Last weekend (here Thursday-Friday) was the strangest. On Wednesday I went off with my friends to the library; we picked up a few books, had dinner from the “snack bar” (lol) and walked for hours, till my dad had to pick me up…from there I went straight to a family friend’s home for a party she was having…ahhh…and it was terribly tiring to say the least. Thursday was busy too. My dad had an appointment and we went to this hospital—which wasn’t as boring as I thought it would, because the whole hospital was like an art gallery. No wall had been left without an art piece. None of the walls were deadly and pale as they are in most hospitals and clinics. Every wall was filled with life through beautiful Arabic calligraphies, paintings and sketches—everything so traditional and so “Saudi”. Everything there seemed to be so serene. Everything in and around that hospital made me feel awfully lucky to be (in a way) a part of a country so rich with culture and tradition. All the people there, the atmosphere in the dining, the walls, the couches—just everything was so comfortable and calm. And with a book in my bag, even all the “waiting” seemed to feel comfy. From there we went to another one of those so-called-parties where I had some of my friends (not just family-friends). All we did though was talked and ate; watched a weird Indian movie (whose name I don’t remember)—it wasn’t really fun because we stayed there pretty late and I was tired of all the traveling but it wasn’t so boring either. Ahh well, there wasn’t probably nothing strange and different about these two days. They were well, very typical and almost in-routine.
What made me call the whole weekend strange was the Friday that was waiting for us. I was studying for my Science test and while studying I slept unknowingly with my head on my book. Newton was boring me and I hadn’t slept much the last night; I really needed a short nap after the Friday prayers. It was around 3, when while I was asleep; all of a sudden I fell off my bed. It wasn’t because I was surrounded with books and that I sloppily fell off my bed—it was rather because ‘something’ had made me fall. I was in shock—confused, when I heard this loud “Boom!” which literally shook the windows in my room. I ran to my parents’ room where I heard another “Boom!”—this time it was louder. My mom had run to the room from the kitchen and for a short pause all of us (my parents and I) just stood staring at each other with uneasy expressions. I broke the silence with asking, “Was that an earthquake?” Yeah, I know that was a very dumb question but somehow learning about all that ‘motion’ in science that afternoon made me think of nothing but that and besides, I was still stupor. My dad answered me. Surprisingly he didn’t really make any remarks about how stupid my question was instead he said, “Maybe there was some problem in the transformer of the oil field”. And just then we heard men coming out of their houses—all of them confused and frightened. I turned on the TV, flipped to all the news channels—but there was no news. My dad called people from his office to know what happened, but no one knew anything. We all knew it was from the oil plant which belonged to Aramco (the place where my dad works) and the same plant which was in the town we were living. But what we all didn’t know was that the two booms had come from suicide bomb attacks. There was no news about it until my dad had left to the oil plant for he was called by his office.
He had left in a rush and we all were still thinking that everything was maybe a slight mistake which caused the transformer to burn—we all were wrong. News on TV made us realize our mistake in thinking that way. Sirens went off, ambulances and police cars sang even more mournfully, helicopters swung in the evening sky of a Friday that turned out to be the strangest of all—everything had changed. I was worrying about my father. He hadn’t taken his cell phone and I was paging him but there was no answer. Yes—the evening had gone even stranger. Every time a car passed by I would peek through the curtains of my window and since that was happening so often, I sat right beside it. Every now and then I would run to the TV where my mom was to know if there were an updates. Finally then at around 10 my dad came back and somehow it felt as if he had come back from a battlefield—as a surviving, fighting soldier. Ironic it was that he had left the home so uncomfortably and confused but now he was back with a weird relief. He told us what he had seen—the police, the military, the chaos in the plant—just everything. My mother and I listened to him carefully—thanking God in every few seconds.
Had those bombs blown off just a little accurately, the whole Abqaiq would have been in flames. They say the difference was only 22 steps and if it hadn’t been for that minute distance—that mistake those terrorists made—there would have been a massive environmental disaster that may have spread as far as Riyadh (which is around 350 km away). God saved us and we were lucky enough to be saved. Terror today creeps in every street but when it stepped into ours we were miraculously fortunate to not lose our breaths…
Oh Lord, let that Friday never come again. Let war have no existence and violence no subsistence.
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