"The Page" by John S LES, part 2

The wait...is over...

"The Page"  Part Two

By  John S LES  ©

Even now as I look back, I remember when it all began for me and not to the rest of the world.  My story began back in the summer of 2010, when I began using a social chat room application on my Android phone.  It was there that I met a girl from the Washington, DC area that I shall call, Jamila to protect her real identity.  Her screen name was actually Jamila2012 in the chat room. I was just 15 years old that summer and looking forward to starting my sophomore year at Stuyvesant high school in New York City.

Over the next few months going into the school year our anonymous friendship eventually blossomed into a real life friendship and courtship.  Making friends with people in real life outside of a chat room was an absolute no no for me, considering my father’s important job occupation.  However, the friendship and long distance relationship between Jamila and I had taken a life of its own.  Over the next seven months during our school year we actually began to fall in love.  We had a lot of things in common.

First, Jamila, was the same age as me and was attending a high school in the Arlington, VA area.   We both were one of two children in our households, and we both had older brothers who tortured us when we were younger.  Both of our fathers worked in security for our local governments, but in slightly different capacities.  Her father worked for a private security company that provided personal security for Congressmen, Senators and dignitaries from all over the world.  My father is the Chief Head of security for the United Nations.

Jamila was born American and so was her father.  However, her grandfather had arrived here in the United State via political asylum, from an African country, Bustani, whose exact name she had kept from me until the Summer of 2011.  Standing at 6’2, I’m just a tall, slender and African American kid, who everyone keeps thinking should be playing basketball or baseball.  Although I do like working out and actually earned a brown belt from a midtown karate school, I never liked playing sports all that much.  I am more of a computer geek with aspiring interests in politics and law rather than jumpshots and base hits.

Mid December of 2010, Jamila and her family traveled to New York City for two reasons.  The first was so that they could visit Rockefeller Center for the first time, and the second reason was because our parents wanted to create a proper environment for all of us to meet beyond just simple phone calls, Skype, text messages and emails.  My father and her father used their law enforcement connections to check each other out before we all got together for dinner on a Saturday night at Rockefeller Center.  Thankfully both our families “checked out” to our respective parents’ approval. 

It was a nice time that night in mid December.  Both our school holiday vacations started out with nice weather.  Even though she told me that she and her family were tall, her 5’11 stature seemed even taller than the low heels that she wore.  She was even more beautiful in person than in the pictures, videos and live camera conversations that we had.  Throughout the entire dinner my father and brother Ishmael kept nudging me, and tapping me with their feet under the table at how beautiful she was.  Jamila has big beautiful, near catlike brown eyes, a slender face and body with high cheekbones and mahogany complexion with velvet skin.

Only my mother had disapproved Jamila and her family after the dinner was over and we had we returned home.  Jamila and her family were affable enough, very educated and well mannered.  However, my mother just felt that there was a strange vibe from them.  But my brother, father and I paid no attention to her.  Other than that, the night had gone perfect.  Our fathers talked politics and professional connections with dignitaries.  Our mothers talked about raising kids in busy cities.  Our brothers talked about their first year college experiences.  Her brother Omar was an economics student at Yale and my brother was at Duke on an engineering scholarship.

That was Saturday, December 18^th.  Little did my family know that in less than 24 hours, on December 19^th , a jobless, Tunisian graduate student, Mohamed Bouazizi, took to selling vegetables in the street only to have his cart seized by the police.  In an act of defiance he set himself on fire, which then led to condemnation from around the world along with riots and police clashes.  That would prove to be the first act in a chain reaction of events that culminated into the Arab Spring.

Coincidentally, there were three other things that occurred over the next two weeks that would greatly affect my life after that night.  Three things that would take me by surprise all the way to end of the following year.  First, the incident in Tunisia triggered the first of hundreds of religious disciples of Masamba to begin forming groups of so-called world peace seekers to approach the United Nations and heads of state.  Second, most of the northeast states would get hit with a record snow storm immediately following Christmas and over the next several weeks.  Then not another flake the rest of the winter.  And lastly…my mother…and her intuition in regards to Jamilia and her family...she was right…she was usually right...but we didn't listen.