Opening pages

THE PRICE OF BEING HUR A Life Lived Free

by

Hur

Hur — Arabic: the free one. Liberated from all chains. This is what it cost him.

A Note Before the Story There is a name my mother gave me that has always felt less like a name and more like a sentence. Hur. In the old tongue, it means the free one — liberated from all ties, all chains, all the small and large prisons that men build around themselves and call life. I did not choose this name. And yet I chose everything it implied, every consequence it promised, every wound it guaranteed. This book is not a confession. I am not sorry. It is not a celebration either — the ruins are too fresh for that. It is something more dangerous than either: it is an accounting. A man laying his life on a table and looking at it without flinching. Counting what he spent. Counting what he earned. Counting what he is left with, which is mostly questions and a particular kind of silence that only arrives after you have been very loud for a very long time. I have changed the names of everyone in these pages. Some of them deserve protection. Some deserve far worse than I could ever give them in words. But names are just the shells we wear over our actual selves, and the stories underneath are real, and they are mine, and I am not hiding from them. Nietzsche said that one must have chaos within oneself to give birth to a dancing star. I had plenty of chaos. Whether I produced a star or merely burned things down — that is for you to decide. I have decided to stop deciding and simply describe.

— Hur