To the sun that disappeared in the sunset then the world became dark and snow fell and covered the earth in frost and buried the tiny green plants bearing the seeds of the future... To the loving chest I was resting my head on as it was tired and exhausted and weighed down by the sadness of my life and dozens of dreams and ideas bigger than me... To the heart that loved me when the world hated me... That held me in esteem as the world scorned me in disdain... to the fingers of the hand whose palm tirelessly held an olive branch with bottomless generosity, that held me from drowning in the gargantuan swamp engulfing my surroundings... To the kind and wise eyes that didn't saw me as a massive joke but as a human with a heart and a mind of his own... Saw me as a shard from the sun clouded by thick clouds but surely becoming complete in the future... as a genius intellect forming in the midst of violent torrents of general stupidity and apathy... To the only warmth I knew in my life... To the only kind loving smile in my life... To the only revolution of the intelligent mind in a scary and mad world... To the green and generous memory that will never die out in my life... To my mother, I dedicate these pages.

So he said.

Let me describe you myself:

I am a man with no woman... with no fields to sow seeds of wheat... with no bottle of wine... with no ball to play with... with no shining memories... with no path to the future.

On my grave will be inscribed these words: "Here lies a man who died during his life."

I am a man followed by laughs and stray dogs... Laughs from people, and curses/calls like a dog/sicking dogs on him (?? unclear)

I am a man cursed by the woman on the street and loved on the bedsheets (by prostitutes).

I am a king in the clothes of a beggar. An intellectual playing with the toy of a small child... A clown who tries to take out the mask of comedy from his face futilely because Nature welded it there well for it to remain applied there forever.

I think as if I dream, and dream as if I think.

You are "so nice" like a perch for pigeons to gather at... "pleasant" like a cigar after lunch... "a delight" like that parrot I raise at home to tell me nice little jokes all the times... "kind" like a cuddly cat rubbing on my feet and jumping on my knees... You are "totally just like a real brother"... or so I am always told by women.

I am faithful... kind... courageous... like a sentient dog like a dunce.

My God you sent me to a world I feel intense shame for my self whenever I see myself on the eyes of others... or from the myriads of reflective surfaces you filled your universe with... maybe on purpose... to further humiliate me... to make me feel worthless even more... My God... I won't ask you for your reasons... there's no doubt you had good ones... but I will ask you... Did you really mean it? ... Did you really seek that?

——————(7)——————

My Sun... she who I ask... I lived in darkness all the years of my life... I hope you will suddenly shine on my life to dispel all of that darkness surrounding me... to ravitalize with warmth my withered deceased leaves... Our meet-up... shall be the horizon... at any time and place you choose. (A letter yet to be sent to my loved girl)

Father... me being your son prevents me from hating you... I don't think that I really hate you... but I can't forgive you for bringing me to a world that bears me intense animosity to the core of its bone... You created me an odd foreign one O Father as I look for harmony in a world filled with chaos... I suffer... I suffer always alone on the rhythm of the laughs and mockery of other... Maybe this is why, my Father, I didn't make the same mistake with children from my own... from our own, both of us... one tragedy is more than enough, isn't it true father?

My Son... I didn't create you... Don't you understand? I don't have a plant to produce children within me or even outside my self... Look at me, I can't even create even a small finger... Son... Do you yet understand?... I just transported you... From the world of the unknown to the world of the sensory... Maybe this was my biggest sin in your opinion, but i didn't create you... do you understand me... i didn't create you... I am just a postman who was entrusted with transporting a letter from a place to another... who has no responsibility whether the letter was sad or crimson blood red violent... do you now understand me my son? (A dialog that never took place between me and my father)

The Author

——————(8)——————

These pages are about the strangest problem in my life, the problem of ugliness... you can think of the weirdest freak in the world in your imagination... the ugliest face you can meet anywhere, so you make sure you see me in front of you... Ever the ever-freaky laughterstock... Ever the strangest... the most outrageously abhorrent... the ugliest.

Ugliness is the core idea around which all my life and feelings are centered about, I start from there and finish there, so it's the first station and the terminus for me... Ugliness is that black ash piling on all atoms of specks of niceties and pleasure of my life, which it taints with its dark dreadful grey color... it's the black light that radiates in all directions of my life preventing clear transparent vision for people and men.

In these pages i will try and analyse the phenomena of ugliness as my lived experience, for no one lived ugliness as i did... nor felt its cruelties and bloody violence as i did.

Unattractiveness in my opinion is like a prism of transparent glass with many flat surfaces and angles, and I will try to provide an exhaustive panorama from all planes and angles of this formidable prism that projects black light in all directions of my life, poisoning it all irremediably and destroying all of its aesthetics.

——————(9)——————

I came close to ugliness like no other human in this world... so close i could touch and feel his hot breath on me, unattractiveness is my relentlessly vicious best friend who I lived with... within me or within him all my life... his kinks and fits of temper no longer scare me... the kinds of deprivation and torture and freakiness he inflicts me with in all instants of my life don't defeat me... it infuses me with an immense power for competitiveness... Unattractiveness is my eyes that gave up on vision... My tense nerves that atrophied... my cells that reached old age before their prime... My skin that frowned and wrinkled (withered).

I felt the horror of the discovery within the first instants of conscience in my life... my tiny fingers felt the skin of a mythical horrible beast and that realization dawned on me with intense dread and horror submerging my heart from the very first instant.

I lived ugliness in moments full of pain and horrible psychological torture... Broken friendships... Destroyed hopes... Perpetual and cruel escape from fearsome demonic powers chasing me.

I hated ugliness like no other human in the world because i knew it like no other... for ugliness did with no man as it did with me... the amount of destruction, misfortune and inhumanity... Look at all my problems and ugliness will be behind it... Those evil puppeteer fingers moving the threads of my life.

Sometimes I imagine ugliness is a continuous sequence of explosions in my life, but amazingly enough, i didn't shatter yet or fall in pieces on earth, I am made from a rapidly self wielding, self regenerating material, resistant against the most extreme chocks and explosions.

What I saw... what I lived, is far from the believable. If a man had the foresight to tell the future and told me in the very beginning of my life that humans will reach this much stupidity, self-centered hubris, and savagery, i would have said he wants to scare me, but i lived the tragedy for myself and met everything.

——————(10)——————

After a long experience in life, I came to the conclusion that ugliness isn't a mere strange phenomena that stirs people's laughter and mockery and just that, but closer than anything else to a real crippling degenerative disease that the unattractive person is inflicted with so it destroys and mangles in his life what those diseases usually do, and i even believe now that ugliness may be very well the cruelest disease and the most painful and destructive for the human soul among everything else. Because, the ugly person doesn't stir pity from people, kindness, empathy with his plight... but rather triggers a revulsion of brutal feelings... every speck of their judgemental critical sense is directed with raw violence towards this man seeking to destroy his spirits and humiliate him.

They are standing bewildered at a weird freaky event they can't comprehend... one that unearths all the feelings of hatred within them, all the bitter fruits of tragedy that the ugly person becomes the victim of the outpour thereof eventually.

But if we said ugliness is a crippling disease destorying man's life, what's strange is that man feels no impotence preventing him from living and enjoying life to the fullest like others... just feeling a transparent invisible barrier preventing him from belonging... man-made by those who bear him hatred and evil intent just for being different and ugly.

Humans, being the stupid lot they usually are, are those who make from a predicament that's at worst only a source of shame and no more, a deep tragedy they inflate... a cruel kind of diseases that could be traditionally classified as one, as it has the same tragic, cruel and bloody consequences.

And indeed, despite that the destruction of the spirits of a human and dehumanizing him is much more dangerous than robbing him from one of his five senses, and much devastating in spoiling and ruining his life... yet humans with their traditional stupidity don't count ugliness among the classification those traditionally recognized diseases, despite all the cruelly bloody tragedy that its existence implies.

——————(11)——————

I have now faith that ugliness is an eternal curse ugly men are inflicted with and remains with him to the very end of his life. A slow fulfilled eventuality, amazing and awe-strucking, in all the ways life can be miserable and bad... with no recourse, escape, or salvation from. A weird man-made Bastille (french prison) man lives in until his life is extinguished.

No one in this world loves an ugly person... No one pities him, nor trusts him. He's the number one refused... the number one hated one... the number one tortured... He's within yet outside the normal course of life living alone, writhing in pain alone, and dying alone.

The problem of the ugly person in my opinion isn't his own sense of being different from others, but all of that continuous animosity those "others" bear to him... Over-dramatizing the problem in front of him in a way that calls for utter and complete despair, and giving up the fight... It calls for hating other people (being misantropic) and considering them the true source of his misery.

The problem is his continuous humiliation... Continuously reminding him of the personal aspects where he is lacking... looking at him in extreme bewilderment whenever he dares try to live life as a normal person with a full grasp on his five senses, and this, this is where people fall into the trap of the weirdest contradiction (moral dissonance) conceivable... They supposedly consider him, the ugly individual, a completely normal person, yet at the same time they are disapproving of him that he tries to live as a normal man lives.

People are the root and start of the problem, and it loops back to them in the end. And if people were real, genuine people full of humane warmth and kindness like people supposedly should be, then the problem of the ugly individual would be reduced to nil, to zero... If we imagined a world of blind people, or if we imagined an ugly individual living alone on his own somewhere with no humans in sight, then there would be absolutely no problem... The problem is that there are human eyes full of frightening abominable formidable cruelty casting permanently judgemental rays on the ugly person then roasting and scorching him... It awakens within him every last factor of inferiority complexes and feeling like a freak... A pariah exiled from the world he lives in and that it would be better for him to leave away and never show his face again, but the ugly person has the right to live in this world, because he fulfills all prerequisites of life and existence within him, yet humans refuse to let him be... He is allowed by Nature, but not by humans.

——————(12)——————

What's weird is that people punish the ugly person for a crime he didn't commit but was committed on him by unknown, demonic powers to be that could have brought great misfortune on them just like it did to him, if not for a happy coincidence in their lives that made them miraculously pass that lottery unscathed... they all punish him... all the time... until the very end of his life.

What's more abhorrent than that is what this overly heartless judgement implies... taking very shallow standards to measure beauty (attractivenes), which is the root of this laughable crime... Attractiveness as these stupid self-appointed judges see it, is the external proportion of the human shape, his true feelings and empathy -which might be extremely shallow- a non factor... and if we applied this shallow standard of beauty to evaluate the supreme gentlemen of the world, then a man like Beethoven or Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec would be deemed "ugly freaks"!

Ugliness in my opinion is a problem that has no real solution unless with the rebirth of life's creation reset from scratch, with no mistakes, no discrimination, or at least invigorating people's hearts with empathy and love, and teaching them with habits to look objectively with empathy at the ugly person, and admit his right to live and share life with others.

I'm perfectly aware how ugliness robbed me from love, job and freedom... Other's eyes were always glimmering around me with intense mockery... Reminding me always to know my place and go back there as they draw its boundaries for me and not as reality makes it out to be... I always stumbled at that transparent, invisible barrier that prevented me from complete integration in life... They always made me feel like an abnormal person... Rejected, hated by others.

——————(13)——————

Eyes examinate me inquisitively putting me on the spot and causing me great discomfort and indecisive unease... after all those long years I lived among those sparkling hateful eyes, I have yet to know what exactly they want from me... What's sure is that they hate me... Looking at me with a great and disgusted perplexion... Seeking to harm my humanity... Eyes like a minefield that warns me from even approaching or touching them... I am like a n*gger (sic) living among millions of white eyes that spread perplexion, hate and shame in his life... Eyes that munch on him and spit him on earth in a continuous rumination... The n*gger (sic) ascends with his struggle to reach the top 1% of society... as a venerable man in his sixties... riding on a luxurious car... then a white hoodlum kid blocks his path in the street and calls at him... "Hey, boy."

Humans conspired to realize a formidably cruel result in my life... to freeze me anchored in my spot... I am immobile incapable of taking a single step forward... I never loved, never worked, never married, never had kids... Like a reef rock in an ocean of loud waves.

Now I feel i reached the lowest depths of the abyss, because it became more than bewilderment in eyes to intentional calleous rudeness... Insults, disapproving cries, sneers and whistling in mockery, all follow me every place i come to... they spit violently on the floor whenever i come close to them as their faces are filled with the most extreme expressions of hatred... in their eyes i am accused of all ugly accusations, i'm a madman, queer, freak, stupid, ugly, and this makes me question the meaning of justice, of humanity.

I think if ever saw the divine in the moments of intensely horrible sadness in my life, i would not hesitate to take a gun and shoot, for what the divine did to me is a crime that can't be ever forgiven... If invadors came to my town whose heart died, i would open the doors for them wide open... with no animosity or weapons held against thems whatsoever, and my only reason would be that they will bring the most humiliating suffering and shame to those people I hate from the depths of my soul.

——————(14)——————

How can I defend a town that hates me... that wishes me continuous shame... a town where i have no single circle of a safe haven of warm love, with only a tiny speck from the sun that shines whole on its people... a sun that never reaches my room... whose moon never looks at my fields... Damned cruel little children pick my flowers and step on them with their feet... A town where i have no single woman who loves me... A human who i belong to, or who belongs to me... a single child who bears my name and my legacy... how can i defend a town i am feeling blood-freezing fear doing my simplest chores in its streets that bear the maximal degrees of hatred and madness... a hatred that emits from its origins and almost unroots me... a hatred that became my daily meal.

My real tragedy is the stark outrageous contrast between my shape and my true essence. If beauty was distributed appropriately to suit the inner feeling of man, then I would deserve a better shape, no doubt, but tragedy struck, to the point I sometimes wish this dissonance wasn't, even at the expense of my principles and inner feelings on the matter, even if the price to pay was to be mad, or mentally degenerate, or stupid.

——————(15)——————

I still remember that freak who was residing in a home close to us... His family had wealth, and he was the eldest brother. His siblings reached notorious positions in society, but he was left behind for a very strange reason, which was that he was ugly and mentally deficient at the same time.

He was wearing a clean shirt and a jacket on it, and getting out to the streets for short walks before going back home, he was peaceful, kind natured and harmless... but they -and I mean every single one of these people, especially the small hoodlum brats from that alley- were making from this daily walk, a walk of shame to the depths of hell... They always made sure to remind him of his weirdness... Never leaving him be, but insisting on teasing, harassing him and laughing at him.

His head was oversized, his eyes bulging outside, his shoulder distorted with a protuding mass... Living in the realm of silence and darkness, the moment he got out his head out of his home, he was met with cries of disapproval, and mocking whistling from kids, while adults were just snickering... Snickering every single time, no matter how many dozens or hundreds of times they saw him in a single day.

Kids would yell behind him... "Barq! Barq!" (T/N: Means "Lightning", a real name) and poor Barq would stop and look behind to see who called him, but the naughty children would hide quickly like cockroaches in deep cracks in the earth... and Barq would try to continue his walk again and cross a few steps, but the weird demonic call will then come cutting deep like a sharp knife piercing his back... Barq... Barq... Son of a Dog (fucker)... Cuck (sic)... And poor Barq would stop and look around with his bulging eyes welling with tears and bewilderment looking for the children who hid again quickly in the ground like cockroaches.

This is how begun and ended the trip of the daily walk for poor Barq... His sole pleasure in his miserable life... His sole reprieve from the individual imprisonment he was sentenced to by the mad Nature and by humans.

I wasn't yet at an age that enabled me to rationally evaluate this scary phenomenon, but my emotions were repulsed beyond words all the time by what it was... Repulsed by the utter lack of humanity, the cruelty, and the sheer ignorance within.

I was feeling pain and grief for poor Barq, the Man who peers from his same age were owed respect and fear by those children, and I thought it was a horrible affront to manhood and humanity, not only that of Barq but the shared manhood and humanity of all Men, that was desecreated whenever a small child would make light of the humanity of a man older than he his, and insult his manhood, for no reason whatsoever other than that Nature created this man different than others.

(T/N: Sorry for the weird syntax, trying to make this translation as literal as possible to convey the author's grief and writing style to the best of my ability.)

——————(16)——————

I never found in myself the desire to share those wicked small cockroaches their laughs at poor Barq. On the contrary, I felt a deep realization that one day, I would be met with his same fate, going for a walk one day and my trip made into a walk of shame into hell, and my fears came true. For I am now Poor Barq, in another slightly different way, children are yelling behind me, and adults are snickering, and all sharing the fun of mockery, profanities, and desecreating my dignity. I'm now "Two-Heads", "Cheeta" (T/N: might be either the feline, or slang for the rag used to scrap floors clean with, or an adapted female form of english "shit"), the "Gorilla" (T/N: either the general body silhouette, the hunchback aspect, or looking like a monkey), "Stupid", "Crazy hilliby", "Queer", "Dog", "Son of goddamned Dog" (T/N: out of the realm of sentient religious humans, and into the realm of dogs and their religion. Religion-related insults are with mother related insults among the most offensive insults culturally in Egypt) or the whole Dog family at once (T/N: his relatives are insulted, like son of dog, father of dog, etc.) which I can't understand how I can be all of that at once.

I'm only sure of one thing, that I am a man who was cursed with the disaster of ugliness, and that I am living among a collective of stupid degenerate foul-mouthed plebians who have no mercy for anyone, ever.

But ugliness isn't the only disaster in my life, there's also the chronic disease that lived with me all of my life... Suddenly I feel nails piercing my eye, and feeling that instant that another calvary of pain is about to begin, not just the trip in the streets of my town whose heart died and whose people from my compatriots are madmen, but a trip within my self... within the arteries of my blood and my nerves... Sometimes my oculary arteries contract and a cruel vision blur sets in, as I see everything through a thick mist for no less than an hour at a time, to the point I feel I would rather die, then the cruel contraction phase is followed by an excessive dilatation, for those damned arteries don't return to their normal size but more than that, causing pressure on the fragile nerves closed to them and causing me the most abominable and most cursed chronic headache that anyone on earth could ever feel. A headache that no medical drug in the world can rid me of, but that I'm doomed to bear until it ends.

——————(17)——————

Headache now invades all of my head... Arteries are dilatated to their extremes... Pressing against the neighbouring nerves... Military tank tracks crushing in their wake my living flesh... Pickaxes stricking violently the inner part of my skull and its fragile bones... A tremendous pain I feel... That I have to feel until the end... Not the end of the 8 hour of pain each attack lasts, but the end of my life, because this is a disease with no cure... Taps of waters open flowing torrents to their full capacity... Within me I'm overcome with an urge to vomit.... I go to the closest sink to empty my bladders... Not once, repeatedly, not ending as long as the pain attack lasts. Headache ended, after those damned eight, or ten, or twelve hours... my head's arteries went back to their normal blood pressure rate filling my eyes with reasonable amounts of blood, but I still feel, me, as a giant abnormally over dilatated artery and that lasting aftertaste will remain with me for the next few days... as a boxer going out of the rig groggy, destroyed completely, exhausted needing long weeks to come back to normal... I feel like my body's functions are crushed... Hungry but still feeling like puking despite there being nothing at all inside my belly, but I'm forced to eat to regain my lost strength in anticipation for the next fit of headache ... always living in anticipation for the next pain attack... just like the next whistling (T/N: ambiguous. Either he meant the kids from the street, or the whistle of a train when it leaves which is an image that evokes culturally that of someone who has nothing anymore to look forward to, a has-been whose glories went and soon he will depart with them from this world.)

After some days I start preparing to go back to my natural state again, and "natural state" is a relative term that in no way means that I became a normal person who can do as I like or eat whatever I like from all kinds of meals, because I am still and will remain a sickly person until the inevitable doom that will spell the end of my life... So "natural state" is an abuse of language, a convention term I will use out of convenience to mean that I am not in an acute pain attack anymore, but am in a convalescene period from it in anticipation for a more serious attack pain... Indeed, at morning, I feel mildly belching and feel like puking slightly... I can't look at light, or the colored, colored stripe patterns, garish (bright, attention grabbing, "assertive") colors... I can't eat most types of food normal people eat so I am eternally deprived from then.

My ailment is an abominable kind of allergic sensibility that has no cure but death... It's an eternal curse I have to bear along with my ugliness until the last remaining scraps from my life.

——————(18)——————

This is the life that I live, that's full of fears, sickness, ugliness, and constant feelings of shame, worthlessness... a life with no love, with no hope in a better future... no hope to belong to someone... to a religion, to a country, to a love... so no wonder that ugliness is the focal point of my thinking, and the thesis that anchors the writing within these pages.

And some might imagine that I, despite all the constant permanent cruelties I lived and live in my life, am a human that's at the brink more than ever to crumble in despair, but this couldn't be furthest from truth, because as I said before, I am a man made of a rapidly self-welding self-repairing material... designed against the most dangerous and cruel kinds od explosions, so if they ever wanted to take me out (T/N: he used a physical term for lifting an object... on a casket?) they have to gather all sticks of dynamite taken out of their eyes, and stuff them within me and lit the fuse to expode them, and nevertheless despite that they will never destroy me. Because I still have hope in future... Not in the men I live among them, because I gave up hope in them entirely, but hope in another world... people behind boundaries abroad... that have more humanity, more justice, more understanding... I will go out of these walls, and will try to find a treatment for my ugly shape and my ailing health, because I am a strong gentleman with a stout will to overcome and go through hardships, for whom "impossible" is an unknown term in his life, then I will soar and go ahead with all of my force, to make up for all the years of my life that were lost from me. But if I couldn't manage that, I would not feel much regret if I ever put an end for my life with my own hands, but the utmost pride and dignity, because I didn't live passive and reveling in humiliation and mediocrity like others, but rather lived as a warrior, of a rare and glorious kind... I will die after I would have realized my courage and my self-respect, which is all I want from life.

Raja Alich

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