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.
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