I wrote this early last year, thought i could get a little feedback on what you think... Most of it from personal experience...

The Dark before the Dawn

Even the silence seemed to mock him. He felt it in the darkness leering at him; taunting him with the weight of the unspoken. Tinted with the promise of light, the tranquil, predawn Beirut sky quivered in translucence, but Jared, in a fit of childish denial, was blind to it and the shimmering starlight, in submission to the inevitable, faded unseen. Even the air that he breathed, although cool and damp with February chill, enflamed him, and he fueled his rage, at having to even breathe it, with pouting thoughts of a sun burnt home. He pounded out his fury onto the sidewalk and into the beaten asphalt of the broken streets.

This nightly run had started out as a way of overcoming the jet lag that had tormented him in his first week, of what he considered to be, the abduction. Now it was his only escape from a world that he pretended did not exist. By day, he sank into dreams of home; an Australian summer, ripe with the scents and flavors of a backyard barbie, freshly cut lawns and the sound of footy, broadcast live on Channel 10, on a Sunday arvo'. During the afternoons, barraged with endless onslaughts from cousins in varying degrees, he sat in a controlled climate of his own devise: isolation.

"Yes, yes! He likes it here."
"Yeah, sure, he'll come round."
ýHeýll be fine. Just needs some time to get used to it all."
"It's like I'm not even really here." He thought to himself with disgust as his angst was bandied about as topic of mild interest by his family and the locals.

Behind the vacant smile and beyond the void in his eyes, he fumed at the world that had put him here. Jared seethed with impotent rage at the selfishness of those closest to him who had taken what shards of identity they had left after twenty-two years of civilized life in Sydney, and rammed it down his throat in an attempt to compensate for seventeen years of being Australian. Admittedly, not much could have consoled him to being hurled to the ends of the earth, not even if he had had a choice in the matter. As it stood, however, he was livid with rage at their betrayal, and languid with the oppressive weight of a self-inflicted depression. Being so harshly and completely severed from all that he knew and all that he was, was almost as insulting as being thrust into the center of a community that could never appreciate what he had lost.

Having been duped by a promise of a short visit, he had only later discovered that his parents had sold the house back home and had no plans for returning anytime soon. Even the nightly rampage through the streets could not help him escape the feeling of suffocation that smothered him every time he thought of trying to get home. Remembering that he was completely trapped in a strange and foreign world made his aching heart throb in apprehension that he would loose himself to the chaos and that all that Jared was and had ever been would melt into oblivion. "Get a grip!" he observed pensively through a clenched jaw and forced slow breaths. ýYour gonna kick this; you just have to."

A shudder and a scream later, and the crumbling world around him seemed to be echoing his pain. At first, it was strangely comforting to have sudden coherence between his outer and inner worlds. While those about him were racing in a panicked frenzy to comprehend what had happened, Jared became suddenly lucid and saw, as if for the first time, genuine grief and profound sorrow. Amidst tinseled cardboard cutouts, cellophane wrapped greenhouse roses and a myriad of vapidly smiling, message-bearing trinkets, and the collective heart of the nation broke.

Ironically, Jared's fury fizzled as he bore witness to what real turmoil, rage and passion could instill in a people. From their weakness they drew strength; from pain; power. From a lifetime, no, a history of oppression, they procured a passion that instilled in all a thirst for the inalienable rights of freedom, sovereignty and independence. He felt as if he had suddenly been told how to look the right way through a telescope, and suddenly he could see, with the right perspective, himself, his place and his duty to those about him.

With each new challenge, the nation, in its unity, was empowered. For every tear shed, hundreds of flags were raised and thousands of hands were joined. Jared cringed from yesterdayýs childhood, and marched forward with the multitudes of his brothers and sisters on March 14. He now beat the asphalt with a pounding march towards a collective identity and national unity rather than from moot fears and childish apprehension. He may have been only a drop in the ocean; a thread in the fabric, but he was there, whole and willing, to do even the most minute part in consolidating a nation, his nation.

Instead of melting into the chaos, he had become welded into the infrastructure of a culture; the culture that his parents had been denied and yet had saved for him. Humbled by the gift, he savored the treasures that this land could offer him, and, in turn, searched his lucidity for any way that he could be worthy of it. To finally accept and embrace was not enough. He realized that he must strengthen and serve his homeland with his presence, passion and toil.

His turned, disgusted with the naivety of his imagined wounds, away from the memory of another home. It could wait. He was not needed in a land where dreams came true and terror consisted of no more than a bad exam or a Friday flick. "Through death, comes life", he thought. A new nation will rise purged from the ashes of the old. He welcomed a willing acceptance of the inevitable; he was home. Although he could weep for the fury of his people, he envisioned, for a nation striving against the darkness, a translucent dawn.