The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Confusion, misconceptions, identity crises.
Liberal minded individuals giving in to ferocious fundamentalism.
Harrowing tales of torture.
Nostalgia drawing you back, swallowing you into a deep, dark abyss.
Events so beyond your control, so out of your reach, absolutely distant. Events which touch you so deeply, carve out wounds so bad, they change your life.
Lessons in forgetting.
Divisions within, which wrench you apart, tug at you in opposite directions until you lose your way so badly, you can never come get back to being the same person, living the same life.
Entire lives lost. Forever.

Life unfolds around us in unforeseen ways. When 9/11 happened no one could have predicted it except maybe the ever suspicious intelligence agencies brewing up nefarious plans to take over the world. What no one could also have predicted was the immense impact it had on individual lives all over the world. The entire globe was transformed from its complacent state of delinquency into a mass of action, combat, terror. Stories of horror began circulating soon after. Stories of horror and merciless torture.
What transforms peoples and lives so completely they become insidiously hateful, corrupt, malicious, and rotten? What happens that makes idyllic lives lived in perfect ‘mehals’ with picturesque sprawling lawns so impoverished and lack lustre? Where goes the serenity, the surety of knowing what you are and where you belong? What brings you at odds with everything around so that you lose yourself so completely it’s just you and that moment and eternity in each brief, fickle speck of time.