just a sidenote

today i am going to write about christmas.

and i am not going to write about consumerism, or church and state issues in sonoma, or anything like that. there's enough people yelling about that these days, and i am not in the mood for a shouting match.

it's just a day, really. and we have all our funny traditions about it, decorated trees and silly hats and semi-obligatory presents, and all that. and so significant to so many people! so interesting. we've melded our very american pagan with our very american christianity, added several hundred years, and look what we've got. a giant franchise of a holiday that's mostly about staying inside and making a fire because it's cold out.

but it did a lot for me, this year. a lot. because, with all our disagreements and no real ability to reconcile them, it got my family to sit around and get each other presents (or promises of such) and drink egg nog and eat cookies and just be happy for a day or two. and even if we can't totally accept each other, and even if we can't agree to disagree in anyone's head but mine, we can sit at a table. and we can listen to obnoxious christmas music and i can be coerced into breaking out the violin, and it can feel like nothing's changed. an unfamiliar feeling these days, in this place.

i don't know where i'm going with this. it's just really, really nice. and weird, and probably short-lived, but nice. so happy christmas, and happy whatever else you celebrate, and if you don't celebrate anything then just have a really, really, really good day.

it really is a wonderful life. put some rum in your egg nog and enjoy it.

volcano rocks at octopus o'clock

whose side are you on?
whose side is this, anyway?
put down your sword, come lay with me on the ground.

pearl bracelets and octopus o-clock, it is sunny here in the winter. there are no clouds, even, today. and i am here to be moved. so move me, if you will, or let somthing else do it instead. for me, there are no others, only unfamiliars.

there is an upside down trash can in my backyard. it's cracked from the sun, probably been there for years. it is right next to the volcano rock. i don't know where the volcano rock came from. i don't know where the trash can came from either, or why it is upside down in the backyard. when the flowers move, the wind moves them too quickly, and the world looks like a giant stream of photographs. fast-forward reality, like on planet earth. a flip book, maybe? i think i live in a flipbook, maybe, made by someone who wasn't quite sure how to make a flipbook. so you flip through it and the motion makes sense for a minute, and then all of a sudden the picture completely changes and you're lost. like they had to make 3 flipbooks for a 4th grade project and at the end they glued them all together. things change so fast, here. i wonder how many years longer the upside-down trash can will be in my backyard. i wonder how long this will still be my backyard.

strange thoughts, these days, she wonders what they are. it is strange to be happy because of real things (or less real things, depending how you look at it), and not just because we decided to be. and there is no drama here, not on the everyday. deep down, there are things here that are deeply, deeply dishonest. but on the everyday, we coexist just fine. i smoke my cigarettes outside and keep my secrets to myself. everyone here keeps their secrets to themselves. it is their way.

so jigsaw puzzles and red wine, it is. not so bad, she thinks. you never throw anything away because you don't know who you are, and just in case the real you is in that stuffed animal you got as a gift from someone you don't remember, you keep it in a box. outside your life, but not outside your potential self. just throw it away, she says. you don't need that anymore.

catching

are you afraid?

and if you are, what of?

are you afraid that they will desert you?

are you afraid they'll never come back?

it is ok, you know, it's ok,

they may come back or they may never,

but here, here you have everything.

and in the dark, she hopes

she laughs out loud,

she hears you, here.

and she can only hope, only hope you are here with her,

and not just a ghost.

she hears the ghosts, many times, these days.

she doesn't sleep well, these days.

but it is a different unwell, and maybe a different sleep.

it makes her eyes water,

but not in the old way.

we know better than that, now,

and we no longer let it catch us.

letter to the editors

darling reader,

as you may have noticed in recent days,

i have decided to be more honest with the internet.

not that the internet was ever the one we were worried about. i've always felt comfortable with the internet. it's the editors i've been concerned about. the editors- who mention disapprovingly, as if it were in passing, a piece of my vocabulary they don't approve of. a stray "fuck", no doubt, who made it past my diligent self-censor. the editors- who want something else but this from me, who wish i would write more conventionally, who wish i would live more conventionally. the editors- who know very little and assume very much.

if someone (you, perhaps) were to read this blog, to click around for more than 30 seconds, it would appear that i had a severe writers' block from the month of october until now. it would appear it had been a long time coming; there's less and less every month since i came back from jordan. it would appear.

this is not true. i am the anti-writers' block, these days. i write every day, these days. i am, maybe, only writing, these days. but i have gotten painfully sick of self-censorship, and so nothing has appeared here for months. and now, as silly and cliche as it sounds, the time has come where it is impossible to do anything but say what i feel. this is no hide-and-seek, i am no pretender, and i can do no halfway-dance tonight.

so. although this will be painful, and although my most recent attempts at honesty about everything on the home front have gone over like substantially-sized lead balloons, i will write what i feel. i will be what i am. i am what i am, and no ultimatums of yours can stop me.

so, to the editors, to the disapprovers and the doubters, this is for you. these are all for you.

walking less, she hopes

walking less these days, she hopes
and hopes
and hopes
until there isn’t anything left of her.
nervous?
i don’t know why.
a silly kind of worry, said a wiseperson once
when things are so good you’re afraid to lose them.
silly, maybe.
but here we are.
with too much time on her hands to worry about
all the things she hopes he won’t worry about.
and so, walking less,
because there’s nowhere, here, to walk
she thinks
she writes
she hopes
she asks for things she’s never wanted more
from fates she doesn’t believe in.

one long swim

crescendos, rising, falling, sinking memories, sinking notes. bottles on the ocean, we write love letters to a world we only thought we used to know. living as ghosts in other people’s reveries, we walked like them and talked like them, danced like them and loved like them. we lived in their cities and we wore their clothes; there were colors, there, or so we thought. and who could blame us? no one ever tells you there is more than you can see. we were happy, there, in our way.

and then came the day when we went to the beach.

and perhaps it was the wind, but we saw the dead pelican mangled in the seaweed, and it spoke to us. it called us by name, slow and quiet, and it whispered familiar words in languages we didn’t know we knew, and the sand spun beneath our feet. we were seized, possessed, by worlds unknown and unforgettable, and the pelican spoke louder, we could feel him in our blood, singing every heartbeat for us. and what he said was, slow and hollow,

one long swim, that’s all it takes. one long swim.

and we stood on the edge, the water just brushing up against our toes, and we took off the clothes our mothers gave us. children we were, of apple juice and guns, and we put our glasses down and dropped our pistols in the ocean. we left them there, on the sand, and peered into the horizon’s shimmering, imaginary line. like a mirage, it was. one long swim, we thought out loud, one long swim.


and so we swam. into nothing we could know, toward nothing we could see, we swam into the currents and the kelp and the sky. tasting the salt on our lips, breathing heavy and more desperate than either of us would care to admit, we hurtled toward the nothing as if we knew its name. as if we could smell it, taste it somewhere in the back of our minds, like a blurry memory just beyond reach.

one long swim, that’s all it took. and now, now we write love letters to the people we left behind, asking them to visit sometime. asking them to look up at the sky, sometime. we don’t know if they get our bottles. we don’t know. but we send them anyway, a daily ritual of something kind of like love and something kind of like show-and-tell, something like a whisper in the night that you tell yourself is just the wind in the trees. it’s nice here, we say. the colors are different, and we don’t have costco, but you can wear a funny hat anytime you want, and when it rains the trees like to swing dance. it’s nice here, you should come visit. and really, all it takes is one long swim.


crescendos, swirling compasses, we rise and fall with the waves and we listen to old radio shows. these are days of long nights and longer mornings, days full of juice and empty of promises, days of things unknown and unforgettable. we are, now, unknown and unforgettable.

we are, now, here and there. in the sun and out to sea, alive, and just around the corner.

the unbelievers' creed

there are things that need to be said-- heard, listened to, believed, or not. there is, she thinks, she knows, freedom in the saying. there are, she thinks, she knows, risks worth taking and similar things.

the unbelievers’ creed

Out here, we are wilder, they say. There is little left to lose for those like us.

But the unchained melody is still ringing in my ears, cuts me to my core like an owl through the night. Out here we are free, out here we are we. Out here we are forgiven, bound only by our own promises, our own desires, our intuition of the forces that we want to [ought to] be. We are our own, a people of the forest, of the trees and the wind and the oceans and the clouds, unchained clouds. Destiny has nothing to do with it.

Separate me, break me from the prisons of my time, my lines- of lineage, of blood and water, consequence and circumstance. Burn the bridges, bomb the walls, and rip to shreds all the tiny threads that bind me, let me see things as they are. As we are. They are to us as we are to something we don’t call god, and that god is to us as the sun is to the west. We only meet in parting, in a slow dance in fading light. And how are we so far, so close, orbiting around each other. Mercury and venus, our hands only ever brush for briefest moments. Come to me, fill me up, let me see things as they are, above, beyond, inside and out, around and around in dizzy circles of drunken understanding. This is clearest to us now. We are what we are, and we see what we see. My universe is mine alone, only I can see it. And we all have our own, vast universes, coexisting and colliding, as i crash into god into you into the mountains where no one lives but legends. We are legends of our kind, of our time and our persuasions. Why don’t you be my persuasion, see me here as I see you; let us have a sunset of the mind.

Rushing water on the page, tiny fish give tiny kisses, where does all this come from, what are we trying to hide? The sun streams from the doorway til all we see is light. Here, here there are trees to climb, rocks to break and unlived lives. Here, there are stars to wander, in this field of gold and blue. When blue was gold and the sun went down forever? There’s no forgiveness for things like that. No forgiveness for things like that. Things. Like that.

I am an American aquarium drinker, and I will use this as I can. And I am wrong, I know I’m wrong, but I feel that I deserve it. There are days, I think, when we deserve to be wrong; it is what we are. And I am not a fatalist, I don’t believe I’m here because of you. who are you? I’m not here for a reason, there is no such thing as destiny. But there is no such thing as luck either, coincidence is as much a myth as our creation. We are all myths. And there, somewhere between fate and myth, between circumstance and consequence, there are two tiny eyes that watch the world, indifferent. Like two tiny stars in a constellation neither of them have ever heard of.

What if they knew? What if stars knew that we called them ursa minor, that we name them to control them, as we have since we invented adam? Would they shrug, or cringe, or laugh at us in their own, giant, burning, sad version of denial?

And what am I, here? Without a god that I can name, with a truth that I can only taste, with only a whisper on the wind that stirs me to revelation? Where will I go, what will I do, with my ghost of a god who pulls no strings, with my ghost of a self falling and rising, with my stars in the sky that have their own names, where will I go? Layer seven of a dark, mythical ring that they call a lake of sulfur? That they call a place for sinners, for unbelievers and rejectors, a place for those who dare to walk alone into the dark? Our bravery betrays us in our quest for peace, for a truth that matters in a world that maybe doesn’t, for a life that is made of more than empty promises and fiery threats. We are the sinners, we are the doubters, the questioners, the unbelievers. The pinnacle of human, our blessing and our curse. See that’s the thing, we don’t believe in curses. Or punishment, or violence, or unbreakable rules. We don’t believe in judgment, or salvation, or submission. But we believe in lilies, and in poetry and open windows. We believe in life and death, in life by seeing and death by ignorance, in atoms and in planets, in love without a cause. We believe in broken fences, red wine and candlelight and midnight, we believe in eclipses, in sunsets on the porch. And we believe that we are what we are, and that should be, is, enough. We believe that life is life, that love is love, that we are pieces of those glued together like broken plates, that what we see matters more than what we hear, that faith is something unbound and unchained, candles in the wind and lives torn apart by living. We believe in swirling smoke, in choices and in loss. In Kerouac and Sartre, in darkness and in light, in complicated realities that dance too fast to keep a rhythm. We are strangers in a strange world, twirling around a strange universe, a kaleidoscope of unknowing until we can’t stand it anymore.

Long live Muhammad, long live Jeremiah, long live Abraham and all his many, starstruck sons. But I am tired of Abraham, of men and sons of men, men who were revolutionaries for their time. for their time is nothing, means nothing, means water under the bridge-- I am not their time, we are not their time. A little girl in a garden is closer to god than all the prophets in the world, with their books and their salvations. they are gilded chalices, seedless cherries, synthesizers set to piano 2. They are lipsticked girls and decaf coffee; leave your books and leave your letters; leave your damnation and your pride; leave your so-called revelations and remember what you are. We are where we are, we cannot be another. But my visions are not their visions; I am no prince, no son of god, no daughter- their god has no daughters. No prophet, no prostitute, no virgin and no king. I am a woman. And I see what I can see, from the cliff we are all perched on, waiting for the fall. We are all, really, waiting for the fall. The piano is a heavy one, the rope is straining every moment. And when will they accept, when will they see, that we are what we are. We are not gods, we are not worms, we are open eyes and open wings. And you can pour as many drops in the ocean as you like, it will never be fresh water. You can throw sugar to the wind until the ground is white, it will never be sweet. You can burn the earth til its charred and black, it will never be anything but home. And I, I will build castles of stone and earth until we all spiral into the sun. I will drink from the rivers until my lungs are turned to gills. I will flail my arms until I am an eagle, stand in the fire until I burn like gasoline. There is no sun, we say, unless there is an earth. And I say no, say that they are all stars in the distance, that we are not the end of time. The end of history is not ours to make, the beginning of the end is a slow lullaby. We are immortal, in our way- everything we are is recorded in the stars and in the spaces beyond them, where there is nothing but Picasso and light is mixed with dark.

Light us on fire, they say, and I say let us burn. Let us be what we choose, let us choose what we believe, let us believe what we feel and let us feel without bounds. let us, unchained like the wind, blow like the chaff their god has always rejected. Let us fill our cup before it is filled for us, let us love as we can, let us be what we are until we can be nothing anymore. Let us run out, run our course, and then let the nothing come. Because we are not afraid of silence, we are nothing but the music of the space between the notes. Let us know, let us speak, let us drink and then, then let us sleep, and wake up next to each other intertwined, can’t tell my sleeping, dreaming arms from his.

As if we were one, we say. If only we knew. If only I know. If only it was so, if only we were unknown.


Remember, she says; a remembering people. Wings, faded, in the photographs of our childhood memories. There are rubies to be found, but Cortes was only ever looking at the ground; and we will never see the earth until the sky has overcome us.

a poem. we walk, slow and quiet, these days.

spider-catching girl

spider-catching girl,
she watches,
closely.
signs of life and knotted strings.
birds, in the trees and in the windows,
singing, quiet, tire treads
move in her like water
and black rocks.
spiderwebs make creases
in the air, skies unfolding,
like paper cranes with minds of their own.
quiet. like coffee.
full of colors, she walks
everywhere. sidewalks wake up,
feel her fingertips,
but they never say so.
they are quiet, too.
a funny kind of understanding
full of smoke and clinking bracelets,
clinking leaves.
spider-catching girl, she walks,
she watches,
deep breaths and dark corners,
breaking,
listening too hard
and dancing hollow.
listening
like two sparrows moving,
darting,
crashing
in the dark.

bones

once, in the dark
with black and white collisions
melting softly into grey
i heard your voice
quiet and still
in the yard, behind the fence
in the smoke you spoke
and in the silence
below sufjan’s voice you
told me stories of stories
stories of secrets only spoken
in lies and poems, never said
i will, i will not shout this,
it has been shouted many times.
we have walked here, many times.
the sun has set here, many times.
and this storyteller’s visions
are so true because they’re not
are hidden beneath the untaught
are tangled up in knots
that never were to be untied
and so we sit, you and i,
in the dark across the fire
telling secrets in the silence
our voices drowning in unraveled threads
in the knots we should have left alone instead
of things we should have left unsaid
but we were honest, if we were anything
and it will be our end, in time
if not in moments or in days
it will be the years that catch us
we knew that all along.
so sing with me a new song
while we can
while we’re still here
and breathing deep.
we speak in different tongues now,
our own, personal, torturous babel
of changing winds and shifting sands
of restless tectonics, long plane flights
and tilted kaleidoscopes.
but i will now, as ever, breathe your fire
drink your pearls
and lose myself in your reverie
of good intentions
and eyes open.
the sun crashes through its own eclipse
pushing midnight off its throne
and stirring visions
that will be lost in this new void
but we remain here,
as we ever, so
for old thoughts, if for nothing,
sit down and have some coffee;
stay awhile,
show your bones.

bedouin stars

sing me to sleep, before i fall too far. tomorrow in her eyes, forever on her mind, bedouin stars in a bedouin sky; that’s all we’ll ever be. and what are we? well-situated dots on a badly-situated page, too little white paper to fill with all our thoughts.

 

there may be nothing left to say; i may have nothing here at all, nothing but the feeling that i cant get it all out. there may be nothing but illusion sun on the sidewalk, glittery pavement thinks its gold. all that glitters, i think i have a sidewalk complex. doomed forever to a mundane existence, all that glitters is not her. all that glitters in the sky, all that flutters in the wind, all that matters in the world is what she hopes one day to be. unmistakably precocious, we want everything there is, everything there will ever be, more than this universe has ever seen. more than god could ever know, more than the stars could have ever told it. we are all here, in this circle, further in the dark than we would like to believe.

 

but the shadows in our eyes cloud the future from us; even so-called gods have limits- cataracts in their celestial vision. in our orbits we see only one side at a time, one line of the rhyme, one constellation in the sky. the power moving in us is our uncertainty; a power born of mortality, of temporal value and the fear that one day we will cease. our worth is our fear, and fear begets our love. there is no love where there is no fear of loss; we are what we are because of what we fear to someday lose. fingers grasping at the sheets, footprints merging with the sea, close enough to touch me, too blind to ever see. we are the end of things, the edge of the trees, an unraveling thread.

 

see me touch me feel me we are human enough to breathe. like fishes do, in a sea of nitrogen and hydrogen and just enough oxygen, our gills open our closed eyelids to the patterns of the waves. singing girls in long-lost villages, wells long-dry after a drought.

 

what does an eyelash think of its purpose? what does an atom know of depth? caterpillars and butterflies, we are all in this conundrum. a puzzle of existence; pieces missing are what makes us who we are.

 

drop from a faucet, not quite turned off, just barely plinking in the kitchen sink we drink we think therefore we are. and what we are we are immeasurably, we are recklessly and desperately. one shot in a million, but we are what we have.

 

bedouin stars in a bedouin sky, she says. not all the veils in the world will hide our eyes now.

p.s.

i'd be trini.

obviously.

this is sort of an apology. it is not a very good one.

i was thinking. that i am, perhaps, an exhausting human being. she is always writing, always thinking, always singing, always reading.

and maybe i would be more... manageable, if i could just take a day, or an hour, or 10 minutes, and watching some effing television. play a video game. fold some towels. organize my itunes library. eat a granola bar. do some ridiculous facebook quiz about what color of season 1 power ranger i would be.

but all i do, all i do is write. and read old things i've written, and write about them. it's awful, reading things you wrote when you were someone else. i have been reading things from 2 and 3 and 4 years ago. (hint: timelines are significant), and i am alternatingly amazed and mortified by the things i wrote and thought and was then. and i want to change them, and delete them, and make the prior me (who is so far away, now, i think of her as "her") sound more intelligent, and less brainwashed, and less desperate, and more like she's got a teensy bit of self-respect. i hate the things i wrote then. they are relics from another world to me now. and they are ugly.

and still, i can't change them. they're ugly and they're awful and they're, frankly, embarrassing, and i don't think anyone who knows me now would recognize me in them, but they are sacred for what they are. they are what i used to be, and instead of drawing lines in the sand between that girl and me, i have to leave her words alone. people change when they have to, and in order to launch that process of change, they tell themselves they are new people. they are liars; i was a liar when i said it and i will be again. there is no such thing. new beginnings are a myth. we are all what we are, spurred on by where we came from whether we admit it or we don't. and it is a useful and a beautiful lie; it gives us courage to be what we want to be. 

as much as i want her to never have existed, she did and does as i do. and to expand, the way i'm desperate to, and to grow and become and exist as something i could call a tolerable self, i have to read the old things. all the time. i have to live in time collapsed, in kaleidoscope identities of she and i and all the intermediary transparencies that i could call a self. 

 i cannot deny her. she was as much a human being as i am now. and this, this now, is why i am so exhausting. i am absolutely, unequivocally determined to figure this out, to come to terms, to see with eyes open, to sleep better, to sing always, to remember without fear, to write pages and books until i've got something coherent and authentic that i could feel comfortable setting down in front of a television to watch american idol or some such nonsense.

so i guess this is an apology. sort of. the kind of apology where the person says they're not really sorry about what they're doing, but they feel bad because it's making all their friends miserable. like if your sister just started playing the violin and it sounds like a fight between two nails over who can make the biggest line on the chalkboard, and for the entire 3 hours she plays she apologizes: not for playing, but for the death she's inflicting on everyone else's eardrums. this is that kind of an apology.  so i'm sorry, to everyone who does not wish to, on a daily basis, discuss mysticism or trauma theory or gender or how time collapses in religious rituals or hegemonic masculinity or iran or pacifism or my old stories or violence or love or what art is. to all of those people, i am truly sorry. really, you should say something. i can put you on a do-not-call list, except for talking. or something. 

these days, we are nothing if not dynamic. and the nights we don't sleep (hardly) and the days we don't sing are just steps in a direction, inshallah the one i'd like to think i'm going in.

i am less, these days, a pile of secrets, and more of a whirling dervish of them. spinning and spinning til i can't see anymore, letting the circles take me and hoping that when i stop spinning i will see clearer than before. until then, we are what we are. and i hope it is, in its current state, tolerable.

writing, dancing, free people. i wrote that quite a long time ago. it is still, even still, true.

perhaps some things i write do not become idiotic with time.

then again, that's a long shot. well, we live and see.

oh dear.

of all the things i should be doing right now,

this is really, really, really not one of them. 

2 papers due tomorrow, on ataturk's impact on fictional poets' brains, and the dilemma facing fictional palestinian and israeli lovers. also midterm tomorrow on a lot of history i havent read. and i havent slept since yesterday morning because i had a paper due today.

this situation is clearly not optimal. can i just drop all my classes and forget about it? i am tired.

that is all. this is the worst blog ever. i promise i will make it up to you soon, blog. and i am sorry for wasting your little html machine's time by making it type and format and post all this. i will buy you a popsicle tomorrow, a computer-safe grape popsicle and you will love it. :)

grape popsicles for my computer? oh dear.

timetravel to the present!

but, it turns out, she did have more to say.

always, always, always more to say.

here we are in california, after the long blogdrought that has plagued my particular blog. and things are... strange.

i am a strange person. this is a strange life. that was true before i ever left anywhere to go anywhere, but its like 9384759384597 more times true now. i have made a list of things that are weird about america and living in it:

1. i call it "america" now. or "the states", sometimes. but mostly america. which i would never have done before i left because (obvi) there are several americas that dont include the US. but now i do. and people think it's weird. at least i've stopped saying "amriika". oh, arabic.

2. i still click at people, but i've modified it to be less offensive.  can we please note, for the record, that i modified something to be less offensive? thank you.

3. everyone speaks english here. it's exhausting. the silence that comes with the noise of everyone speaking in a language you have to concentrate to understand is overwhelming, but glorious. realizing that if you are within proximity you will be forced to  not only hear the 15 year old girls in line at blockbuster behind you talk about how mad they are at their mothers, but understand them, is anything but glorious. claustrophobic, really.

4. i am occasionally still scandalized by things that are not scandalous? like girls with wet hair, or very short shorts. or alcohol. however, generally, i am less scandalized than ever before. i have theories about this, to be continued.

5. no one honks. at anyone. ever. even if they're about to run you over, they won't honk at you. i mean, can't we find a happy medium here?

6. the other day, i was walking on a sidewalk in a tank top and i was so excited to talk to sarah that i did a dance. wait what?

i could put like 10000000 things on this list, but it would be pointless. how do i explain that, no matter where i go or how much i'm willing to pay for it, i can't get anything even remotely jordanian?

american sheesha? not the same. also ridiculously expensive.

juice made of fruit? good luck. 

turkish coffee? what is that? 

hummus? please. nice try, trader joe's.

arak? ok i don't miss arak. but i couldn't find it if i wanted.

my idiotic, but lovable, jordanian phone, doesn't even turn on.

my jordanpants are too ripped up to wear, and i can't get them fixed because i refuse to wash them.

american chili powder is NOT the same.

zaatar? supposedly thyme? try again.

american olive oil? gross.

i can't make jordanian ramen because american ramen is such a sodium attack.

i mean, come on, i can't even get a pepsi with sugar in it in this country. what is that?

and these things sound really, really petty and stupid, i'm aware, but they matter. they matter because there's no such thing as a "piece of home," it's not like in paris when we were craving america so we would go to mcdonalds and starbucks and giggle at how guilty we felt about it. there is no jordanian mcdonalds here, there's no ANYTHING here. i'm really going cold turkey. and i don't like it.

it's just so... comfortable. too comfortable. and not in a ridiculous, guilty-paranoid-ascetic way; what i mean is that i walk around on sidewalks, and spend $4 on coffee, and wear what i want, and say what i want (mostly), and i don't have to blowdry my hair, and i can go to the beach, and i go to classes where everything is in english, and the weather is great, and i have a nice american phone with a keyboard the size of my face, and i can use a debit card, and i can get coffee TO GO, and if i want i can get notebooks that open on the left and aren't only graph paper, and there are places where i don't have to smell cigarettes if i don't want to, and i can buy alcohol without the necessity of being a stealthninja about it, and i look like everyone else, and i talk like everyone else, and i don't have to stand out if i don't feel like it. and i go to class and learn about "abstract" things like the differences between islamic and christian views of divine unity and human rights in palestine and syrian politics and the social position of bedouin women, and i realize that

this is not real life.

this is nowhere near real life. this is a giant waiting room; i don't know what i'm waiting for, but i feel like i'm just waiting for something to happen, or for somewhere to go, or something to do. life here feels like pretend, like we're just playing dollhousebeachtown until it's time to go outside and rejoin the real world.

and i'm not trying to make a point, and i'm not trying to be offensive; this is just how i feel. the feeling is like... it's as if you were abducted by aliens when you were 15. and they brought you to their alien planet and it was hard at first but you assimilated and you lived your whole life there; you married an alien and had alien kids and you became a famous author on alienplanet who wrote true stories, and then all of a sudden one day you blinked and you were back in high school, with your now 52-year-old brain and understanding and experience and viewpoint. and you remembered everything: your kids and your books and your favorite place to watch the second moon rise, but who are you going to tell? who would want to hear about it, and if they did, who would understand? so you go back to your high school life, trying to forget everything and live like a normal kid. 

trouble is, now you know. and once you know, you can't forget. once you figure out that (spoiler alert) santa isn't real, you can't go back to believing. and do you see how your high school life, your high school problems and high school dreams would feel like a waiting room, so unreal they must be temporary. you'd just wait out your high school years, trying to figure out a way back to your real life. and you'd think: you changed so much, things must have changed while you were away. something, something, something must have changed.

something must have changed.

right?

i love it here, i do, all i'm saying is it's weird. california is my latest foriegnexchange experience. how am i supposed to make sense of that?

untitled. on purpose.

note: this was written on the plane(s), from amman to london and then from london to san francisco. you can tell because i get crazy on planes. also, the 77-80 pages referred to are contained in "the confidential word document", which is the secret, uncensored version of all of this. i began writing that on the plane flight home from paris, which explains all the full-circle talk i do throughout ("77 pages later" refers to 77 pages after i started, after i flew back from paris). at the time i wrote this, i hadn't integrated all the necessary entries into the document, so it appeared to be 80 pages long. as of now, with almost all entries compiled, it is 102.5 pages.

love. :)



the day of the plane. sometime may 22 or 23rd, we got lost in between the 2.

11:20ish



77 pages later, she flew home again. 77 pages later, she wrote again from a plane again, going west and chasing the sun again.

i don’t know where im going. i dont know where i am. all i’ve got is laurence juber’s guitar, stand by me.


i left again. i left people i love, and places ill never get back, and nowhere near enough love letters to make it all ok. and when we got to the airport this morning, my sweetest-roommate-in-the-world, who is a sunflower in my heart, cried. and, i mean when i left paris i bawled. so i really thought i would cry.

and i didnt. not once. not this time.

i wonder why. i don’t know why. i mean, this is the last day of my life, the first day of my life, this day of my life. but i didn’t cry, i couldn’t and i don’t know if i will. i’ve just... come to terms i think. i’m really, really ready. and i’ve already got my head around the idea of having people i love for the rest of my life and only see a few times a year if that. im not worried about my friends- i’ll miss them, but they’re family. i’m not afraid of losing them. and i think, since i’ve already come to terms with that idea, and i’ve come to terms with the idea of leaving jordan, of leaving the world and going back to california for a while, this isn’t the tearing that leaving paris was. that was the first time, before i’d ever promised anyone in north carolina that i would come visit them. those were the days i didnt know how to live without anyone; and now, we’ve lived a bit and we can do it. paris was a tearing, a scab ripped off too soon. this, this is TIME. this is RIGHT. it feels like a life cycle, like watching a flower live and die. sinking in music, i am sinking in it. fading into it. fading away- am i disconnecting? am i distancing myself? i don’t know. i’m just letting it happen as it does.


who knows, we know, what is natural? what is broken, what is fixed? we are so high up now, there are no words that can catch us. there are no strings that can tie us. there are no voices that can reach us. we are alone. alone in our height, in our depth, in our solstice rituals. we are a crane unfolding, a flock of geese flying home in our own little V formation.

i dont even know where i am anymore. i dont even know what i am anymore- im so far gone from what i was that i cant even tell ive changed. all i feel is far away.



16:37 amman, jordan time. flight from london to san francisco

and now im stuck on amman time. haha im never gonna get this right. and i feel like will smith and his movie, his heart wrenching breathtaking movie that i have watched silently twice, it feels like that was days ago. weeks ago that i left them all this morning, weeks ago that i thought i would have cried.


77 pages later, and here we are again. flying, again. there should be some sort of metaphor for this and my life, i think. something cool about flying and movement and self-possession and freedom. clearly i have not thought this metaphor through quite all the way. i need to hire someone to do that, a metaphor-elaborator. if i ever have the money to hire someone solely to elaborate on my metaphors. i will have too much money. and if that is ever the case, will someone please smack me upside the head and tell me to do something useful with my life.

it is so sunny up here. i wonder if it’s always sunny in the sky. i wonder how far away from the earth you have to be for it to always be sunny, right before the point where it never gets sunny because now you’re in space. i think i would very much like that place. it would be like santa barbara, where it’s always almost sunset, long shadows all the time.

and i wonder if the earth casts shadows, and where they fall and when. i wonder if there are times when planets cast long shadows like trees in the late afternoon. i wonder where those places are, and i wonder who looks at those shadows.

i wonder who lives in them. i wonder what it feels like to be tiny and never know that you’ve been living in a shadow your whole life. i wonder if maybe everyone lives in a shadow, we just don’t know it. we don’t have any idea how bright the sun really should be.

maybe if we lived out of the shadows it would kill us; too bright, the sun would scald us and disintegrate our bones.

musical notes scrawled on crumpled, yellowed paper. 78 pages later, she starts forgetting where she is, what she’s writing, if in english or arabic or french or cuneiform or musical notes or rorscharch tests. transfiguration, translation, transliteration. i think transliteration is a metaphor for my life, for my poetry. i can only write in these blocky, two-dimensional, colorless lifeless soulless ancient scratches in the ground. i can’t convey even the letters of what i want to say, there is no such sound as LIFE, as SOUND, as FREEDOM in ancient blocky scratch language. there are only those symbols that represent some dead, hamida imitation of them. i am transliterating feelings, breathing moments into a language without even the capacity to pronounce the words. as i told rula, english is a useless language, sometimes. i am a useless writer, sometimes.

alle, allealleluia. and i hope, i hope you are tired out, and i know, i know there is joy now.

i am tired. i am old, these days, i think. i have been twentyone years old for one day, and i’ve no idea what it was ever like to be twenty. we are new people every second, and i every tenth of a second. i think i have a shorter half-life than these people. or maybe a longer one? i don’t really understand how half-lives work or how they would make sense in this context. frankly, i never thought half-lives made sense. thank you, christian school hatred of science classes.

i am many, many feet up in the sky, flying home from jordan and writing about half-lives. 78 pages later, ladies and gentlemen, she has lost her mind.

10:47am california time.

my clocks are all confused now. i’ve no idea if that time is right in ANY time zone, much less the one im traveling to. why is this so hard, why can’t my computer just stay in the time zone and day i put it in? i mean when i turned it on it was some random time in amman but on the 21st. and i was like... wait we went backwards a day? time zone application, you have lost absolutely all credibility.

do you know what’s ridiculous? i even feel like a foreigner now. everywhere i go i’m a foreigner. in dc it’s because i walk around raising my eyebrows amusedly at all the suits who’ve never seen anyone regard them with quite that expression before. in paris it’s because i wear short skirts with boots and ripped jeans and not enough black, and i smile too much. in amman it’s because i’m blonde and i have a funny ayn and a weak ma3salama. and here, on the way to california, i am a foreigner again.

i don’t know how to deal with toilet paper.

i mean i haven’t had to do this is a long time. and in ladies bathrooms there are always little trash cans! just like in amman. so i didnt even have to think about it until i was in the bathroom on the plane, and realized with horror that i had no idea where to put the toilet paper. i kept looking around for a little trash can when i realized oh. people flush that in america. and now i feel sheepish and silly and i feel like an immigrant from some stereotypically "un-modern" place who has no idea how to open a car door. for christ’s sake, i didn’t know what to do with the toilet paper. as if it was some great technological advancement that we dont have “where i come from”.

i’m feeling rather embarrassed. and rather like i just moved to LA from rural... i don't even know where. what what what am i going to do when i have to function like an american again.

i actually really enjoy NOT having everything luxuriously, obnoxiously american all the time. living without them is better. it takes the unnecessaries and the stupidities that go along with them out of my life. individual paper toilet seat covers? come on. what, we dont have wax paper between our asses and our toilet seats? living dangerously, i see. god. and why do we need straws? seriously, ok i understand curly ones are way fun and they’re reusable so i totally approve. but honestly, who needs a disposable straw so they don’t have to put out the effort to lift a cup to their mouth? what is that?

the things i write on planes are always interesting. it’s a little poetic sometimes, and other times just stir crazy (like now) when i’ve realized that i still have 6 hours and 3500 miles to go in this effing 2 feet of space i have, because it tells me on the little screen in the seat in front of me that for some reason our plane is having a really hard time getting past the coast of greenland. so i rant about straws and toilet paper and america and half-lives. sigh. these, these are the days.

maybe they are all “the days”. i kind of think it’s true. after all, when the wind blows in the trees it’s always the ave maria.


every time.


12:08
so this is worth documenting.

i just ordered a vodka tonic on the plane. made it a strong one, too. and i don’t know, maybe it’s that i’ve got these american dollars i’m just itching to use, or maybe it’s because of the whole hey-you’re-21-now-and-you-can, or maybe it’s because i’ve been on this effing plane for half my adult life, but this is gonna be fun.

so here i am, on a plane, wedged in between everyone i think that previously inhabited london and their extended families, playing impossible sudoku and drinking absolut and tonic water. could it be a better day/night/tomorrow morning? i think not.

the worst part is, we’re only 3 sips in and i think im getting a second one.


15:07

dear god i dont think i can make it another 2 hours. im just watching the miles countdown, 968, 842, 804. even numbers. interesting. i like those more now in real life.

79 pages later, she starts talking about her preferences for even vs. odd numbers.

it was years ago that we walked around shmeisani, stumbling over demolished sidewalks because we were too busy looking at the world to care about the ground. years since we climbed onto the train station in the desert, years since we snuck out the stairs of al manar. years since we walked to the tops of syrian mountains, years since flowers in palestine were all i cared about. i am light years and eras and physical, geographical centuries away from everything that i ever planned to do, every exploration i ever undertook. here we are now, in the sky and old, now, older than we ever thought we could be. and everything is so far away.

clouds are winds are melodies are, the sun is what we make of it and the haze is closing in. we are planets, in orbits, orbits of each other. and the sun is god is we are atoms. electrons and whizzing stars and tree age rings age rings. pieces of the universe and palm trees in the sun.

god, palm trees in the sun.

and this is a circle of questions; i don’t know where it ends. maybe there’s another book, maybe just another chapter. maybe just another entry- maybe life goes on tomorrow like i never flew away from everything. maybe i’m gonna cry just one tear, maybe two, right now about the fact that i’m leaving everything. god. i want my friends. i want amman. i want jordan back, i want abdullah, i want garden street and i want a taxi driver to try to cheat me after midnight so i can put his ass where it belongs.



it’s really interesting, the opposite of paris, that i didn’t cry until now, until i’m about to land. and i think it’s because it’s over, becasue my life as i know it, my exploration year, all my plans and everything i wanted and needed and everything i wanted to become has happened, now. and maybe it’s because i lived, because i’m happy now, because i made it. because i’m everything i ever wanted to be, and now i’m going home to prove it. maybe because i took my year on the mountain, because i read my books and wrote my stories and left my flower seeds everywhere i could, and now i’m going back down to the ground and i’m going to... i’m going to be so great. and maybe it’s because i’ve never been proud of anything or anybody the way i’m proud of me right now. maybe it’s because i’m going home, having learned the secret arts and meditations, and now i’m going home to guard the village and prepare to fight the dragons.


all im saying is maybe. maybe this is it, maybe this is life, maybe i’ll never be this high again. maybe i’ll only ever cry when i fly. maybe i’ll never cry again. maybe we’re just atoms, maybe all there is is space. maybe it doesn’t matter.

and 80 pages later, maybe she had nothing more to say.

traveling salesman/ the return

ignore the title; i know far too much about "the office" to be a healthy human being. but, at any rate, i'm back. and so is the blog. excited? should be ;)

we will begin with a few things that were never published, the last post i wrote in jordan (on my very ridiculous 21st birthday, during which i stayed home and drank wine with my lovely friends and sewed up my jordanpants so i could wear them on the plane and not be scandalous. i also spent the day taking jordan pictures, i should post those sometime. they are pretty. anyway, that is the first thing. and the second, which will be posted following this one, is what i wrote on the plane on the way back. so... here goes? cheers.

21 may 2009. 22:24

it is

my last day in jordan. my last night in jordan.

and i am sinking, sinking, sinking in music. drowning in it, even. i see everything in fast forward, feathers on my breath, black flowers blossom. bloom and live and die and leave petals and all of it happens in an instant. wind in the tall grass, whispers in the trees. i don't even know where i am anymore.

everything is beautiful, everything is walking. walking, walking, step by step toward wherever it is we're going. wherever it is im going. ripples in the ground with every step, it can feel me too.if anything could ever be called god, and if anyone could ever say they heard it speak, this would be it. feeling the universe ripple with me while i walk on ground i've never seen before.

it is a transfiguration, if a quiet one. we are what we are, living or dead or more than either. red pills and blue pills mean nothing to me. it is a myth; there is no such choice. things like this are not so optional.

here we are, ground sky i dont know the difference. sinking somewhere, rising into somewhere else. and i am on the side of the pond. she grins, laughs a little, and then dives in and plunges to the bottom until she drowns or comes out the other side.

call it home

get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged.

where you once belonged? i think i always belonged everywhere. consider it my current and future address. hard to find? maybe. the only way to live? definitely.

in a week, i will be back in california. we're gonna talk about california, not the states, not amriika, as they say here. when people ask where im from, i never say anything but california.

in 1 week, i will have to remind myself to wear a seatbelt again. ill get to flush toilet paper in a toilet, ill get to lose miserably as usual to my siblings at guitar hero, ill get to eat nachos and cheezits and maybe even have a starbucks if i feel like it. ill get to wear tank tops and shorts, and flip flops every day. ill get to skateboard everywhere again, unless i feel like driving (someone else's car, haha). ill get to annoy my parents by sleeping til 12, ill get to work out and go running and ill get to look at all the clothes i forgot about and then just decide to wear a swimsuit instead. ill get to call a soda a soda and not a "beebsee" (pepsi, get it? why do they all drink that here?), ill get to play a piano whenever i feel like it, and do nothing if i feel like it. ill get to drink tap water with ice, smell garlic in the morning all the way from gilroy, and there will be such a thing in my universe as a non-smoking area. ill get to eat obnoxious amounts of avocados and go to coffee with people who may or may not really want to see me, but ive dragged them out anyway. there will be roads with lanes, which people can at least choose to use if they wish, ill get to walk places and not take a taxi everywhere, and my talent for telling whether the car behind me is honking because its a taxi wondering WHY ON EARTH ANYONE WOULD BE WALKING WHEN THEY COULD BE SITTING or whether its a random car full of men who are going to throw phone numbers at me will no longer be a useful skill. i wont buy phone cards, and maybe if i ask nice someone else will make me a dinner that's something i recognize. ill get to eat chinese food and listen to the music i missed and complain about the radio thats still playing everything its been playing since i was in 11th grade. phone calls wont cost an arm and a leg, or maybe they will because i have a tendency to make the impossible happen when it comes to phone bill numbers. and ill have the internet without having to go to a cafe and buy a drink, and my hair color will be almost normal, and people wont stare at me on the street any more than they stare at anyone else. well maybe thats not true, but we can dream, cant we? ill get to live like a normal person who lives in their country, not a foreigner who is exhaustingly fascinating to everyone on the street/in the room/ in the building.

there are things i will miss, millions of things. shirts like "redundant... don't ask me to do a damn thing" and "yes... i... do." and "ok! i would like that!" (... what does that even mean?). and everyone i meet wont be named ahmed, and it wont be normal for me to offer everyone i see tea or turkish coffee, and no one will understand me when i say hiloo ktir, and ill have to speak effing english all the time. god im sick of that language. and i wont be able to get "juice" meaning actually just a fruit put in a blender and then into a cup. and ill miss mint lemonade, and taxi drivers who love my bad arabic, and everywhere i look wont be white stone buildings. and ill miss stupidly constructed and subsequently half-demolished sidewalks with giant trees in the middle of them making them completely irrelevant in the first place. and ill miss asking for directions and having someone take my hand and pull me wherever they think i need to go, go all the way there with me, and when they find they've misunderstood me, go with me to find someone else who will join our posse of me simply trying to find some cafe. and ill miss yalla bye, and argileh (god), and oppressively hot jordanian sun, and the call to prayer how will i live without you? and that smile that i get when i realize that the beatles really are universal- it doesnt matter where i am when they grace my ipod with their presence, it's always, always good.

we had a talk yesterday (after i left the ER haha) at school, some sort of re-orientation to america thing. and it was all really obvious, and i really dont think ill have a problem with it. i mean, if anything, i think too much, i process too fast- the states will not be a shock for me, i dont think. and i have a different feeling than i did when leaving dc, or paris... i think im ready to go home for a while. not a long while, mind you. i need to be here, i need morocco, and i need beirut, and i need to go back to palestine and syria and everywhere i love here. but i've been thinking about it, and i really think, this time, that im ready to go. i dont think ive felt like i wanted to go home all year, really, not for a long time. but its been a long time, a long way in my head and on the ground, and its time.

now that she's back in the atmosphere, with drops of jupiter in her hair.

ladies and gentlemen, she may just be coming down soon. and i dont know what ill do, really, coming "back" will be just as big an adventure as it ever was to leave. my spiderwebs link me now, pull me back here. i have long, long ties. and there will be winds i cant refuse, that will bring my heart back, if nothing else. honking cars and girls in hijab and pepsi and tea and boys on the street who say "nice", and ill hear in my head "hello i love you welcome to jordan". and everything makes you smile. everything makes me smile.

living here does that to you. everything is mish mushkila, no problem. everything is just the way it is. and traffic makes me smile, and bad english makes me smile, and people spitting on me makes me smile. living in jordan is like riding a camel; you just have to relax your hips into it and ride it out, let it do its thing.

its perfect for me; thats how i live anyway. but it will be nice, for a little while, to live somewhere thats not a rollercoaster, where i know how im getting to school regardless of the weather, and there are no doomstairs to climb, and i know what im eating at least half the time.





and they will see us waving from such great heights, and they've stopped a long time ago telling me to come down now. maybe thats why i feel like its time, i dont know. and its unexpected, and its strange and pretty, but i really, really, really do.


Sugarcane in the easy mornin'
Weathervanes my one and lonely

The ink is running toward the page
It's chasin' off the days
Look back at boat feet
And that winding knee
I missed your skin when you were east
You clicked your heels and wished for me

Through playful lips made of yarn
That fragile Capricorn
Unraveled words like moths upon old scarves
I know the world's a broken bone
But melt your headaches, call it home

love story

this is a paper, written in response to leila aboulela's the translator. my professor apparently liked it so much she read it aloud to my class. so i figured since half the world has alread heard it i might as well put it up here.



The translator, they call her. And what does she translate? Arabic into English, home into exile, love into guilt. She is a wanderer trapped in a series of exiles, prisons of guilt wherever she is.

I found the book strange, the characters different than the usual. There were no abusive fathers, no raging husbands, only Sammar and her guilt, of a husband whose death is somehow her fault and a son she can't love because of the pain he brings her.

This is a love story, of a woman who falls in love with a foreigner, in a time and place where she is a foreigner. In a sort of guilty, naive way, I loved that it was happy, that they ended up together. I read those pages time after time. But more than a love story, it was a story of religion, of rules and cultures and lines in the sand. I don't understand the end, I don't understand Rae's sudden conversion... it didn't make sense to me. It would have made sense to me that he converted for her, because he loved her, but it seemed like he was serious about it. And i didn't believe him. I was conflicted- wanting desperately for them to be together, for a happy ending just this once, but also wanting them to rebel, wanting them to break the mold of their cultures and love each other anyway. I wanted her to love him regardless, to accept him with his doubts and his thoughts and his wonderings. I wanted him to refuse the black and white terms of her question, to tell her that he was searching for god and for truth and that he loved her, and that that should be enough. I wanted that to be enough. I wanted their relationship to be love and truth and acceptance and mistakes and doubts, something human. And his conversion, her insistence upon it, his bending to her, seemed unreal to me, fake.

And I wish, in Islam, as I wish in all religions, that we could accept each other, and our questions and our doubts and our wanderings. I wish that religion would let us be human, with mistakes, with forgiveness, with trial and error, with searching. I wish the terms didn't have to be so black and white, heaven and hell, saved or not. People are complex, people are piles of questions, I don’t think I could ever explain what it is to be human in words. And how, how do we presume to describe any sort of real or imagined god, with our language, in our words, how do we presume to think that any god worth thinking about could ever fit in a book? I didn't want Rae to convert, I didn't want Sammar to back down on her principles, I wanted them to form a new religion, their own religion, a human religion—of everything they both clearly believe in, without a name. I am tired of everything having a name.

I feel like I shouldn’t be writing this. It is her religion, now their religion, and I have no right to question it, but this is how I feel. There are so many lines, so many boxes and we are all stored in an attic, in the box labeled Muslim or Christian or whatever else we call ourselves. And it’s not my place to say that any of that is wrong, I would never presume to do so. But I don’t believe in it. I don’t believe that we fit into boxes, and I don’t believe that God does. And I understand Sammar; I understand devotion and I understand her religious and cultural principles. But I don’t understand the labels, the ultimatums, the black and white of it all. All she requires of him is that he takes her label, her name—can’t he believe in the principles that she does without having to say the same words in the same language that she does? That world is not my world; I guess it’s just something I have to accept.

I believe in things. I believe in right and wrong, I believe in choices. I just can’t believe that everything has to have a name.