my recent life in pictures

yes, mom, i finally managed it :). this is a collection of highlights from my photographic life. it's in backwards order chronologically and it's beautiful and it's overwhelming and i love everything about it. enjoy. love from jordan. <3<3<3

view from the reins.

mountains on every side.

camels in the parking lot.

our caravan.

my roommate riding a camel. she's such a bamf.

so there were 4 people waiting for camels when i got there, but they grabbed me out of line and brought me to this one- screaming, rolling on the ground, trying to kill our bedouin friend here. my camel was a rock star; he had quite an attitude. so this is my screaming camel.

my beloved muhammed. we were bffs.

the desert is just so big. it's like an ocean... but with sand. (my metaphors give away my history, haha).

morning

even after the sunrise, we watched the morning for awhile. when you're up at 6am, why not? below is our camp and in the distance someone is practicing his high kick and fighting the wind.

i'm always on mountains these days.

hazy mornings, watching the sky.

too pretty not to post another one.

sunset to sunrise, and i'm always on a mountain.

i didn't take this one (obvi since i'm in it)- it's the 3 of us watching the sunset on the mountain.

love these kids. how did i ever live without them?

sunset from the mountain

the haze gathers in pockets, between sand dunes and mountains

evening in the desert, wind and sand and 80 miles an hour

sand dune races

shadows like marks, proof that we were there.

afraid of heights? no way. these are days of fear-conquering.

oh we are so cute. taken by our yalla-man friend.

after the stampede.

hazy in the desert

i found a flower in the desert. here we're sitting in the arch below and talking.

the arch. we climbed down from the mountain and stood inside.

desert wind

hearts and alleyways

dangerous? psshh. we drove this way for a ways, into an alley where our sketch taxi driver here (on the left holding the door "closed"? yeah that's him) took our passports and sprinted away with them... to photocopy them, of course. wow my life is ridiculous.

the moon has risen over this building every night for 800 years.

newer damascus

mosque + alien

ohm qassoum, looking over the city. it was overwhelming, i have never felt so full of... everything.

old city in damascus

beautiful.

the omawayyeeeeefhagkjdshiiin mosque (aka ummayad).

and they write love on the walls.

i have never seen anything more beautiful. damascus has my heart.

breakfast in syria

nutella picnic at the syrian border. get it, girrrl.

her first nutella experience IN LIFE... quite a memorable moment.

also on the menu were sheep testicles and other similarly appetizing items.

i'm sure we're not the ONLY people to ever have been pringle ducks on the syrian border, but we were definitely the best.

welcome to syria

me, about to burn my wad of syrian cash. ladies and gentlemen, i am shway gangsta.

my beloved propane truck. i hear ice cream music just looking at it.

take from my garden. see the funnel? it's our landmark.

god, amman is beautiful.

and it is so big. i can't get over it. 

view from the garden

i then picked and ate this lemon, i will have you know. beautiful day.

we were "studying" in the garden

the stairs of doom... doomlike, no?

view from the walk home

the wheelbarrow hasn't been rightside up since i moved in

this picture is in my house. we don't know why. it's kind of creepy.

our unnecessary 2 living rooms

one of the first pictures i took of amman

untitled

crescent

our train being "attacked" by bedouins (who let me ride their horses)

the sunrise over heathrow airport, london. no idea what time it was for me.

sunrise in a box

rainy garden, rainy camera lens

my garden

offroading

in case you didnt believe me that it snows here

water shortage?

our own personal waterfall

raindrop

everything about this picture is so standard.

so about that whole water shortage thing...

last night the world flooded.

this is probably because amman has literally ZERO drainage systems, and because it rains a bit here these days. so it will rain kind of hard but for not that long, and the streets will be flooded and i will be walking in water up to my calves. like serious wading to get to taxis because the water has flooded over the curb- this is impressive because amman's curbs are unreasonably high to keep people from driving on the "sidewalk", if you could even call it that. and this in a country with a water shortage? we could maybe be more effective in this area.

we went to a rap concert? strange i know. though i am not an expert, i suspect that rap concerts are more fun when they are in a language i don't understand. there is this swiss rapper called greiss (or something) who was playing a free show here- his flight and concert were sponsored by the swiss embassy. pretty serious stuff.

the opening act was more interesting, actually. they are a group called share3 (means street) 962, and they consist of like 15 rappers and breakdancers who call themselves a hip hop movement. as far as rap goes, they were off and on. sometimes they were great, there were times when i could have laid down a better beat with my personal gangstaskillz, ma3lish. but it was a really interesting experience, because the content of their songs (as translated by my friend, who was coincidentally the only girl there wearing a hijab and SO proud. we told her she was badass, and then had to explain that that was a good thing... oh i love her.) anyway the content of their songs was really beautiful. it was all about loss and violence and palestine and hope and the future. and there was a little boy who did one song, and the chorus was "it's our decision. we are ourselves". it was really powerful to me to hear their stuff, because when people talk about their past, and street violence, and all that, it's just different here. because you hear this boy talk about bombs going off and his friends killed in guerilla wars and how his mother still has the keys to their home in palestine, still hoping someday her kids will go back. not that street violence in the states isn't bad, obviously. but here it has affected such a huge segment of the population... there are half a million iraqi refugees in jordan. there are 1.3 million people in jordan who consider themselves palestinian. i can't even imagine what that must be like. and so they write songs, and the chorus is salaam, ya salaam (which means peace, peace).

if i could see a big guy in a hoodie and a sideways baseball cap shout about peace every time i went to a show, i would be much more confident in the world. jordan is good for me in that way. 

life is beautiful. people are beautiful. i can't get over it. 

this is bad, i'm feeling hopeful. better go watch the news or something, yeah?

k so i just read my own blog for a while,

and i have concluded that i am maybe almost probably INSANE. like seriously? wow. my mother must be so confused. you all must be so confused.





what i wanna know is


where does this stuff come from?

this blog was supposed to be about camel rides

i really should be preparing my islam presentation right now, which i a. have not started and b. will be presenting in t-minus-3 hours.

oh well.

i think this place is making me crazy. i can't write in anything but poetry circles anymore. maybe it's the argeelah, smoke makes me thoughtful. maybe it's the sunshine. maybe it's the rain. maybe it's the leftover damascus, i don't know.

i hear in my mind all this voices
i hear in my mind all these words
i hear in my mind all this music
and it breaks my heart- it breaks my ha-aha-aha-ahahahart.

we will start with real things, which are less real actually than unreal things, but everyone says the opposite. so i will concede because i am a language descriptivist, and i will say that real now means unreal and unreal is the new real.

you can't argue with language.

last weekend we went to the desert, to wadi rum. it was beautiful. and even that one, my most beloved of words, means nothing there. it is a red sand desert, with flat land and dunes and towering, impossible-looking giant red and gold things that are somewhere in between mountains and just really, really big rocks. maybe they are baby mountains?

and we took a bus there, and we found a new captain whom we love. and he told us from memory stories about lawrence of arabia and how he fell in love with wadi rum, and how the bedouins have lived in wadi since forever.

we got out of the bus 4 hours later, piled into truckbeds of "jeeps" aka toyota pickups with cushions in the back. and we were probably 90 of us, 6 in each jeep, and we drove into the desert. we really just tooled around on the sand dunes, there were no roads. we just drove. and fast, there were dust clouds and races and trashtalk as we'd race by another jeep. i sat on the side rail or stood most of the time; it was glorious.

and i have dreams of orca whales and owls, but i wake up in fear that you will never be my fool.

we stopped a couple times to climb mountain-rock things- i think i forgot the extent of my love for climbing on things. it is a very, very, very great extent. and we stood on baby mountains and shouted to the wind and watched the clouds. you can see them better from up there.

we tooled around on sand dunes for about 4 hours, stopping every once in a while to climb a mountain or look at a rock painting centuries old. we came to our camp, which was ridiculous. we thought we would be sleeping in tents- no, these were tourist-friendly houses made of cloth, with foam mattresses on beds and pillows and blankets and candles since there were no lights. (also, please picture the face i just made when i typed the words "tourist-friendly"). and that night we ate bread and kabob and rice and tabouleh and hummus and some spicy thing i am obsessed with and apples and honey and i cannot describe how good the food was. and there was music, a few beduoins in the dining tent with instruments. and we danced and people belly danced and they tried to teach me to belly dance and i think we all know how that went. and there were lanterns and bonfires and sand and stars and someone played the ukelele and i felt like home. and i would close my eyes and feel the sand in my toes and hear the music and smell the fire, and then i would look up and watch the falling stars and i had no no no idea where i was. and we smoked argeelah by the fire and talked and laughed and my friend whose name means happiness in arabic tried to teach people dubka (not spelled right- do people spell that in english?) which is a traditional dance. and they held hands in a chain and raced around us all sitting at the fire bringing their music with them, so that every 45 seconds a few notes of traditional arabic music would overtake the ukelele, and then disappear again.

and there were so many stars, and so many falling ones, and we watched the moon come up and chase the stars away and i thought i was hallucinating. we sat by the fire until it was late, and i wanted to explore because i love deserts in the dark. so a friend who is not yet named in terms of flowers but whose couches we sleep on more often than ours came with me, and he and i walked out to not the nearest baby mountain, but the second nearest. and i brought an apple in my pocket to roll in the sand, which i did. we walked not far, just to the top of a dune, and watched all the unexpected lights. there was our camp, and a few bedouin camps, and a car which was obviously inhabited by a teenage couple that needed some space from their families for a while. they were too far away to see or hear, but their existence made me happy.

i love seeing couples here. young couples in cafes, or at UJ, almost holding hands but not quite so you know they're not married yet. everything means so much to them. eye contact and voices are all they'll have of each other until they live together. no holding hands, no kisses, no tackling each other on muddy hills. i don't know, i think someone's reaction when you tackle them on a muddy hill is a very serious factor when considering marrying them. maybe that's just me. actually i'm almost sure that's just me. most things are.

and dating is strange here, mostly because the barrier between men and women here is so massive. the word, i believe, is alienation. and boys are told what boys should be, and what girls should be, and they are exactly the opposite, like puzzle pieces. as if there was only one of us who could be powerful, only one of us could compromise. and it's always zero sum, always all-or-nothing. if one of us is powerful, the other is somehow necessarily less powerful. it is as if there was a limited amount of control, and if she has it she has it all. which is maybe why, more often than not, she has either none or a thoroughly unthreatening amount.

as if people were puzzle pieces, and opposite ones. she is the opposite of him. maybe we are trying to make some sort of perfect whole? like a yin yang but more complicated. that may have something to do with religion, i think religion in general makes people think that they have to be some kind of perfect shape, and color inside the lines, and all of that. it makes people into ideas- he is uncompromising will, she is submission. he is power, she is weakness. he is reason, she is emotion. he is red, she is blue. as if they could never mix? as if the walls were so thick and so high that we could never share anything again. it is so strange. and so formal. and so public. and such a strange sort of love. it is like if a yin yang was combined with cold-war berlin, so we had black and white at definite but very quiet war with each other, and a giant wall down the middle keeping the two apart and probably making kissing very awkward.

i'm just saying.

so boys here have no idea how to talk to women, how to deal with women. they've no idea what we are. and i think, on the whole, that is true most places- that i've been at least. after centuries of female subjugation, we are still taking tentative baby steps toward actual equality. it means breaking down far too many myths to happen quickly. this i understand. so now, the reconstruction of the female- the breakdown of the cult of domesticity and the recreation of woman as an agent, on her own terms- means that of course the female identity is a source of confusion. this i also understand. but here, here is different than any place i've ever been. boys not only shout out car windows at us, they pull over, stop the car, and shout hellohellohellowhatsupyourecutehelloyoulooklikeamoviestarwhatsup until i'm out of earshot and it is clear that i am not interested. i mean, i thought it was clear that i was not interested when i ignored their shouting the first time, and walked as far away from their car as i could, and made no eye contact, and put on my pissed off parisian face. but what do i know?

i've had cars drive around the block i'm walking on 5 or 6 times, slowing down to my walking pace every time and trying to "give me a ride". i've had phone numbers scribbled onto pieces of paper and thrown at me multiple times. as if the fact that i didn't call you the first time didn't do the trick? you still think i'm into you? really? i've had marriage proposals- love at first sight, perhaps? and i don't make eye contact with anyone anymore unless i'm ready to ask them what their problem is, because looking at someone means maybe i would like to go home with them? and it's sad. i feel sorry for them. because it's not because they are bad people, it is certainly not that the entire male population of jordan is obnoxious catcalling construction workers looking to take a girl home for an hour or 2. really that is so not true. but they do not know how to talk to women. once you get to know them, you are confused- because they speak respectfully to you, and seem really sweet. and it's because they don't understand how to interact with girls; they're never taught what we like, or what we think is creepy or gross, or even how to go about thinking about what we might like. our worlds are so separate here, ours and theirs. and they don't know how to bridge the gap.

i should start holding seminars or something.

anyway that was long. but it's a really big part about being here. i think, if asked about jordanians, that the boys in our program would have a totally different story than i would. one of my closest friends here told me the other day that basically we invite the harrassment we get because we aren't conforming enough to the culture. and that we should either conform more for the short time we're here, or we can't complain really about the consequences.

and i adore him. like really he's amazing, he's one of my favorite people here. but i had absolutely nothing to say.

when he said it, we were walking home, and i just studied the buildings that we see twice every day, very purposefully not looking at anything in particular. and he asked if i was pissed at him, and i said no because i wasn't. and he asked me to say something. so i told him that he is right in the sense that there are things i could do. i mean, i could wear a head covering- i'm blonde, it would make a big difference. and i could not walk on the street ever. and i could go buy some brown mumus to be as inconspicuous as possible. and i could not go out at night, and i could not drink ever, and i could not hang out at the american bars we go to sometimes. and i could only ever walk around with a boy, and i could never look at anyone and i could never smile, and i could... i don't know refuse to speak in public or something. like i said, there are things i could do. but as i have mentioned before, there is a limit to the amount of things i will compromise. and in order for my time here to be my experience, to be laura + jordan = some unknown chemical (which probably will result in multiple explosions and serious damage to whatever chemistry lab has the misfortune to house this experiment), i can't do those things. this is a clash, that's why i'm here. i am here to run into things that make me angry and frustrated and i'm here to bash my head against them. i am not here to make myself into something that fits perfectly here- because i LOVE this place, and because i want to learn how to LIVE here. i want to learn how to compromise just enough of me and just enough of it that we could maybe make this work. and if i just pretended i was someone else for 5 months, i'd never know how it would be for me to live here. i already know how other people live here; i see them every day. i want to know how i can live here. because i love it here. and because i am an optimist.

but walking home that day, of course i didn't say any of that. in regards to conforming to local culture, i said very truthfully, that to an extent i have, and to an extent i will.

i think it does interesting tricks to your brain to be a female. and i like it.

on a slightly unrelated but not really note, i've decided that i'm going to shave my head.

not now. maybe not this year even. but sometime, i don't know when, i've resolved that i'm going to do it. and you all think i'm really silly, i know, because i love my hair and i'm really attached to it. it is one of the only pieces of my identity that is physical. i think as far as physical things go, my body is first. i am a good size, i think, not big but not tiny, and generally very in shape. that is important to me, and is probably the biggest physical piece of my identity. but after that is my hair- because i love it, because i like its personality. it is wild and it is a crazy color and it knows it, and if it doesn't want to be in a braid you'll know it. because there will be no braid, no matter how hard i try. and i like that. i like that it is stubborn, and wild, and extremely low maintenance, and i like that i don't really brush it (shhh don't tell).

and i have been thinking lately, and have been noticing that it is a good-sized piece of my view of myself, as a human being and a woman and a young person. which may sound like a ridiculous reason to shave it, but that is the reason. i would like to stretch my brain out a bit, and challenge the hair-based portion of my identity, and live without it. i am all about branching, and recreating, and stretching, and expanding. and i think that the physical act of shaving my head would be really interesting for my brain to deal with, as well as the subsequent mini-crisis i would probably have about feeling like i had amputated some part of myself, as well as challenge and recreate my ideas about beauty and femininity and all of that with regards to me. and i wonder how long it will take to grow back, which is a bit of a scary thought. this convinces me even more that i need to do it. i am scared of it not growing back for a while? that is silly, laura. you are you, hair or not.

mom i know you won't go anywhere with me if i "randomly" shave my head. that is ok. i understand. haha.

anyway i'm gonna go, this has been a ridiculous blog. and if i don't leave now i will start writing about religion and words and divine inspiration and ideas and faith and translation and prophets and why i will have a really hard time explaining to my kids what mommy thinks about god. so we'll leave it here, i think. that is for another time.


you are my sweetest downfall- i loved you first.

i loved you first.

paris feels like sugar to me now.

like sugar. and like glitter. and i don't really know why. and it's a little disconcerting. it's like the last 6 months have been crystallized in my memory, it gets less real every minute, and more real at the same time? i wonder where this ends.

i was thinking yesterday. surprise, surprise. but really, i was thinking about me, and the people i know here, and the people i know from paris, and my family, and my friends in isla vista, and my high school friends. and i was thinking that i'll be going home in a few months, like really home, in a way i haven't maybe ever.

i haven't gone back to california with no solid plans to leave in a long time. when i go home it will have been almost a year that i've been "exploring", in DC and paris and here and everywhere else. and i was thinking that maybe now i understand how it was for my friends in paris, who were really going home last december, when i was going-on-vacation-from-living-outside-the-states. it's a strange feeling. and it interests me that there are people here like me, who all of us are going to come back. and it's different than paris, because i want to go back to paris. i wanted to. and in paris, when we talked about coming back , it was that we wanted to. together. to see it again, in a different time and place. but here, we dont want to; we are going to come back. maybe that has something to do with jordan itself, as a place? as a choice of places to go? i mean far fewer people go to jordan just because they felt like it, really. you go because you have to. we came because... well, we just did. we study arabic because... well, we just do. we're coming back, we're living here because... because we just are. we just will. we are what we are.

and it strikes me that we live in strange ways.

i was thinking yesterday that i miss people, and places, and all the etceteras, differently than i used to. differently. 

and what strikes me are the emotional paradigms i’m getting myself into, the patterns i’ve established already. to miss someone is unpleasant; to miss a whole other way of life is worse, and maybe the hardest is to miss another time, when life was different and you were different. and i am setting myself up for all of them.

i was thinking about my friends from paris the other day at hollywood cafe. i think i might miss them most being here, because they’re the first ones i ever lived our of the states with.
and stumbling around familiar streets we don’t know the names of, hearing everyone around us speak in a language we don’t understand, blowing off studying to go for a walk because seriously we didn’t come halfway across the world to sit in our apartments, all of it feels a little different without them. it would be like going on a wagon train re-enactment without my mom or fighting over a nintendo with someone other than my brother—it just doesn’t make sense to me.

and i had a particular moment- of wow i miss them. and wow i miss paris. god i should go back to paris sometime—and then it hit me like a brick-filled piano that i never will. i can’t. i mean, i can physically go to the capital of france, but that’s not paris to me. paris is late-night aepp dinners, and tiny parisian alleys where no one ever goes, and too much nutella, and being able to sit on the grass and watch the eiffel tower glow blue without feeling like a tourist. and disgusting sausages, and writing poetry on the seine, and wishing that cameras could see notre dame like i could, and chris brown, and impromptu dance parties, and the jonas brothers, and swiss chocolate, and long, long talks long after everyone else had gone to bed about the universe, and us, and blurry lines, usually induced by readings due tuesday for gerard. and american music trivia, and go-go dancers, and matthew mcconaghuey, and thinking monet’s garden was the most beautiful thing i’d ever seen until i saw his paintings. and the trees that line the boulevard on the seine river, and never taking the metro if we could help it, and the bastille in the morning, and chicken nuggets, and the lights on the champs elysees, christmas or not, and our stupid gray phones, and dr. scott blair, and getting my wallet stolen, and my ipod stolen, and my passport stolen, and never giving a shit about any of it. and the longest 10-minute walk of my life, every day from hotel de ville to class, past all the shops where no one is allowed to buy anything and sunglasses come in packs of 250. and paris is goodnight upstairs, goodnight downstairs, and watching certain adorable someones fall asleep in line for her favorite ride at disneyland, and american boy, and never having any idea if the franprix was open because it was tuesday and for some reason this caused confusion. and wearing dresses with boots, and long island ice teas, and la duree, and the ferris wheel, and the louvre once a week, and thinking 4 euro for a coke is normal, and hot chocolate that really is to die for. and the crepe guy who taught me how to say “cherry,” and watching our french teacher “pretend to” hit on the only boy in the class, and other boys with similar names peeing on our floor, and wandering the marais late at night looking for a bar just like the 3 we just deemed unsatisfactory, and chocolate eclaires, and arbor day, and red wine, and white wine, and no such thing as bad wine. and hide and seek on the grounds of that gorgeous chateau, and ghost stories in the field, and thinking we heard iris laughing in the woods (which is still really creepy), and life without furniture, and that adorable little old man in the shop next to aepp. and patrick’s (“good morning”), and “ill trust the OED as far as i can throw it/him/Him”, and bad chinese food when the kitchen was locked, and pouring our hearts into a thanksgiving dinner, which was worth it after watching french kids eat leftover stuffing on november 28th. and living an hour ahead, and starbucks and love letters to make it through our 3 hour fashion lectures, and sock races in the hallways, and spanish parties, and musee d’orsay, and a massive comprehensive overview of marxist/anarchist ideology in lenin’s era, and watching the sun flood like a thousand tiny flashlights through paris clouds, and feeling unexpected tears on my cheeks when barack obama made a speech at 6:30 am. and paris is sangria, and sneaking up and down the stairs of aepp without the guard ever noticing our friends, and staying up all night every monday because we had reading to do, but we just couldn’t miss american music trivia. and walking around hazy and delirious in normandy unable to speak we were so full of everything, and then laughing when an a cappella group appeared and sang “lean on me”- could life be more perfect? and paris is everything i own in a pile, and postcards of a fat man in a flower hat, and faidherbe-chaligny, and the american chip we only took 3 weeks to get off our shoulder, and the luxembourg gardens in fall, and spinning outside at midnight catching tiny snowflakes. and dreaming of freebirds, and griping about parisians, and pajama parties, and daisy asking people on the metro 2 inches from her face if they could understand us- because we were talking about candy underwear. and paris is all the ridiculous dances and hand motions that i now am compelled to do, and all the words no one here understands because they’re either french or just abbreviated to the point of ridiculous, and the fact that my brain still giggles to itself when i think of never d’accord alone.

paris was a perfect storm, of all the people who happened to be there when i was there, who i now love more than life, and of all the things that happened while we were there, and of all the things i needed, all the things i got, and all the things i hated, and all the new things i loved and lived and became while i was there.

you can’t ever go back to that.

and it struck me yesterday that i miss paris, as i had paris, and that that place doesn’t exist anymore except in us. and it is strange to me that i will miss, for a long, long time, a place i’ll never ever see again the way i saw it then. and here i am, again, doing the same thing. jordan to me is heart-shaped cookies, and massive amounts of irony, and scraping dead sea mud off my boots with a butter knife, and trying to catch my breath at the top of the stairs of doom. it’s beautiful. and i will miss amman when i leave, and it will become exaggerated and crystallized in my memory the way paris is, and i’ll realize later on that i love amman because of what i loved in amman, because of what i was in amman. i’m setting myself up to fall in love with lives that i know will only last a little while, and to feel both a little emptier and a little fuller later because i have to live without them. i don’t know if people usually do this on purpose. maybe this is normal. maybe it’s not. but i’ve been thinking about it.

like i said, we live in strange ways.

and for the record,

there are crosswalks in the axis of evil. maybe we could do some thinking about this?







and that's all i have to say about it.

we walked in silence.

i will not write a blog about damascus.

i can't tell this story. there is too much story to tell.

suffice it to say i love[d] it. suffice it to say that i was moved. suffice it to say that i came home with a bracelet i'll never willingly take off. suffice it to say that i wrote in my little book, in a cab on the way out of syria, that i felt like home. a strange, and sweet-smelling, and utterly unfamiliar home. isn't the idea of home exactly the opposite of that? i'm gonna have to do some thinking on that one.

there is much i can't talk about. but i will try, because i have seen, and maybe it is my job to write about it? because much, much, much has been written by people who haven't seen. i will try. but keep in mind that this is nothing. i can't talk about hardly anything. what i can talk about is the ridiculous. as if my life could have gotten more ridiculous than a last-minute trip to syria for the weekend.

we had a picnic on the syrian border, with apple juice and nutella and digestive biscuits. and we ate pringles and (obviously) transformed ourselves into pringle ducks and wandered around duty-free staring open-mouthed at the $800 swarovski toucan and the giant lollipops as big as my head and more nutella than my eyes have ever seen in one place. we played cards and ate weird-looking alien peanuts and told stories and smoked argeelah and made friends and had a really, really great time on the syrian border. figures. i guess that's just us. yom yomii shway legit.

damascus by midnight. it was gorgeous. beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, we paused to capture our first moments standing next to the citadel on a syrian sidewalk. and bashar welcomed us on a billboard, assuring us that he believed in syria. we believed in syria, too. and we saw a young couple out late, holding hands, walking together on the sidewalk. which was amazing because
a. they were holding hands and b. because there was a sidewalk to hold hands on. in celebration of physical contact, we had a group hug; and in celebration of the sidewalk we walked and danced and stumbled on it all weekend.

love, love is a verb, and all we did was walk all weekend. we just wandered, to the old city and the citadel and the old souk and the trendy european neighborhoods. and there were times and places, hours and city blocks, where we were the only women. and we wondered where they were. we would wake up in the morning and look out the 3rd floor window, and it was like a theatre set, with men putting up banners in the street and men standing in their windows and men perched on roofs like chimney sweeps. maybe it was because i hadn't slept all night yet and 8am felt earlier than ever, but i was genuinely surprised when they didn't break into an a cappella song about themselves.

but there were few places we felt uncomfortable. once we were spit on, by which i mean sprayed probably about 4 times. and the 1st time i thought he was sick, and the 2nd time i thought he was crazy, and the 3rd time i realized that 3 of us were american women out at night, and the 4th time we got into a cab. even better was the next night, walking in the old souk, when a man sneezed behind us and we all of us walked faster instinctively, assuming we were being spit on, and then laughed at ourselves.

most people were very welcoming. we would be walking or sitting and people would come ask us where are we from and do we like syria and have we been to xyz yet? and they would show us around and smile and tell us how much they loved americans because we are so friendly. "the american government, no. but the people, we like them very much. they are always smiling." and we were sitting on a curb and a girl holding red roses, probably 12, came and sat with us and smiled and giggled at our bad arabic. and then she skipped away and we were just in awe and i thought of paris and how this girl might be the first person i ever met who was the antithesis of a place.

"what is your opinion of george bush?" (you know me. insert my response). "*smile*. well, then welcome. welcome to syria."

and we walked miles, and mountains, and laid down on empty sidewalks and watched babies play soccer in sunny fields while their mothers prayed, and ate hummus and falafel and drank pineapple juice, and men with carts of blood oranges squeezed us juice on the spot, and sat around color-lit fountains at night and talked, about how this was the most beautiful place we'd ever seen, and the most misunderstood, and how baghdad is a city- my god, baghdad is a city-, and how little boys in roller blades really should watch out for that hole in the- ohhhh ouch that one hurt. and i left fingerprints like flower seeds, everywhere we went.

"i am not from syria. i am from old damascus."

and a friend- as flowers go, she will be daylily, and if she ever reads this she'll laugh about it- and i stayed up all night and talked about more than i've talked about in a long, long time. and we told stories and watched the sun come up through our window. we were planning to sleep, already in bed even, but the call to prayer at 4:30 exploded our hearts and that was that. so we talked until it was light and went outside to watch the morning and read poetry on our tiny balcony and watched the musical of men working and talking and walking and perching and the gangs of cats roaming the metal awnings. and then we copied them, and slept inside like cats, each of us a circle.

fallujah boys. 6 or 7 years old, maybe, curled up on the sidewalk, with the orange they'll eat for lunch in their hands. eyes open, eyes closed, waiting. they've been waiting so long i don't know if they ever knew what for. and 11 years, singing in the night, praise songs in a voice more beautiful than i've ever heard, shatter me. and 18 years, and beautiful, begging to shine my shoes for almost nothing, and my heart chokes into my throat and i've no idea what to say except im sorry. im so, so, so sorry. and i feel guilty even about my apologies, as if i thought they mattered. i don't. i don't think they matter. but i have nothing else. and every time my heart would drop and my hands would clench and my eyes would water, and i would feel like a child. a spoiled, arrogant, filthy rich, indifferent child. helpless is the word, i believe, for wanting desperately to do something and knowing there. isn't. anything. you. can. do. and their voices crept inside me and their smiles broke my heart. quieted me. fallujah boys.

and every time the call to prayer sounded i stopped walking. and i closed my eyes and i felt the words i really only pretend to understand. i mean i know the words... but words aren't really words. words are context, and connotaions, and language, and history. and i can't pretend i know any of that. the call to prayer means more to me in damascus. more passionate. more haunting. more authentic, maybe? pretty is a word i am hesitant to use, but keep in mind that i thought it.

then there was a mountain. it was beautiful. i can't explain in words. but i was moved, my thoughts were whales- giant and ancient and blue and full of music. and i was brimming with them, looking down from a mountain where the prophet did the same, at a city with no end and only haze to hide it from me. and it was night, and the green lights of faith and ritual floated everywhere above the city. and i sat there for a long time, with flower seeds and written words dropping from my fingers, and wind warm and cool at the same time moving through all of us differently.

we walked in silence after we came down.