The place I’m at in this moment in time is a result of a series of fortunate events.
I am a private and introvert person but as my following grows I thought I’d tell you a bit more about myself and I hope you’ll appreciate my reaching out to you and enjoy this silly post. I always love hearing from my fans and at times I wonder if you know how much I appreciate your support, if I have said it enough times, how many messages and tags I missed, and so on. But those of you who see this posts and have sticked around, here is another thank you and I mean it. I wish you the best, to me you are awesome!
I don’t really know where to start my story, there are so many things that happened all at once, but I guess one outstanding piece of luck for me was when a bomb fell on the neighbor’s house instead of my grandmother’s, during WWII. If the wind had blown slightly different that day it would have been that branch of my family who died not the entire neighbor’s family, who were hiding in their basement.
Or another piece of luck was that my grandfather, a decorated veteran, fell in love at first sight with his arranged bride. Out of all the outdated family traditions he went against, this one he didn’t cast in the trash. Together they had a son, and only one, because the rest were miscarriages.
My father was born prematurely and with a heart problem which prevented him from pursuing swimming professionally, so he became an engineer. He has a cousin, now just as old as him, but when he was young,one day, he saw a pretty young lady in the train he was on, and decided to invite her to his birthday party. She accepted and brought to the party her roommate, my mother. Long adventure story there as well.
But now all of these stories are hear say, it’s what I remember from my relatives telling me their memories. I asked my grandfather once to write his life story since he had a particularly eventful one. But he never did, and after he died we found a whole box of medals, even my dad didn’t remember all of them. One was for bravery, and we do remember him telling us about a grenade that took his hearing and left him with some cool scars, other medals and diplomas were achievements from when he worked at the ministry of education, I think.
My dad had a brush with bravery too, at the revolution. They started shooting his way and so he went back home. However he does remember the students hiding under the cars behind our apartment block and soldiers dragging them out. Estimates are about 3000 died at the revolution, some were infants in their mother’s arms, but it’s a lot of fuzzy stories.
My grandmother loved telling stories, she even told me that she loved me at first sight and that when I was born the stork brought me to her and not my mother, on that cold, snowy day. Can you guess what is bullshit is and what is true? I’ll give you a second. Are you ready? All of it, yep.
She was not thrilled by my parents wedding, but fortunately my non-traditional grandfather supported my rebellious father (who got arrested once for having long hair like a rocker, yes, having long hair was bad). And so my dad didn’t listen to his mother and married for love. My grandmother, in time, grew to love me because I was so damn cute! I mean, look at me!!! And to this day, my dad still says marring my mom was the best thing he ever did.
Now bullshit number two in my grandmother’s story, is obviously storks delivering me. And number three: it snowed on my birthday. I was born at the revolution and so it’s a pretty well photographed and documented couple of weeks. In the photos students in t-shirts were running from soldiers on dry streets, it was a very warm winter, but my dad says it wasn’t that warm for t-shirts. So it kind of puts into perspective the whole bomb thought the roof story my grandmother told. What is true, however, is that Americans and Russians, both bombed her city. It was not a great time to be alive, but the alternative sucked more.
As for me, for a time I thought the street I lived on, named after a dead French journalist, actually had a tank drive over him on my street. When I was told the street wasn’t wide enough for a tank I couldn’t believe it, since it seemed to me like there was plenty of space. But after some reading I learned he got run over, up the street, in the Palace square. I know it sounds fancy, that I live down the street from the royal palace, but I actually lived in a roach infested, rat hotel. When I was little I used to fish rats out of their hole, from my balcony. Don’t ask why, I was just a strange kid.
Also I almost drowned once but my parents saved me, I almost strangled myself but my mom saved me, again, this time from the evil fence I got stuck in, and so she kind of redeemed herself for those times when she lost me on the beach. Uhmm what else? I almost got hit by a bus once, I fell down the stairs numerous times, but always landed on my butt because I have a half assed cat reflex. See what I did there? Word play on “butt”.
But for me personally I think I struck gold-luck when, at a motorcycle exposition a colleague from another class from university recognized me. We couldn’t remember each other’s names but we struck a conversation and she ended up inviting me to her team’s barbecue party. One of her team mates picked me up for the event, which was held outside of the city. Since we were the only ones who showed up on time we had to talk to each other for over an hour, and that is how I met my husband. The very next day he got a job offer for across the ocean, so that was the first time I had gone to that team’s event and the last time he went to it.
The timing is just amazing sometimes. Some say it is destiny, I think if you gamble long enough you’ll eventually win something. So if you take anything from these stories I’d recommend you take this advice: make educated guesses and learn how to sail using the wind and currents, eventually you’ll get where you wanted to go. Hope you understood the sailing metaphor, I’ll try and give you deeper more creative metaphors next time.
And hope you’ve enjoyed my post despite the history lessons, and as always I love hearing from you.
I wish you all a lovely day!
Hisame
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