of it takes you to a temporary fun that ends with the arrival of another, more terrifying news, you turn your face away from it and it surprises you again through the fast news service on your mobile.

Escape with your body away from the conflict zone and the source of the horrific news. Your memory catches up with you. It does not leave you or leave your imagination. It is part of you. Rather, it is the bridge between your body, mind and home.

You pretend to be indifferent, turn off your phone, open a book, drown in its letters, take your mind and body to another space, perhaps less stressful but more confusing.

You remember your stammer in pronouncing the letters in your first grade decades ago, while you are now immersed in their meanings, trying to connect their parts in order to understand what is going on around you.

You grow and your imagination grows with you, and the pupils of your eyes widen with every “urgent” news that may seem strange for a moment, but it requires you to impress yourself and your mind with it so that you do not get a touch of madness.

Do not calm down until you read news that scientists have discovered seven new planets the size of our planet, with rocks and water on them, which may indicate the presence of life and perhaps other creatures that share this vast world with us.

Your imagination is running again, you dream of escaping to one of these planets, and quitting the Earth

Insomnia accompanies you, and you escape from reality to imagination.

You extend your hands to a novel by Aslan or Orwell or Orhan Pamuk, you dive into it, its plot and the stories of its characters take you far, but not very far to the extent that you may forget your reality, for the reality of the original novel may be more bleak and oppressive than your reality, and it is enough for you here to read “War and Peace” To Tolstoy or "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by García Márquez, to know that imagination is sometimes more difficult and tougher than reality.

But the tragedy is that it reaches a stage where reality overcomes all degrees of imagination in its tragedy and paradoxes.

She has nothing but silence and a desire for annihilation.

You go away on vacation, vow to cut off from the world, and pretend to be able to isolate yourself from its problems, but suddenly your phone rings and someone on the other end asks you, "We want you to comment on breaking news, prepare yourself if possible, we will be on the air in minutes."

An inner desire struggles between rejection and return to a space of calm and relaxation or acceptance in order to follow up, explain and analyze the event.

When you read news that the use of nuclear weapons is no longer just a fantasy, but rather a possible thing, and you feel that the universe is about to die with any button press of a tense president, you cannot be silent or silent, and you try, or so you delude yourself, to do something or say a word that has stopped This is absurd and crazy.

And when you are struck by breaking news that dozens, including children, have died in an irregular immigration boat, you are in pain and wish that the media would cancel the breaking news service altogether.

And when the news that comes from the areas of war and conflict in our country hits you with dozens, hundreds and thousands of dead and injured as a result of a bloody struggle for power in this or that country, you feel that life has no price.

When Arab leaders, intellectuals, media professionals and ordinary citizens brag about normalization with the Zionist entity, you feel that reality has killed the imagination and taken its soul.

And when you read another news story about an Arab president killing his people with poison gas without that moving anyone east or west, the novel becomes incapable of describing a reality in its decadence that surpasses all imagination.

And when you know that another president has been unable to move for years while running his country from a wheelchair, he refused to leave him, then know that the imagination of novelists is no longer able to keep up with this bleak reality.

And when you see the president of a great country, or so it is said about it, babbling nonsense and using rude language, while the world opens its mouth and does not move a finger as was the case with former US President Donald Trump, know that the imagination is about to escape from our planet while pouring curses on us.

And do not calm down until you read news that scientists have discovered “seven” new planets the size of our planet, with rocks and water on them, which may indicate the presence of life, and perhaps other beings that share this vast world with us.

Your imagination runs again, you dream of escaping to one of these planets, and quitting the Earth, until you wake up from your dream to the buzzing of another “urgent” news, but this time about someone who blew himself up here or there, you panic, and the ghosts of reality chase you for fear that On those planets you find other, more violent and bloody beings, so you return to your reality, fit yourself in with it, go along with it, even if temporarily, and your highest ambitions in it is for the breaking news tape to stop, even if temporarily.