A Story by: Abdel Latif Moubarak – Egypt
At six o’clock sharp in the morning, Adel wakes up without needing an alarm. Not because he is an orderly man who worships time, but because the chaos in his mind makes more noise than any alarm ever could.
He reaches out toward the nightstand and puts on his prescription glasses with their elegant black frame. Adel is in his fifties and works as an architect; he designs cities with obsessive precision. His set squares govern right and obtuse angles, and in his drafts, he does not tolerate an error greater than a single millimeter. Yet, in his private life, he inhabits an apartment submerged in disorder: papers scattered across the floor and a wall clock stopped for two years at three-thirty, which he doesn’t care to fix at all.
He sets his feet on the wool rug to perform his first ritual:
He prepares his coffee following a strict chemical procedure—two teaspoons of grounds, half a teaspoon of sugar—watching the boiling with the caution of a hydraulic engineer. But as soon as he pours it into the cup, he adds three ice cubes to it! Hot coffee that he deliberately cools until it loses its heat, exactly as he does with all his emotions.
He stands in front of the mirror to shave. He spends twenty full minutes trimming every single edge with care. Then, right after meticulously grooming his face, he puts on a crumpled shirt and mismatched socks before heading out into the street.
Adel walks down the street counting the sidewalk tiles, taking extraordinary care to avoid stepping on the cracks. At the same time, he throws cigarette butts onto the ground without any respect, even though every morning he collects the trash from outside his front door to throw it into the dumpster himself.
In his architectural firm, he is known as “the judge of details.” He does not tolerate any error in the execution of projects.
”Architecture is the order that saves the world from collapse,” he had once told a young intern.
What no one knows, however, is that in the locked drawer of his desk, Adel keeps a secret notebook. He does not draw harmonious buildings in it; instead, he is a master at depicting cracks in walls, rubble, and palaces at the exact moment of their collapse. By day, he builds for others; by night, he demolishes the world on paper.
At noon, he calls his elderly mother to check on her health in a warm, caring tone. But as soon as he hangs up, he receives a notification: a message from his only daughter, who for years has been trying to mend their relationship following his divorce from her mother. Adel reads the message and then deletes it without replying.
He was an infinitely gentle man with those who expected nothing from him, and as hard as stone with those who begged for his closeness.
Adel lived like this for years: interwoven contradictions in the form of “daily rituals” that offered him a false sense of security.
However, on a rainy Tuesday, the unexpected happens. While reviewing the design of a massive residential tower in the city center, he discovers a serious flaw in the structural calculations of the foundation. A mistake that no one else had noticed. If he reported it, the work would grind to a halt, an investigation into his colleagues would be opened, and he himself might lose the end-of-career bonus he had been waiting for all his life. If he stayed silent, the building would remain standing for years… before inevitably collapsing.
He stops in front of the blueprint. The contradiction, this time, goes beyond iced coffee or mismatched socks. It is a choice between the “rigorous engineer” who worships order and the “chaotic man” who lives alongside decay.
He returns home that evening. He does not cook his healthy meal, nor does he put ice in his coffee. He sits in the dark, staring at the clock stopped at three-thirty. For the first time in years, he performs none of his rituals. He sits listening to the silence and discovers that his habits were nothing more than a fence built around himself to avoid facing his true pain: the fear of failure, the fear of closeness, and the fear of being, himself, the building destined to collapse.
The following morning, he does not wait for six o’clock. He wakes up at five-fifteen.
This time, he puts on a neatly ironed shirt and matching socks. He drinks his coffee hot as it is, savoring its bitterness for the first time.
He goes to the office and submits a detailed report highlighting the structural error, recommending an immediate suspension of work, and assuming full professional and financial responsibility.
At noon, instead of drawing ruined buildings in his secret notebook, he pulls it out from the drawer and throws it into the trash can. Then he picks up his phone, opens the chat with his daughter, and writes to her with a trembling yet firm hand:
”Forgive me for all this delay… Can we have a coffee together today?”
Adel steps out into the street. He walks without counting the tiles, without caring whether the cracks are fractured or not. The rituals that protected him from life are over, and it is finally time… to start living.
