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.

meandering thoughts

a remembering people. spider-catching girl. shove me in the ocean, let me breathe like fishes do. breathe with me, like fishes do.

the city is covered, now, in a haze of white and heat. it quiets us, subdues the noise of our cars and our humming air conditioners. gives a sense of ending, of quiet apocalypse, as if we had built all we could build and then we fell asleep, leaving the rows of white stone buildings to entertain themselves without us.

i am unsatisfied with everything these days. missing something, wanting something, not ever knowing what. not ever guessing quite right. writing takes such effort now, it flows from my mind all the way to my wrists, stops before it ever reaches my fingertips, as if my veins had gotten tangled in a traffic jam and life only trickles out of them.

if i am home, i want to be out, if i am out, i want to be at home, usually laying on the floor rolling about. i want everything. to eat and to not eat, to write and not to write... i dont know. and i can't believe im leaving this place- forever it seems, even if i come back, but i am glad to be going home, i think. i am everything at once about leaving, happy and sad and worried and confused, but mostly just in denial.

let's go write about adoption in islam. that should be fun. :D