Dr. Jedidiah's Diary: Episode 13. Emma from Syria

Dr. Jedidiah’s Diary

Dr. Jedidiah is a psychiatrist who loves traveling, meeting new people, and exploring different cultures. As a single father who lost his wife to drug overdose 10 years ago, he has not been his old perky self for the last decade. During those hard years, he has met hundreds of, thousands of people from various walks of life around all over the world. Meeting new people and listening to their stories outside his office have given him different feelings from the ones through the formal encounter groups or support groups for therapy. These people he has accidentally come across were the paths through which Dr. Jedidiah could look back on his own life, being truly honest with himself. Here is Dr. Jedidiah’s monologue that has left him with some food for thoughts in life….or a fodder to justify his own mistakes in the past.

Episode #13: Emma from Syria

Emma was the most depressed and disprited girl that I had ever met in my life. She was always the very first in my sight when I stepped into the gin mill called “Cozy Cabin”, which was my major hangout around evenfall while struggling to survive the sea of pain since I had lost my wife, Demi. Emma caught my eyes not because she was the only one there, but because she’d stand out among the crowd by the impassivity on her face. Her deep pessimism shows by the way she moved, the way she downed the liquor, and the way she stared into the air.  To put it mildly, she seemed to make light of everything in life. To be accurate, she was more like a futilitarian who had given up on any kind of expectation or hopes from humans. ‘Huge resemblance to Demi’, I felt inside.

This woman named Emma had a thick accent in her English. She was born in Syria and moved to Lebanon, and then to Egypt with her family as a refugee. There she found no land of promise at all. It was rather a cesspool of iniquity and depravity. Being terribly lack of food, water, and basic things to survive, she fell into drug dens that were crawling with thieves and drug traffickers who could mess up with anybody present there. In Emma’s painful memory in the raw that had left her heart sore, there was always countless ragged children who used to cry themselves to sleep fighting hunger pang in the street. Quite a lot of them were carrying narcotics. They had also been innocent beings like other little ones in privileged growing situations before relegated to fallen angels regarded as contemptible riff-raffs who were in a rotten way to survive. Emma ended up in the bottomless pit by human traffickers. She lost her soul and trust in humanity for good. It seemed next to impossible for her to catch an unguarded moment among those human traffickers that gave up on the last hint of humanity. After three years of being trapped and delivered to a ton of different places, Emma could finally get out of the devilish group of smugglers. She came back to her home to find out her parents had already passed away in deep frustration a year ago.

Although she had been physically set free from all the nightmarish period of life, her blank look was telling me that nothing and nobody on earth would be able to rekindle her will to carry on or cozen her into believing that this world is still worthy of her attention and positive mind. I don’t remember since when, but she disappeared one day and never showed up at Cozy Cabin. I still feel bitter, sad, and badly anxious to hear from Emma, wondering if she has ever been able to settle down somewhere and call the place her own promised land now. As a person who listens, studies, reads, and seeks for clues or puzzle pieces to the matters in people’s imperfect lives, I keep asking myself and God if humans could still rebuild hopes even after they have been completely shattered to the last piece.

Expressions

    

    1.  evenfall: the onset of evening/ dusk

    2.  impassivity: the state of indifference/ a lack of feeling, emotion, interest, or concern

    3.  futilitarian: one who believes that human striving is futile

    4.  cesspool: a filthy, evil, or corrupt place or state

    5.  to crawl with: swarming with/ full of …..

    6.  in the raw: in its true state; not made to seem better or more palatable than it actually is    2 (of a person) naked. informal

    7.  relegate ….to ~: to consign to an inferior or obscure place, rank, category, or condition:

  

    8.   to cozen someone into doing~: to mislead / cajole someone by means of a petty trick or fraud; deceive.