All the family, mom and dad, sisters, brothers, nieces and nephews, were waiting for him at the port of Halk Elwad. The vagrant soul is back after twenty years of wandering. You can spell it "wondering" too. He came back by sea and not by air because he was broke. Nevertheless he wasn’t apparently broken. The customs were amazed by the lightness of this peculiar being. All his luggage consisted in a laptop, a small bag carrying some clothes and rucksack full of old books. He had nothing to declare but his love for his family and his fondness for the beach of Mahdia. The only present he brought to his family was a box of chocolate.
When he met his two old friends Mustafa and Lobna again, he felt like an alien. They spoke the same language, their mother tongue, but he could hardly understand them. His friends experienced the same strange feeling. The space-time gap between them was unbridgeable. The same thing happened to him when he met Salima, his first and last love. Before meeting her, he thought he was lucky because her marriage didn’t work and had ended in divorce. When he took her in his arms he had the feeling of an actor playing a role. In a few words: no feelings at all.
The only person who could understand him and whom he could understand was his friend Haythem, a shrink from Sousse. Wherever they met, be it in Toronto, Paris or Sousse, they had the feeling they were just continuing the dialogue they had started the day before. "The day before" for them could be five or six years ago. He once asked his friend about the secret of their "elective affinity". His friend referred him to Mawlana Jaleleddine Rumi: "The friend’s secret should be kept in the dark".
