I am surrounded by books in every corner of my office. Books for pleasure. Books for study. Books for days when I want to do nothing else. Books for those rare stretches of time when I can cocoon with another writer and peruse their word work. It is a problem. To want to devour everything and barely scratch the surface.

In the summer months, my fellow island dwellers try their utmost to stay away from the sun. I stay away like so, like now, writing this, glancing at another volume I must finish before bedtime.

“You’ll go blind someday,” my mother jokes. “You use your eyes too much.”

The sun is more blinding than any of my books, than any of these words I type in. It is a violent force, a curse, a volcanic eye from hell.

I came home from a long outing to call on a friend who commented on my face. I looked red, blotchy, hot.

I think of my late grandmother in this post, how, during the harsher years of nomadic Arabia, she made it her tradition to stay away from the desert sun during the day. Her aversion to it, to how it affected her rare paleness in a terrain of smoked faces. She prized her complexion, her coloring, her cool temperature whenever I came in to kiss her cheeks. It is a very difficult act to follow, especially when I am currently beckoned by a Bulgarian trainer to brave the sun for my hour of movement. This philosophy of smoked faces, of heat, of sun carries no weight for her. She will finish with me and head out to the beach soon.

It is amazing what a different culture brings to a conversation. You are shaken from your depths to a new perspective. Of this very large woman in a bathing suit, Goliath in the sun, of more of my gym mates looking at her with reverie as if she were about to go battle Helios himself.

Good luck, I think.

During my years of living in Saudi Arabia, I was caught off guard by nocturnal culture. Nobody saw you in the daytime. Nobody was up for brunch. It was always dinner. It was always coffee till dawn. I slept during so much of the day; life existed only come sunset.

“We need to make peace with the thing,” my cousin announced one day.

“What thing?” I wondered absently.

“That.” She pointed at the distant, extinguished orange.

I never thought of the Sun as an adversary I could parlay with. It is there, constant, and one day will incinerate us to ash. Peace doesn’t come when you have a gun to your head. Like my grandmother, I try to keep to my enclosures of shade instead of drawing some treaty for the wind.

The desert was the Sun’s whipping boy, a slave to its heat. Of course, my Bulgarian trainer didn’t mind the August sun. Her pale skin tanned so quickly, and every day I saw her I could spot new freckles on her face. I did not want to offend by pointing this out, that the sun was no one’s friend and that her European complexion wasn’t made for weather like ours. So, like the rest of my gym mates, I hand her lots of high SPF.

A Saudi prince writes the following:

لا أنت حارس للنجوم .. ولا أنت غارس للقمر

You are not a guardian of stars and you did not plant the moon.

لا أنت فارس هالرمال .. ولا نوارس هالبحر

You are not a knight of this desert or the seagulls of this sea.

أعظم حروبك خيال .. وأقصر دروبك سفر

Your greatest battles are imaginary and your shortest voyages were trips abroad.

شايلٍ هم الصديق .. وشايلٍ هم العدا

You carry the weight of a friend and an enemy.

وليت به شيٍ يدوم

And I wish things could last.

وأنت في الآخر بشر

You are only human in the end.

While I write this, I’m reminded of the connection between poetry and the nocturnal, that so much nomadic song burst out during late communion of firelight and stars. The sun brought no inspiration for romance and myth; it was always darkness that made such imagery.

In my current ‘project’, I resist banging my head against the wall, for there is so much to unearth. There are no beginnings, no middles, no ends to the materials I’m following in my research. I walk around these words of mine, afraid to poke too much lest they evaporate. But let me write this: nomadic life was never romantic or beautiful. I still wince when I hear stories about my forefathers’ strife, and yet their poetry was telling of so much passion for the world. Perhaps this is why celestial emblems touch me so much: they are a memory of mock belief, of hope in the heavens, of eyes that once beseeched the sky for miracles.

And then I came across a poem and recalled my birth day—a Monday.

I detest Mondays. It is when the world is too alert and mouths speak too many words and the streets are awash with the commonplace.

In a discussion I had, I asked a recent confidant about their day of birth. A Wednesday. A day removed from mine. I pondered the Tuesday in between. Are we really our birthdays? A moment in time when some star aligned with another while we burst out of our mothers’ wombs. It reduces us to a moment, no? Perhaps it is more about the sequence of days, of a life yet to be lived. Perhaps it is more a general timeline: a beginning, a center, and an end.

A story.

I was happy to discover that a recent purchase of mine allied with the poem I list in this essay. I fished it off the shelf of a beautiful old bookshop during a recent trip I took. It looked lonely, forgotten. The title read The Stories of the Months and Days.

I thought it was going to be very sad, perhaps written by an immortal warlock at the edge of the world—but this is what I do. I romanticize books before reading them. To my delight, the book is a collection of scattered myths and legends, links between the celestial elements and the holy.

“It’s all man-made.” A voice says from memory.

Aren’t all myths man-made? What are we if not a collective of stories? A span of tongues and footprints and hands in the mud?

On the days of the week, I selfishly graze the pages to my day:

Monday. Moon day.

The chapter begins:

The moon, like the sun, was an object of wonder in the days of old, and was worshipped almost everywhere in some form or other, but it does not play quite so important a part in the story as the sun. Since the moon is paler than the sun and its light soft and gentle, it was often regarded as being a chariot driven by a woman, but the course of the moon-goddess across the sky was similar to that of the sun god. The moon goddess is the fair Diana.

I read on: Diana’s love for the mortal Endymion, and how she would visit him every night in a dream. There, Endymion would shun the sun and the ennui of the day, only to seek the goddess out in another glorious vision come nighttime.

Longfellow writes:

The rising moon has hid the stars;

Her level rays, like golden bars,

Lie on the landscape green,

With shadows brown between.

And silver white the river gleams,

As if Diana, in her dreams

Had dropt her silver bow

Upon the meadows low.

On such a tranquil night as this,

She woke Endymion with a kiss,

When, sleeping in the grove,

He dreamed not of her love.

Like Dian’s kiss, unasked, unsought,

Love gives itself, but is not bought;

Nor voice, nor sound betrays

Its deep, impassioned gaze.

It comes—the beautiful, the free,

The crown of all humanity—

In silence and alone

To seek the elected one.

I pencil down the following: “Moon—A seeker of beauty. Desire. Dreams. Woman.”

I recall another myth, one from ancient Arabia, where during an eclipse, the moon was said to be captured by demons for three days of the month, and offerings were made until the moon shone again. Another story. Another world of darkness.

But the book continues to a new god, another myth—the Egyptian god Thoth. A god of wisdom, invention, writing and magic. Thoth comes from the time of Ra, a contrast to the sun god. The Romans compared him to Mercury, another deity inventive of writing. Thoth wore the crescent moon atop his head, while holding a stylus, the instrument used by the Egyptians for writing on wax tablets.

Interesting that I write this in the late hours of day, my book of stories against my hip while I pour into the page. My face is illuminated by the soft light of my device. My words are stardust, and the immortal warlock beyond the page reads mine for a change.

Man-made. God-made.

Aren’t all stories somewhere in a book? Forged together for nocturnal enquiry? Left unread on a dusty shelf in some indiscernible bookshop? I spoon them out, a glutton for passages through some forgotten paradox. I will the elements into my hand—Diana, Thoth and Mercury combine in some violet light that I merge into me.

Into you.

Perhaps with time…

N

Many of the well-wishing messages received little more than a quick flick of my thumb. I did not need someone’s afterthought prayer over my life.

I posted a note recently where I confessed my deep derision for the word hope.

Hope has become a filler word. You drop it into the middle of a sentence, like so:

“I hope things get better.”
“I hope this blows over soon.”
“I hope you’re all safe.”

And I have nothing to say to my well-meaning friends. There is nothing to say.

The world isn’t bound to wishes or hope. We sleep and wake to different realities every day, and yet this felt bleaker because it was so close to home.

My Iraqi doctor receives me with a clinical smile. He asks me to sit, which I do in quick, short strides. He reviews my test results, where I am once again bordering on anemia, and tells me to eat more meat.

More carcasses.

Then he tells me not to worry too much, that this wasn’t real war I was experiencing.

“Great,” I say, this fledgling flame of rage once again swallowed back into my belly.

I will myself to kill all passion, for I will be stuck here a while longer, and passionate rage will have me climbing the walls.

Regulate. Regulate.

I’ve always been good at regulating.

Your local caracal. I await the noise at night, my temper even, my spine erect. There is no sleep for me.

And yet the dreaded hope parade is in your inbox, and it is another tea you’ll brew while your youngest asks if they’ll come back tonight.

This poem came at the moment my dead passion for writing was reignited during an offhand report about the Shajareh Tayyebeh Girls’ Elementary School in Minab, Iran. The reporters were clamoring to speak to an official when he said they would investigate.

Investigate?

The murder of over a hundred schoolgirls?

And then what?

What do you say after you send that many bombs toward children across the world?

I look at mine, and it is one of those brief moments during that blur that I cry into the covers. The world is not one that follows through on empty platitudes. Somewhere another child is about to die, and there is no sentence in the English language that can stand in the way of that.

Tap.

Dust.

Something falls.

A call.

Come.

They resuscitate.
They run.
They race.

A father through the gates.
A mother and her mates.

An uncle.
An aunt.
A sister.
A brother—
breath like a mace.

Tap.

Dust.

Something falls.

A scream.
A wail.
A broken voice.

Fresh wounds.
Limp hands.
A bloody corpse.

Piles of them under the ruins.

Tap.

Dust.

Something falls.

The sky has no borders.

You feel it in the wind.

You turn to your screen.

A rehearsed language.

Something about missiles from a machine.

They’ll investigate.

A promise
they’ll never make.

Tap halts.

Dust.

Something blasts.

Eyes upwards.

Unrest in my skies,
sent by men across the sea.

The dead girls there
no longer see.

Girls, a fat man says,
won’t matter.

They look like you.

Eyes brown like bark.

They close.

Girls you’ll never know.

Fat men and their toys.
Old men in office.
Men on the news.

They say there’s more to come.

More bombs to waste.

More fight to wage.

Dead girls in the rubble,
and the dead boys they love.

Dead children—
brown things, they loathe.

We share the sea,
the strait.

The sky has no borders.

And I want to think
it’s a dream.

An image
where the girls wake

and laugh

and bake

and sing

of no bad men.

No dust.

Nothing falls.

Only laughter
they can’t shake.

With pens and paper
they’ll draw

a map of dreams they’ll reach

over tea and cake.

No noise.

No missiles.

No blasts.

And no bad men.

For more on the Minab School Strike, please find it here.

In military terminology, a "triple tap" refers to launching three sequential missile strikes in the exact same location—often to target first responders or civilians gathering at the scene of an initial blast . [1]

—My poem A Triple Tap was inspired by that military terminology, which echoes much of the devastation the Middle East keeps experiencing and which is so often swept into the margins. The outrage in Gaza, the desolation of Baghdad, the twisted history of Iran—and yet, these are all our children.

My body floats on a black sea. My arms are oars. I stroke the surface. A single wave. A swish. A slap. I am a fish with an upturned face. Eyes towards the moon. One more stroke. One more tackle, the water seeps into my ears. There is another sea inside me. An oblivion without edges. The sun looks away, and it is the moon and I again.

We linger in this chant of eyes and breath and mind. I look towards the light, my face upturned. The moon resides in the north of my being, above me and the black sea. A deity in heaven, a suspended monarch, celestial stone that floats in that other ocean beyond this one.
I speak to it in dreams and visions. I omit no sound. It is an atom in me that chants, and the moon—a god of silence—accepts what I say. There is no judgment in the ocean. No eyes that glare or tongues that mock. There is only water, the heavens, and what floats above.

I am a creature of creation. A sigh in the wind. I am edges of bones. I reek of my nature, my name. I am alight, illuminated, of sunlight, of godlight, of moonlight and stars. I reflect the heavens. I reside in the belly of the great mother. I am still a child despite my length. There are none in the great abyss, save that suspended stone… and I float and float and float.

You may remember, dear reader, my last essay in which I recount scouring femininity through the eyes of one of my favorite poets, the Lost King of Kindah—Imru’ al-Qais. In that same vein, I try to pull inspiration for this next chapter of The Butcher Of Baghdad.

Find the previous chapters here:

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

Enter Antara ibn Shaddad, a warrior of Abs, his lineage besmirched in his tribe’s eyes for his dark coloring, for the duality of his birth, for the baseness of his mother. He describes himself as black as night, as the moon despite the darkness. He resided on the edges of his father’s reign, a mistake—the product of a lord’s lust for a slave.

He carried none of his father’s likeness. He was his mother’s son, of Zabiba (Arabic for “raisin”). In the years of his adolescence, he is drawn to the kindness he feels around his cousin Abla. He grows into a true son of the desert; his vitality, legend. His poetry is of pride for his coloring, of his slavehood, of his essence, his strength, of war and battle, and how death never finds him. There is youthful assuredness, and beneath it, a philosophical mourning. There is so much of him that he made sure to immortalize through poetry and not the sword.

He summarizes his life in this verse:

يُنادونَني في السِلمِ يا اِبنَ زَبيبَةٍ
وَعِندَ صِدامِ الخَيلِ يا اِبنَ الأَطايِبِ

In peace they call me Ibn Zabiba (the son of Zabiba),
and when steeds collide I am hailed as a son of my fathers.

The following are very famous verses depicting a battle scene, and his beloved Abla’s face:

وَلَقَدْ ذَكَرْتُكِ وَالرِّمَاحُ نَوَاهِلٌ
مِنِّي وَبِيضُ الهِندِ تَقْطُرُ مِنْ دَمِي
فَوَدَدْتُ تَقْبِيلَ السُّيُوفِ لِأَنَّهَا
لَمَعَتْ كَبَارِقِ ثَغْرِكِ المُتَبَسِّمِ

I remembered you when spears rained upon my body.
Sharp, flashing steel, dripping with my blood.
How I desired to kiss those swords then,
for they sparkled like your smiling mouth.

There is a driving chapter in the story of Antara’s transformation from slave to warrior, where his father hurries into the slave tent and pleads with Antara to come to the tribe’s aid after another raid has succeeded. Their world is summarized in echoes of screams, and steel and blood, but Antara is devoid of his father’s urgency. He responds with the words of his upbringing: “A slave has no use in battle. A slave is there to carry the heavy load, to milk your she-camels.” This is when Shaddad (his father understands). He is negotiating his freedom for the tribe’s well-being. Freedom will mean that he would have high standing among his kin, that he would finally be deemed a true knight, a contender for his cousin Abla’s hand in marriage.

Shaddad gives his word. Antara is free.

Some of his verses on his transformation from slave to his tribe’s savior are the following:

فَغَرَّ أعْدَائي السُّكوتُ
وَظنُّوني لأَهلي قَدْ نسِيتُ
وكيفَ أنامُ عنْ ساداتِ قومٍ
أنا في فَضْلِ نِعْمَتِهِمْ رُبيتُ
وإنْ دارتْ بِهِمْ خَيْلُ الأَعادي
ونادوني أجَبْتُ متى دُعِيتُ
بسيفٍ حَدُّهُ يزجي المنايا
وَرُمحٍ صَدْرُهُ الحَتْفُ المُميتُ

They have taken comfort in my silence, a presumption that I have left my kin to memories.
But how can I sleep when I am a lord of my people?
I who was raised amongst their prosperity?
And if I am called, as enemies’ steeds echo in the distance, I will respond to thy call
with a sword that ends all dreams, and a spear that carries their doom.

This immortalization of his name: how, in the aftermath of that period, his father Shaddad is only remembered through the name of his unwanted son. His mistake. It is pure irony, is it not?

In a dramatization of the epic of Antara, the Arabic dialogue is spoken by one slave to another while Antara listens on the sidelines:

“Do you see those camels? How some are light and some are dark? Do you think the herd cares? You see, slavery is a human construct. Like all things human, we corrupt the earth with things that do not exist in the natural world.”

I thought it very clever, on how easily humans mistake their systems for nature. Animals do not carry this fracture. We are our own conflicts. In the epic of Antara, the lesson is—freedom is a return, a belonging. Only humans have broken things into race, tribe, and religion. There is a need to pull back, to retreat into what was once open.

In the epic of his life, his poetry is revived by readers across the world. It is a story of pure want: to dream, to shed slavery, to rise against those who saw him as other, and to walk into the sun toward immortality—and toward us, toward this page, where a writer tries to compress him for the sake of the story that follows…

THE BUTCHER OF BAGHDAD

CHAPTER III

His father was Sultan once.

A man as high as the sun. His beard dark as a raven’s wing. Rakan remembered looking up at him, searching the Sultan’s face for some sign that he belonged there. Sometimes there was recognition—a nod, a glance, scraps of kindness that became the happier moments of his childhood.

His mother was ravenous for the Sultan’s attention, always chasing favor among concubines. When the Sultan came, she disappeared into him; Rakan saw less of her, less of the man. A child of base desire was never seen in a palace that measured worth in blood.

His mother told him he carried the lineage of kings in him. That he should be proud to belong to a name that never called on him.

He had just turned ten when he stood beside her to watch a battle of kin. His father, the reigning Sultan, had no legitimate sons to inherit the throne. So the court turned to his brother—Rakan’s uncle—to decide succession.

The uncle smiled at him sometimes. A thin, careful smile, as if Rakan were something to be acknowledged but not fully claimed. He was younger than the Sultan had been, with more men behind him, and noble sons already prepared to carry on the name.

It was that day his father drew his last breath before his eyes, his body askew on a white steed, propelled backward by his brother’s spear.

He told himself he felt nothing for the man. He watched as his knights came forward, retrieved him, and carried him to the grand pyre. He told himself he did not care as the pyre was lit—the smoke of a demi-god. The whole kingdom breathed him in. And so it was Calia’s father who took the throne next: a swing of a spear and behold—a kingdom.

His cousins, princes rightly born, offspring upon offspring, unions of power, unions on a chessboard.

That very night, his mother flung herself into the smoke—a fallen star from a high balcony. Her body was a memory of itself, her beauty a mishmash of blood and bone in the mud.

The kingdom lost two that night. One in smoke, and one he dug into the sand.

And this was his return: a man of steel with a helmet in his hand, one eye hidden behind a fall of dark hair, the other fixed upon the throne. The court of his kin turned into a loud hush as he proceeded deeper into the grounds. His cousin Noah, the oldest remnant of his uncle’s line, lounged upon the cushioned seat. Three slave girls rested at his feet. But Calia was unseen. He had pictured himself on that seat once, with her by his side—her belly full with a child, a child of their coloring, of darkness and sand instead of that wretch she pulled beside her in the shadows of their reunion, with hair the color of straw.

Noah stood to welcome him. He halted at the edge of the shallow steps.

This was a conqueror’s welcome. He bent no knee.

“You are resurrected, cousin,” Noah boomed.

“I was never dead, majesty.”

His cousin chuckled, his white teeth breaking the darkness of his beard.

“And thank God for that. Welcome home.”

There were drums again. Drums that had never rung for him before. Home? Perhaps he would take that too. He saw Calia in the word.

There is a memory amidst the drums where he reaches for Calia in the dark. Her laugh an echo, like a ghost; she is unseen, save for the touch of her skin. He could never tell the difference between the softness of her and the silk she wore. To him, she was of that essence—a girl and woman and dream, so unlike his element. She was refuge. Rain in the heat.

It was Noah who reported him. He was drawn down into the torturer’s chambers. He was given twenty lashes that night. His back still bore them, imprinted on him to this day. He never spoke to her after that. Not until he heard her screaming, her brothers unseen. He saw bandits rush out of the throne room. He saw her in blood, the decaying body of his uncle in her arms. There were no last words between them. Hers was an unspoken plea; his answered in motion—blood and eyes and a promise.

And he delivered.

Now, he drew away from the splendor of his cousin’s court, away from the velvets and silks, away from the women who introduced themselves through lashes and painted lips. Ten years of war had stripped the taste for luxury from him. What were dancers and poets and songs beside the great men he had lost? Those were days of scarcity, of angled thoughts, of hunger and thirst, of blood and fire. He still had dreams he would never speak of. He had done things that would make everyone in this court weep. He saw nothing here. Nothing he wanted to linger on. He looked at each perfumed face before him and remembered another court like this one. He recalled similar faces, the dark triumph he felt in grabbing men with silken hands and dragging them into the fire. He had a heavy urge to do it again—to call on his warriors, to grip one of those poets his cousin liked to entertain, to draw out his tongue, and to have his mouth pour blood instead of words.

He bid Noah goodnight, and took to the old hallway, deeper into the servant corridors. His old haunting grounds. There were few faces from his childhood left in the palace. This one belonged to no court.

The old cook welcomed him with familiar flour-dusted hands and the same tired smile she had worn when he was a boy stealing scraps from her kitchen. They spoke for a time. Of old days. Of Calia now, and the boy she holds close.

“He is like her in every sense.” Cook said. “She birthed him under a full moon, her husband off on a long hunt; she bore the pain alone.”

The full moon, she said, was a resurrection of Calia’s namesake—a goddess of a forgotten church. The moon was her element.

He did not want to linger while the old woman went on to reveal more—of Calia alone again, another scene of blood, her body claimed by this child, this other man’s seed.

“So she does not…care for him?”

The old woman peered into his face.

Too close.

“Their union was a treaty. Nero and his legion, and their connections. I do not think Noah allowed her to love him. It was your name she called when the boy was crowned. She will never heal, Rakan—she adored you once.”

“Once,” he said.

“She did not have a choice. She was always a chess piece… you? Nobody could really tell with you.”

“A bastard is not of the board, ma’am.”

“You’ve always been part of it. She has been at the center of things; it’s a difficult position for a girl.”

Girls and their positions were not of his domain. Yes, he was born into his bastard reality—but he would never be bartered into a marriage he did not want. He would take, inflict, choose. He could not see into her world from here.

But then, he never understood women beyond what little relief he found with some. He had found true belonging in the pleasure of bloodletting, in the piercing of steel into flesh, in the growl of the animal inside him… but he wanted to be back. To be within these old walls, to seek her voice, to quench a different appetite, to understand that call from a distance away.

He could not tell Cook of it. Of how, in the hallway, he was already moving, his sword hand at the hilt. He was about to strike the boy down.

For her.

He seeks the temple—a blank cube. The smoke of incense and the mutterings of prayer all around him. At its center sits Isaac, another monarch he must seek.

“Light returns to us.” Isaac says, and he rushes to him with his arms unbound. Rakan lets him have it. His cousin’s arms around him are soft, pliable, similar to the aristocratic slaves he brought with him. The temple was another court, another place where more words were made.

Isaac began uttering things—prayers of gratitude, of longevity, things he knew the faceless god would not give.

Rakan glances at the icon in the wall, a figure with a blank visage. “I presume the faceless god is blind then.”

“The faceless god sees all,” Isaac says.

“Of course,” Rakan replies.

He could slay him here. Let the faceless god watch.

“There is no love lost between us, cousin—only Calia seemed to understand you. But you are back now. A champion.”

It took a war, the heads of so many men, of blood carved out of kings, of a scar that he will keep forever, to make him seen.

His mention of Calia went uncommented on.

“Nero is good for her. He understands women of rank, her temperament. They have a lovely son now; have you met him?”

Isaac knew he saw the boy, but liked to prolong this facade of himself as a man of God when in truth he was a man of vipers. He surveyed the halls just as Noah had once.

“I advise you, priest of God—pray.”

“Always, cousin. One needs to be anchored in something.”

“Indeed.”

He met her at the steps of the great cube. Her figure wrapped in a gauzy pale fabric, her sandaled feet paused. Calia. He offered no words. No greeting. Their last meeting had shocked her into the dark. And so he remained by the door, steadfast, a soldier once again.

She took slow steps towards him. Careful, precise, each step crunching a twin echo upon the granuled ground.

“Are you here for prayer?” she asked him. Tentative, her voice almost a whisper.

The question, after all the carnage he had envisioned inflicting upon her brothers, was almost comical.

“Does the faceless god have ears?”

“You should ask Isaac,” she said with a brief smile.

“You know as well as I that he would lie and say this god listens through his pockets.”

She glances towards the entrance, the open mouth of the great cube where breath was fragrant smoke. “I think the temple has improved on him.”

“Do you think I’m improved, Calia?” It was a sudden question. He was looking for a word. He hated this. He despised himself even more for arching up for her like those damned poets at her brother’s court.

She stares at him, openly. Her dark eyes sweep up his form, and down his torso towards his booted feet. Finally, she shakes her head, a small movement, another hand towards his face. She touches the scar. “You needed no improvement, Rakan.”

Calia did not know the violence he felt for her, did not know how difficult it was to keep his hands to his sides, to let her glorious face seek his.

—”Oh, I think the scar is a nice touch to him.” Echoed Isaac’s voice from the innards of the temple.

Calia drew her hand back. It was a reluctant shift. She did not draw away quickly.

Isaac stepped forwards, his long robes slithered behind him like the plows of smoke about. He did not stand in the sun, but remained in the shadow of the great mouth.

Rakan eyed Isaac through the smoke. “I thought you were praying, Priest of god.”

His gaze moved first to Rakan.

Then—slowly—to Calia.

And there it lingered.

“She has not changed,” Isaac said, almost absentmindedly.

Calia did not respond.

But something in her stillness altered. There was a slight recalibration of weight in her stance. A settling—away from their reach.

Rakan saw it. Isaac likely did too. because he smiled faintly, as though satisfied with something only he understood.

“Time is generous with some,” he added. “Less so with others.”

Calia’s gaze shifted.

Past Isaac, to the interior of the temple, where smoke moved like breath without body.

Rakan felt it before it became clear. She was no longer standing with them in the same arrangement. She was no longer available to either of their readings.

“My sister is here for prayer, Rakan,” Isaac intoned.

Calia did not correct him.

She paused before allowing her legs to make the distance. Then she moved—past Rakan, past Isaac—and into the smoke.

Isaac watched her go a moment longer than necessary. Then he glanced back at Rakan and followed her inside. Rakan watched them go. For a moment, nothing moved in him. Then Isaac’s voice came again from within the smoke—“She came willingly.”

And that was all. Rakan did not answer. His hand moved first. His sword was already drawn. The blade hung low, scraping once against the ground where her footsteps had been. Dust lifted in a thin line. He held it there, still.

He knew no words. Spoke no whispers. He stood at the foot of the great temple and watched the plumes of smoke thin into breath. The sound of their prayers went on and recognition formed in him:

That what had been said inside that smoke would not remain inside it.

That it would bleed.

That it would be used.

That men who spoke of god could still be broken.

Author’s note:

Rakan is every red flag in the park. The restraint, sensory violence, and images of displacement open like a flower while writing him.

I’m winging this as I go. I have a sense of where it will end, but there is still much to fill in between. This work draws from my readings in Arabic poetry, literature, and history, which I often write about here.

Thank you for joining me in making sense of someone who has seen too much and is still trying to belong somewhere.

I know. Classic.

N

The phrase “Oh, she’s so beautiful” is so common, it is a phrase so often heard that it has lost all meaning.It is a conditioned phrase we spew towards any female in sight. Any girl child, any woman in our midst.

Tell me, how often have you said it?

I dealt with a death in the family during my early college years. I had come out of my lecture broken and a classmate of mine looked beyond me and said “She even looks pretty when she cries.”

I realized I was an objective scene, then. Something to be commented on, something to speculate and diffuse. I promise you, I did not look pretty. I was blotchy, red, and all snot. And yet, my classmate felt that this was an appropriate observation. That my brokenness needed to be beautified. That I was not allowed ugliness. I was for aesthetic consumption.

That—hey!—at least you look good when you’re broken.

I found out much later in life, that this girl would go on to have extensive procedures. A nose job, lip fillers, body conturing, and god knows what else…

I have never judged anyone on their chosen lifestyle, but I was older now, I saw more than I did that morning. In the state of my brokenness that day from long ago, she did not see me at all. She was gathering inspiration—I was material.

I think this is why I am often disappointed with certain displays of femininity. Not all, It is not fair to generalize—many of us have woken from that stupor. But, I do meet them often—women too busy with their hair, their faces, their men to the extent where they often dilute the core of themselves. That they should not be smarter than their male counterparts because it would kill the romance. That their hair and lips were more prevalent to what they had to say on politics, or philosophy, or religion or anything else that did not require a face.

So…why are we so obsessed?

In her book, A woman looking at men looking at women, Siri Hustvedt writes:

I do not see myself as I look at a painting. I see the imaginary person in the canvas. I haven’t disappeared from myself. I am aware of my feelings—my awe, irritation, distress and admiration—but for the time being my perception is filled up by the painted person. She is of me while I look and, later, she is of me when I remember her. In memory, she may not be exactly as she is when I stand directly in front of the painting but rather some version of her that I carry in my mind.

Do not chuck your make up out of the bag. I am not saying come out of your cave a monster. But, we are much more than this. I am much more than sharp eyeliner and lipstick. You are much more than the man you’re with, the children you’ve borne, the life you mask behind. We dislodge and yet never allow ourselves to venture too far.

I am writing this as a journal entry. I have books to the left and right of me. Books of old dusty poets that are so far gone, historians speculate if they were there at all. Male poets. Men that are dust, and yet their words still live on. Men who’ve offered endless verses on beauty it has become doctrine.

One of my favorite poets growing up was Imru al-Qays. Though, I was always confused during my studies of him as a fresh adolescent. He would describe a new woman in verse every now and then, and I had to roll back the pages to see which one was which. I am holding a bibliography of his work in my lap as I type this. In a passage it describes him as a man who would fall in love with any beautiful woman that passes him by, he would recite verses and drink in her honor until the next one he’d meet and the next. I recall a total of twenty names in his verses. You can understand, my confusion. There were so many inconsistencies to his life. But, It was a predictable hobby for a prince. His father would eventually disown him for his aimless pursuits, and he would die young, dubbed as the lost king, the fallen heir of Kindah, a hedonist, a drunk, a failed dream.

It is quite symbolic that Imru al-Qays’s death was tied to his endless pursuit of beauty. His end came at a feast held by the Byzantine emperor, but by nightfall he had seduced his host’s daughter, thereby fracturing a fragile alliance. His end was nigh.

I wonder if the twenty women he pursued would fight amongst themselves, would draw tears of one another and then comment on how pretty they looked when they did. I wondered if they thought of him at all in their rivalry, if he was merely a reason for something that stems much deeper than his verses of them. I also pondered if they cared at all, if in their perspective a night with a prince was of limited pleasure and nothing to mull over. That he, too, was a fond memory they would carry through their days.

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Stop, and let us weep,

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remembering

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a lover and a campsite

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where the sands twist between Dakhoul and Hawmal.

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The whipping winds from north and south

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have yet to efface Toudih or Mikrat,

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and you can see the scat of antelopes

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strewn like peppercorns

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all across the sands.

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When the time comes to set out again,

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my friends start loading up their steeds

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by the tribe’s acacias, 

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but I feel like I’m splitting bitter colocynth.

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“Hold firm,” my companions say, 

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“don’t give in to sorrow.”

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My cure: a river of tears.

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But no place brings solace

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now that every trace of her 

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is gone.

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You see, Imru al-Qays was also known for his lament on grief, elegies of empty spaces, spaces where these loved ones have been. His memories of moments in time, women that he chronicled his life around. He was said to be the first to weep at the remnants of a place. A bold moment of his, was when he stopped his trope of knights to call out the walls of a deserted home. The house of his past love (One of many.) As someone that often writes on grief and the ending of scenes, I often recall his poetry. His way of trying to hold on to a moment, to hold on to beauty and what pleasure it had brought him. I recently mentioned to a friend trying to find answers in theology, that my belief is that we experience hell and heaven in our lifetime. That like, Imru al-Qays we seek out pleasure because we are finite, and that hell can find us at any moment. I ponder if that is the axes point with women, that we creatures of pain, would happily go to hell if it’s the correct ensemble.

There is beauty in pain. Is that not the phrase? Perhaps, it is how we hold ourselves. How we proceed into the abyss in silence, seldom glancing back at the world we leave behind. We are swept into orifices, of girlhood, of womanhood, of the violence of our wombs, the rage it carries into our lungs. We see our blood too often.

Curious, that the world has rendered that concept of a pained creature as something for the visual effects of a scene. Much like my crying for a death in the family, much like the women in Imru al-Qays’s verses, much like my female counterparts who’ve rushed into their own life paths, despite the chaos.

How did we allow ourselves to be for aesthetic consumption?

In a Daughter of Isis-The early life of Nawal el Saadawi, in her own words

Nawal writes—

In the morning I could not get up. Severe pains kept shooting through my body. I had a rasping cough and my chest hurt. Then I got cramps in my stomach and intestines, vomited and was overwhelmed with feelings of being impure, of humiliation, and a desire to hide away from people.

We often belittle the pain, the image, the inner ugliness of ourselves and squeeze out the beautification. When men persevere through pain, they are masculinity reborn, a virile specimen of the highest human form and in turn we are left out of the race. We bleed in the sidelines. Our endurance, our rage, is seldom celebrated. We in biblical terms were always the second human. The second born is often overlooked.

In Catherine McCormack’s Women In The Picture, she writes the following:

The classical male nude has since symbolized political strength and heroism in numerous images and sculptures. Napoleon Bonaparte posed for a life-sized nude sculpture as Mars, god of war, when he appointed himself as emperor of France.

Michelangelo’s colossal nude sculpture of the Old Testament hero David was chosen as a fitting symbol to stand sentinel outside the seat of government in Florence in the Piazza della Signoria. And in London, a nude sculpture of a classical warrior wearing nothing but a helmet and sandals is the war memorial outside of the army and navy club on Pall Mall. They stand proudly oblivious of their nudity and as such are a world away from Aphrodite emerging from her bath, aware of her body under our gaze.

If you are in any doubt as to how men and women’s unclothed bodies are seen differently, just try to imagine a sculpture of a nude woman in a public space in which her body signifies actual, real power, and represents something like government or a revered institution. The language does not exist.

Yes. I agree with the women on my table. I read, I underline, I acknowledge. Though, I end by looking away and dipping back into my lifelong conversation with this particular poet. My coming back to him, my inner monologue of grief whenever I see a ruin long past. I wonder about the innards of it. If there is life still, if there is someone grieving it from within. The unseen ugliness of a moment. Like, Imru al-Qays’s own laments on his numerous lovers. How women were hollow surfaces, memories of a time, beauty, and lust and love…and yet I was never allowed to cross him and seek the women beyond his verses.

Their perspective is a blank. Much like, McCormack’s passage on the perception of the male and female form in art. Through the lost king, I find nothing beyond the physicality of these women.

Much like the woman my mother likes to boast about whenever she recalls that holiday. The idea that my voice, my hands, my mind would be stolen away from me, leaving me with nothing but my face, is an unbearable concept. But it is a reality for much of our history. We are so recent in the written world, so seldom documented, reduced to the kohl in our eyes. Perhaps this is why writing has become a form of reclamation, we are here to make up for lost time, for a legacy that was never fully preserved by our fellow man. And so we lunge into the light, into ugliness and beauty and pain. We are new, reborn, and we have much to address.

I have struggled with this chapter.

I wanted it to be something beyond surface-level “dark romance.” Instead, it became something closer to obsession, fantasy, and memory—the myth of an alternate life. A celebration of what was never lived.

In my earlier work The Butcher of Baghdad, I turned to history for reference: Al-Saffah and the Abbasid violence that marked that turning point in history.

This time, I find myself returning to a different kind of figure.

A feminine voice, expanded in range. A compliant woman, but not a hollow one. I had been thinking of Rakan as a man written in greys moving toward black. His counterpart, glimpsed only in fragments, is not.

This is not a work in progress. It is an exercise in tone, in matching voice. Like placing patterns beside one another and asking: do they belong in the same world?

While writing this, I thought of Hind bint Al-Muhallab, the fourth wife of Al-Hajjaj, the first commander of the AlUmayyads. Hind came from a family of twenty-three brothers, several of whom grew in fame and prudence. A few years into their marriage, her brother was taken into custody by her influential husband. She would stay up at night to listen to his screams while her husband’s men tortured him into obedience. Al-Hajjaj had a recurring dream since the foulness of her brother-in-law’s taking. In the dream, Hind is above him, clawing his eyes out. There is a glimpse of her beautiful face then it is crimson, and then darkness.

Eventually he is driven into despair; he divorces her and sends her on her way.

Another story of Hind reoccurs. This one is of Hind combing her hair while her husband spies her reciting the following:

A noble steed is naught but an Arabian mare.
Yet a lineage of horses may be undone by a mule.
If she bear a foal, it is by the goodness of her stock;
But if she bear a mule, the fault lieth with that mule.

These lines are an insult to him. He decides to part ways, and so he sent his servant to utter a divorce in as few words as possible. In Arabic, it is two words, but I’ll translate the meaning in lengthier English:

You are a wife no longer.

Hind responds in verse, happy to be free of him:

We were together, yet knew no joy;
We are parted, yet know no sorrow.

The initial feeling does not last; the slight remains. He had cast her off indirectly, with two words spoken by a servant.

She goes off on an ancient marketing campaign. She entices several poets to sing praises of her beauty in the court of Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, the Caliph of the Muslim world, Al-Hajjaj was his governor in Iraq. A climber’s strategy that she will see to completion.

The Caliph sends her a messenger, an official proposal; he seeks her hand.

Hind licks her lips, leans back into her success, and drives the messenger back to the Caliph with a single condition. She pens the following:

I shall consent, if Al-Hajjaj leads the beast that carries me unto thee.

Al-Hajjaj dared not defy the Caliph and sets off to do his bidding.
Hind prepares to depart for Damascus, and Al-Hajjaj leads her caravan forward. Along the way, she draws aside the curtain and beholds him guiding her mount, and she laughs in mockery.

Al-Hajjaj, seeking to provoke her, recites:
O Hind, perchance thou hast forgot
The nights I left thee wakeful in lament.

Hind answers:

We care not, so long as our souls remain unscathed
For what have we lost of wealth or lineage.
Wealth may be gained, and honor restored,
If a man be healed of ailment and ruin.

Meaning she was cured of his ailment.

Hind sought to wound him even further. She let a dirham fall.
“Boy, I dropped a dirham. Fetch it for me.”

Al-Hajjaj looked upon it and said with scorn:

It is a dinar, not a dirham.

She chuckled in mock surprise:
Oh praise be to God, who hath exchanged for me a dirham for a dinar.

Meaning: God had replaced Al-Hajjaj with the Caliph himself.

Al-Hajjaj swallows his tongue for the duration of the trip.

When the caravan reached the Caliph, a feast had been prepared. Abd al-Malik sought Al-Hajjaj among the guests and summoned him to join.

Al-Hajjaj said:
My mother raised me not to eat the leavings of other men.

The Caliph does not comment but understands—he was speaking of Hind, once his wife. Disturbed, Abd al-Malik withdraws from her and ceases any more visits to her chamber.

Hind, hurt by this, feared Al-Hajjaj had triumphed. So she devises another plan.
She summons the Caliph and instructs her maid to alert her upon his approach. When he is close to her door, she adorns herself, then purposefully pulls at her necklace so that its pearls scatter to the ground.

Lifting her garment, she reveals her beauty as she kneels to gather them, saying with each pearl:
Glory be to God.

The Caliph asks:
Why do you keep saying that?

She replies:
Isn’t it so fascinating? These pearls were created by God for the adornment of kings.

While she picked at each pearl she adds:
Yet in His wisdom, He ordained that none might pierce them but those of the lowliest serfs.
—More reference to Al-Hajjaj.

The Caliph laughs and says:
By God, you speak the truth. Shame upon him who reproached me for you.

And thereafter, he took her as his wife.
And Al-Hajjaj was but a memory of a past she will speak of no more.

The story of Hind resurrects female agency. She is undone and redone. She is married, divorced, and reemerges in a foreign court through poetry. She introduces herself as a fantasy, a being out of reach, and she succeeds in ascending through another doorway. Men were stepping stones, means to an end. Hers is a mechanical perseverance. If I were given the choice of inviting a historical figure to lunch, it would be Hind.

The following is my second chapter of The Butcher of Baghdad.

I hope you stay for it.

The drums reached her before their sight did. By the time she stepped toward the window, the clearing below had already given itself to spectacle.

Him—at the head of it all. Warriors. Slaves. A procession built to be remembered.

And her, high above, unseen among the masses screaming his name.

A wildfire of a return. And knowing him, every moment of it calculated.

“Come back to bed, pet.”

Her husband’s voice, soft, practiced. A leash pulling her back.

This was her chance to speak. To say something.

The words rose in her throat, a pressure, a pulse—something alive inside her that was not a child, not duty, not silence. Her own voice, trying to surface.

She swallowed it.

She was tired of him. Of his stillness. Of the careful, lifeless rhythm of their days. Of a marriage that required nothing but her compliance. She had been cattle to her brothers, and Nero had been a favorable trade.

Calm. Predictable. Useful. A man they could guide, redirect, will into obedience. His family’s wealth bent toward the crown’s needs, his being pliable enough not to resist.

He would not ride into the night.
He would not burn the world for her.

He would not look at her and choose ruin.

No—Nero was convenient.

She had thought Rakan dead until now. Somewhere between here and the long roads to the palace, broken.

But there he was. Whole. Returned.

Her chest tightened at the sight of him—bareheaded, scarred, unmistakable.

Memories of him resurrected—
the training grounds, the echo of steel,the boy who became something sharper, something uncontainable. He had never belonged to her brothers. He had been something else entirely—a weed they tried to pull, only to find him growing back stronger, more stubborn, impossible to root out.

She wanted to call his name.To lean out into the roar and find him in it. Instead, she stepped back. She was no weed. She did not grow where she was not wanted. Where he had carved himself out from the edges of court—mocked, dismissed, forged in derision—she had been placed at its center. Adored and displayed.

A goddess, so long as she remained still while Rakan returned a champion. He was agility and she an ornament.

Not anymore—She was once something bright and had been reduced to a shadow at the edge of her own life.

They had told her he was dead, unseen since his departure. Nearly a decade of killing, of slaughter that they diminished with this marriage—She was not allowed to marry for her heart. She married for theirs. She remembered the cloister, thick with smoke and prayers, her knees pressed into cold stone as she swore herself to a god with no face.

No more letters.
No more messengers.
No more reaching for something already gone.

Her father unavenged.
His killers free.
Rakan lost somewhere beyond the horizon.

They had let her grieve. Watched and then handed her to Nero.

“They did not tell me he lived.”

Her voice was barely there. Nero did not answer. He sat with his goblet of wine at his lips, untouched by the roar beyond the walls. She turned back from the window. Tears caught the candlelight before she wiped them away.

Her hand moved for her robe. She would go to him before they told him.
’Before this became something she could never erase.

She reached the doors and stopped.

The maid stood waiting, the child’s small hand in hers.

“My lady… the noise. I think it woke him.”

The city could not shake without it reaching her.

In that instant, something sharp rose in her—a sob, a violent scream.

Then the boy stepped forward.

“Mama?” His voice, small. Careful.

Her boy.

Dark eyes like her own. Fair hair like his father’s.

“Can I sleep with you?”

She closed her eyes, just briefly.

“Yes,” she almost said.

“You know that is not appropriate, Zane.”

Nero again. Always present. Always ready to speak in her place.

The boy stilled, his gaze to his feet.

“I’ll come with you,” she said instead, softer now.

A compromise. A surrender.

Nero made a small sound—a clucked dismissal and disappeared deeper behind her.

“Get some sleep,” she told the maid. “I’ll take him.”

Morning came too quickly.

She moved through the halls barefoot, the marble cold beneath her feet.

Had she imagined it? The spectacle from last night. All those dark horses and Rakan at the front, his black hair slicked back, his skin all dusk, all sun and earth, his scar as white as the moon— Was it really him she saw?

“Calia.”

That voice. She turned. And there he was.

Not armored now. Not the figure from the night before. Not a champion here, but the man from long ago. This was their fragile reunion. He stepped toward her. Slowly. As though something might break between them if he moved too quickly.

She didn’t dare breathe.

The scar along his face was akin to the one in her heart.

“They told me you were dead,” she said, a line she had repeated in her head over and over since spying him outside.

“Not a chance.”

There it was that familiar sneer. She crossed the distance. He pulled her in, solid, fast. He smelled of dust and heat and something green beneath it—argan, maybe, weeds from the lands beyond. She stayed there longer than she should have, as if time had not already moved on without them.Then she pressed away, her gaze to his face.

“I have so much to tell you…” She said.

“I have so much to tell you…” He whispered.

She was all ears about to swallow up all his secrets.

She sensed the small footsteps before hearing them, his ripe voice echoed her alter name.

“Mama!” Zane called.

She did not turn to the boy, she looked at the shattered visage in front of her. Eyes that sought hers only in tenderness turned to ice, his adam’s apple bobbed once before he shot murder at the child.

He stepped away from her. His form straightened, a soldier again. Hawk-like he glanced from her son to her. “You became a mother while I orphaned many. Congratulations, I was not aware of your nuptials.”

“Rakan–“

“Pray, spare me your explanation—your child is of foreign coloring. An extension.”

“I’ve always despised your ability to read things in simple iterations by just looking—you’ve been away for a decade, you’ve returned now and I was not expected to wait for you.”

“An eternity cannot alter me, Calia.”

“I am not like you.” She said, tears in her throat. Claws of her former self within her skin, but she was already too diminished to give voice.

“No. You are not.” He said, that same sneer again before his gaze turns back to Zane with murder he had once left her for.

“I have killed for you, Calia. I can do it again.”

This is a side of him she did not dare touch, she retreated towards her son, his small hand shivering in her own.

She did not want more blood on the ground. She did not dare try him.

Rakan gazed at Zane’s small face, the child lets out a whimper, and she could hear the great thumping of his heart. A calamity of birthing him. All is felt.

Rakan let out a laugh, it is a sound with nothing in it.

She turned away and retreated into the dark once again.

An eternity could not change him, but a decade had altered her forever.

He was no longer a fantasy. He was death and rampage, and his chaos would reach everything he chose to touch.

I lust for sleep. I sink into my mattress, either cocooned to my side or on my back, staring at the ceiling for checkered doorways into the unseen. There are none. I close my eyes. Nothing reaches for me.

Through the night, I toss and turn, or wake too early, too late. My friend’s face on a screen tells me to take stock of my magnesium; I have three jars in my cabinet. I always overstock on vitamins. It is my way of growing immune, stronger, more powerful.

I shift on the mat, another position—downward, upward, cross-legged. A point on the wall. I check for a doorway. I am still, my breath in rhythm with the soft music I let loose.

A bird flies past my window and disappears beyond the next. I brew a cup of coffee, pour it into a mug I bought in India. Another portal.

I am outside. I rush into a class I had signed up for—a place where I am supposed to hone my penmanship. My instructor shows me how he holds a pen. I mirror him. We write in calligraphy; I pour into the ancient act. Mine an amateur scrawl against his nimble strokes. When finished, I lift the page and show him.

He nods, kind approval. I am years away from his level.

I don’t remember much after that. The conversation drifts away from my poor penmanship, and from the history of the kufi script we were adapting.

He peers into my face.
“A woman needs a man in her life,” he whispers, a low verbiage he believes is baritone.

I cross my legs, fold my arms, lean back. I wait.

“Women need men. It’s unnatural to be without your pleasure. How else will you get there…?” He says.

I raise a brow. “Yeah, I think I’m done here.”

I might as well have slapped him. He lunges for his paperwork, rummaging through his bag, shoving things together in a clumsy pile.

I don’t know what he expected—some reaction, perhaps. A performance where I require him to demonstrate what he insists I lack.

He coughs, or gurgles—I can’t recall which.

I pick one of his calligraphy pens, press the pointed tip down, and sign my name on my page of exercises. A small marker. I glance around the empty room, then at his purple face. I wish him pleasure, and walk out.

Years ago, the intimacy of his insinuation would have flushed my skin red. The slight of being told, again, that I need a man. This time, it didn’t land. I saw it clearly: some aging idiot, casting me as his limelight dream girl, deciding to make a move.

There were no checkered portals in that classroom. I had to leave the normal way.

My friend messages me about “hoe inclinations” when you’re divorced, asks if I’m there yet. I pause. I wonder if women develop hoe inclinations while sirens wail in the background. I send her a shrug emoji. I use that one a lot.

“So you don’t get approached?” she nudges.
“I think I scare most of them.”
“Oh…well, you shouldn’t.”

Thumbs up emoji

I meet another friend. This one still has hope in the world.
“He’s out there, you know.”

I lick my lips over the burgers we’ve ordered.
“What?”

“You know. The one. We all have one.”

I chuckle, raise my thumb. Another thumbs up.

“You don’t believe in any of it, do you?”
“No,” I say, secretly envying her for the hope she holds. “I think you’re high on a standard you imagine is out there. Men, like women, are a pain. Everyone has to make sacrifices for things to work. Ask yourself, do you want to make sacrifices?”

“There are so many women who’ve gotten exactly what they wanted.” She argues.

“We’re talking about human beings. The perfect one does not exist. I’m flawed, you’re flawed…hell, everyone is.”

“There are flaws you can take. I mean, I take your sour puss every day.”

“And you’re lucky!”

She laughs.

I used to measure women in the men they kept. I used to think women with the right consorts were a pleasure to see. I’ve long forgone that habit. I seek women as they are now. Singular, their own. I no longer see them as portals.

A third friend tells me to always be rude to men and never offer them any kindness.
“My instinct is to always listen to see what they want…most of them seem utterly helpless to me.” I say.

“Well, they’re not. They live in societies built for them. If they’re helpless in custom-made societies, then they shouldn’t breathe near you.”

“Oh wow…”

“It’s true!”

My friend is a bossy little thing. She struts in sandals, carries her pink gym bag, and changes into giant Adidas trainers to work out in.

“You’re not a bitch to your trainer,” I say, noticing her interaction with the muscular Brazilian man.

“He provides a service. I can’t be mean to him.”

“Ahhh, I see. You like it transactional…” I laugh while she slaps my side, and we lean into each other in hysterics. We’re familiar with our previous partners. It was always a mess. She still carries his credit cards to swipe despite their separation.

I don’t think I can survive being tethered to someone like that. To orbit around his name even when I am without it— it felt like invisible ownership. She tries to pay for our meal; I throw in my card, mention his name, and she rolls her eyes. I did not want him paying for me.

“I birthed his child,” she argues.

I shrug. “I did not.”

“You loooove to judge me.”
“Oh psht, we judge each other.”
“But you judge me more.”
“So judge me back.”

She smiles, a quiet sort of reckoning.

“Do you think you bypassed the system?” she asks.
“Which system?”
“The social construct? Women and men? I don’t see you interested in anyone.”
“Mmm.”
“Well?”

“I don’t know yet,” I answer. “Are you interested in anyone?”

People—my friends, anyone—grab on to this opening. I give her the floor. The dissection into my person was getting a little too close. The light returns to her eyes.

“I want to have fun,” she says.
“You should,” I agree.
“I want that for you too.”
“I always have fun,”

Please note—I don’t write this from a superior standpoint. I don’t know shit. But I do believe there is a void of loneliness no one can fill. It’s you and yourself, and there are no portals. No checkered pathways.

My friends have known loss and heartbreak too, but their will is to keep the conversation going, to have fun—to hold my hand and pull me toward the light. Their fingers point to the sun, their smiles like upturned crescents—look, look towards the brightness—they say, through colorful stories about themselves, their lives, what they want out of it. They think I’m an in-between color, a grey sheen to their metallic coating.

I look at the ceiling. I try to trace the checkered portal. It was there once, when things were a blur and I needed to leave this place for another. I don’t want to sink my friends with thoughts of that—of a world beyond this one. Maybe I should call Azza, but she is in another world of her own. More haunted than I am.

I close my eyes. It is black now. I breathe. A hushed rhythm in the nothingness. Something takes my hand, and I am drawn deeper into the darkness…

The most-used emojis on my phone these days, is a broken heart, a girl shrugging, a thumbs up, and a missile. My brilliant friend Chelsea also lives in my phone (not exactly); she mentioned “exhausted rage” last week during one of our many video messages. Perhaps this is what I’m feeling too—the breath I want to take in suffocation, a fatigue I can’t name. The doors I keep closing to return to myself. The disconnection from romantic narratives, social expectations, and a reality that feels too uncertain to hold still.

I am troubled by the dark the way I am troubled by sleep—how it arrives without instruction, how it refuses shape. I look for the checkered pattern again, the old passage to escape, but it does not form. I steel my breath. I do not say ‘I hope’ anymore. I will look for a way through.

I will find the sun and I will take my magnesium.

My father would tell me whenever I met his eyes in my grandmother’s presence to give her grace. That my grandmother was not from my world or his. That she had seen things I would never understand. My father would tell me whenever my grandmother drew her nose a little higher when I came home after school, cheeks red, hair askew, that it was not a custom of hers to linger when the sun was its harshest. That she grew up as a Bedouin princess, a woman fought over by her own tribesmen. A woman who did not linger outside like I did.

She would tell me that it was when servants roamed, when she would linger inside the coolness of a tent, in darkness, away from the thirst the sun would inflict. I thought it a terribly lonely image, but she would tell me that I should care more for my complexion, lest I look too smoked like many of my kind. We cared very little about the effect of the sun on our young faces; we cared much less for my grandmother’s warning when we stood on floppy swing seats and ushered ourselves into the wind.

Fly, fly, fly.

I’ve always wanted to fly. Not in the sense that I wanted to sprout wings and glide into the distance, but there is something inside me that wanted to be unleashed. To lunge. To uncork oneself. A voice I wanted to scream out into the void. A sob. Words less tangible than these. There is another girl inside of me, one that has never grown up. She guides my hands, and we write this together.

My grandmother would eventually laugh. She would laugh because there was nothing else to do during those afternoons from so long ago. Afternoons that held her shadow. Afternoons that only contained our laughter in the wind. Fly, fly, fly, she would say. And I did, fearless and always askew.

I’ve always thought her fascination with trousers was noteworthy. She would linger on her threadwork, her hands always busy or clasped neatly in her lap, her gaze on my purple track pants.

“It’s good you girls wear those now.”

I have nothing to say in response. That acknowledgment carried my understanding of her throughout my life. Her approval of an item of clothing that was not the norm for her time. It was the turning point—the knowledge that my life is nothing if not the women before me. Women who used to fold their tents, push their poles down, and pile it all on the backs of their camels before they lunged towards the unknown. Women who would cover their faces, not because they followed some bearded man’s creed, but it was their own rebellion against the sun. Because they, like my grandmother, were much too busy for swings in the afternoon. Much too busy for books or television. She was always awkward around such things, her posture never in a laid-out position but always perfectly in place—high and regal, a contrast to ours. She was never splayed out, never comfortable; everything about her was stiff, solemn, ready. But I knew it was not all laughter in the afternoon. It was not all sun. There were times when she was still behind the tent flaps, in the dark, alone—while we were outside.

I miss her most on days like these. When the world seems to suck me low, when America has bared its teeth again. It is not a trade center this time—there is madness at the reins, an angry blue star, and a nuclear plant that can’t be, and of course, more oil to take. Much talk about who is the bigger man when they’re all toddlers with guns. I do not side with either. Iran was never our friend. We’ve intercepted so many missiles and drones; their continuous excuse of US bases rings hollow. We are a tool for retaliation, except nobody cares beyond the oil or the money or the gas those pipelines provide. We watch Neanderthals take the earth—little men who have gone too far because the world keeps to the sidelines and lets them.

I miss her more when I don’t know what to think. When I rummage into my mind for questions nobody can answer. When the world I’m in seems too bleak to linger in. When I pick at a tablet my doctor prescribed—something that is supposed to keep the darkness away. When there is very little to say and I just want to linger in her shadow for a bit. I miss her most when there is no one I truly like anymore. When most tire me out. When words escape me. And the girl inside just wants to be held.

There is a memory of her—an afternoon where I am not on a swing, not screaming for her to watch me go higher. No, this one is a quiet one. One in the shadows. She draws my head in her lap, where she combs my hair back and tells me a story—

The youngest son of a desert sheikh is propositioned by a woman of his tribe. He refuses her and distances himself. She is found hours later with ripped clothes, bruises, and her hair unkempt. She screams the youngest son’s name; she accuses him of assaulting her.

News of this travels fast. His father draws him in a fist—a grip that he does not undo in the presence of many of the tribe’s nobility. It is a great dishonor. The forcing of a woman. Another voice breaks into the frenzy—a new one, another woman. She disrupts their accusations—a confession that she had been in his presence many times, in many secluded situations where he crossed no boundary.

The “assaulted” woman screams in cue of the girl’s presence, where men stand and dwarf his savior into the sidelines. They do not listen to her leveled voice. For women are more convincing when hysterical. The youngest son draws his robes, steps out into the sun, tears run down his handsome face.

The scion of an old name leaves his father’s tent. He does not look back at his brothers’ angry faces. Their words of shame are stab marks on his back. He was made less because a woman accused him of falsehood. He was made less because a woman was his only ally during their inquisition. He walks towards his horse, grabs the reins, and departs.

I linger in consciousness while her fingers comb into my scalp. I want to let go, to fall into her spell, but there is an urge to know where she’ll take me.

“Does he return?” I ask

She pauses, a true storyteller. She tinkers with the question.

“No,” she decides.

I am quiet. I keep my eyes awake. I want to know.

The scion of an old name travels far into a deeper wilderness of dust. He finds a tribe beyond many—a tribe unknown to him, a tribe far from his name.

It is Bedouin protocol not to inquire after your guests. He provides them his sword, to be a soldier amongst theirs—a resident and not a visitor.

During his stay, he discovers something foreign to him, a strange tradition. A horse race is often planned, for the sheikh’s daughter has sworn that she will only marry a man who can best her. He saw many scions of old names, many sons, many fighters compete and fail. He watches from the sidelines, his heart taut. He wishes to participate, but his name would be revealed—a name he has sworn never to utter again.

Some days later, visitors arrive while her father is away. There are a few of them in the common tent. He is uneasy; he does not like these men. There is something sinister in their air, a smile that never reaches their eyes. They shake their coffee cups and depart.

By nightfall, there are a dozen torches. The same strangers—they aim for the sheikh’s daughter, aggrieved that she had bested them. He sees her from a short distance; she is capable with a blade, but is outnumbered, and so he drives them back with her.

When he stepped in for her, that in turn was him standing for his adoptive tribe. When he is thanked and applauded for his victory by the sheikh and the rest of his men, he takes a deep breath—he breaks his vow. He speaks his name. A name they echo about the tent in awe. His was a noble lineage, a scion of an old name.

He accepts the tribe’s terms. He would race. She complies—the most difficult race of his life.

He wins and they marry.

I look up at her, a critic even then.

“Did she let him win?” I ask.

“Maybe,” she laughs.

“Eww… she liked him.”

My grandmother looks towards a bird’s nest by her window. There is a smile on her lips, faint but there. “They sleep—the birds. You need it too.”

But I didn’t want to leave her yet. I wanted to stay, to keep vigil while she brushed my hair back. I wanted more—echoes of sandy terrains, open-ended worlds, stories only she can weave together. Stories I wish I knew more of.

“I’ll tell you another one tomorrow,” she promised.

But tomorrow is here, and I am without her stories. I wake with the sounds of missiles in the distance. Nobody combs my hair back. I write these lines for ease during the uncertainty.

She once told me that “There is no comfort in men. Only stories of them. Stories we can reframe. Stories we can make palatable.”

Except, I do not want to make palatable stories of men.

My grandmother was not of my world. She was a relic of a time I’ve never seen. She knew things I would never understand. She spoke in a voice different from mine. She would tell me stories—words on words on words. Words much more tangible than these. There is another girl inside of her, one that has never died. One that is still with me. She guides my hand, and we write together.

“Hey, do you think I’m more marketable now that I’m in a war zone?”

“I think so. All we can do is nudge the needle towards the light.”

I send him an attached file.

“Think you can nudge this towards that publisher you know?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

I shift over to another app, another friend answers a meme I sent her.

“I forgot how high your hopes were for this year.”

“Yeah, I should’ve stayed a pessimist.”

To be clear, I’ve always faced the world with cynical expectations. You’ll find more in this entry.

But, I don’t want to write about myself today.

I turn to a white page, I seek someone else.

Escapism is necessary while the world falls down (quite literally in my case).

Below I share a piece I’ve repurposed inspired by warlords like Gengis Khan, Sharayar from a 1001 nights and finally The Blood Shredder or Al-Safah named for his reaping of the Ummayads in 750 CE.

It is also interesting to note that the great Battle of Talas occurred during Al-Safah’s reign— a military engagement between the Abbasid Caliphate and their Tibetan allies against the Chinese Tang dynasty.

In July 751 CE, The Tang and Abbasid forces met in the valley of the Talas river in Central Asia. After several days of battle, the Karkluk Turks turned on the Tangs, tipping the balance of power resulting in the Abbasid’s victory.

This marked the end of Chinese westward expansion and resulted in Muslim control of that region for centuries to come.

Partial control of the Silk Road, all economically beneficial to the Abbasids.

There are even whispers—still debated—that Chinese prisoners captured after the battle carried papermaking westward. That knowledge moved through the Islamic world, and eventually into Europe.

Empires fall. Knowledge travels. Stories remain.

And all roads, in some way, lead back to Baghdad.

A city of so much myth it is now a shadow of what it was. I scoop into the barrel. I touch the dust.

I write a beginning.

I pick at a male perspective.

Let us see what he becomes…

A rider was on the horizon. Before him, the city glimmered like a mountain of polished quartz.

Rakan drank in the sight of his homeland. Astride his black destrier, he studied the cloisters above the great dome, his gaze settling on the entrance where she resided.

It had looked different once. A bloodshot moon. A blackened sky. He, a shadow in starlight.

He had always been practical. He rode by night, outrunning word of his own departure. The dark was his ally. In a fortnight, they crossed the borderless desert and reached the northlands, moving like wraiths beneath a sky that did not know them.

She had called him a bastard. A stain on their name. Her wrists too delicate for his sword hand.

The desert did not care. Its heat followed them north, relentless and familiar—an element he understood better than mercy. It was nothing compared to the summers of Baghdad. Nothing compared to the time when she had been his, despite their family.

No matter.

He had made her into a memory. A ghost.

Until now.

The domed palace drew his eye again, even as the wind pressed against the plume of his helmet. He turned slightly in the saddle, glancing back at the men who followed him—his cavalry, sworn and silent beneath black banners.

The bastard son of Baghdad had returned.

They had not expected him from the north. Had not seen the banners until it was too late.

He lifted his helmet, set it on the pommel. Let them see his face. Let them see the scar that carved its pale path from temple to jaw, splitting his beard where it would never grow again.

Let them remember.

The wind cooled the sweat along his scalp, sharp enough to almost be called a chill. For a moment, he thought he could still smell it—the city as he had left it. Rot. Blood. The slow ruin of men. They had begged for burials. He gave them cruxifictions. Two years, and still it lingered.

One could walk from the gates and follow the Jewelled Road for fifty thousand paces. It stretched from the far Northlands, through Baghdad, and down to the southern coast—the only path through the Bleakness.

Along it, the screams had carried.

All had heard.

All had known.

He had made certain of that.

Nearly a decade had passed since his uncle’s murder. A decade since he found her kneeling in blood. A decade since he made his vow.

But he had not killed them all. Some were foreigners, and he had no desire to provoke distant crowns. Others were merchants—useful men, wealthy enough to purchase their lives and eager enough to name their rivals in exchange.

And then there were the Twelve Families…

For five centuries, they had ruled in cycles, each house rising and falling with the certainty of seasons. Not one of them had offered a single life when the city demanded sacrifice, so he took what they did not offer.

Stripped. Broken. Sold.

The heads of their houses—the Forty-Eight, the monarch, and his queen—would not see nightfall. Fifty pyres stood waiting before the palace steps, flanked by the twin temples of the square.

The rest were reintroduced as gifts. Coin. Flesh turned into currency.

And they were not alone. More than thirty thousand of them now belonged to the crown.

They had wanted war.

He had given them an apocolypse.

Two riders approached from behind, their horses massive, their armour gleaming. Rakan did not turn immediately. When he did, it was only slightly, enough to acknowledge his twin cousins.

“The city waits,” he said.

His voice was measured. Certain.

He set his heel to the stallion and rode forward, taking his place at the head of the honour guard.

His men wore heavy armour, built for war where heat mattered less than survival. Steel polished bright enough to catch the sun and throw it back in shards.

His own armour drank the light.

Black plates over mail, each piece fitted so precisely. Even his helmet, crowned with its dark plume, bore the same obsidian sheen.

But he did not wear it. He wanted no barrier between himself and their fear.

He rode bareheaded, the wind cutting through his short hair, his scar laid open for all to see.

Not more beautiful for it.

More alive.

More real.

He had always been more than the men his uncle had raised above him.

Now, he needed no comparison.

Now, he would make them know.

He straightened in the saddle and raised his voice—not shouting, but carrying, each word striking clean across the ranks behind him.

“Soldiers,” he said. “To me.”

And after a decade, the High Martial of Baghdad—the Butcher of Men, the Black-Hearted Sultan’s bastard—rode at the head of his army and came home.

I leave it here.

I imagine my character and his legion ride towards their destination. I reassess the seriousness of what I’ve done in abstracting the fantasy of it. Steel in the desert. Armour that could never have existed for an army in a setting like this one, I know, but I write it anyway. I am stretching out a fantasy. Though, I seek to escape the confines of reality too. The confines of a history already written. Al-Safah killed more men in his lifetime than I would know. There is freedom in not knowing the details.

I tap at my screen. Maybe I should write him up to be more ruthless, then—what was the rule they often tell you?

He must be redeemable.

There is lightning in my obsidian sky. There is a growling in the clouds.

I type him, anyway. My character and his plumed helmet.

I let him breathe without the rules.

I write to you in the calmness I’m allowed, from a region seldom granted reprieve. My phone is flooded with images of war, because that is what my algorithm now feeds me. I listen to music, text my friends, check in on work tasks as if this is normal. It is not normal, but there is a desperate desire to make it seem that way. I am still called in about deadlines, online classes, helpful materials to share with our students despite the missiles.

My daughter looks outside her window. It is mid-Ramadan. A boom splits the sky. She catches the unnatural phenomenon on her phone and I want to weep. This is not something I wish for children to document. I do not want them to see the ugliness humans create, the destruction we inflict on one another, the way my country becomes a pawn. Will we ever be innocent again?

On my phone there is a video of a blonde woman screaming the word Strike. Over and over again. A woman I am very sure has never seen a strike in her life. She invokes religious order, when what little I know of religious men is confined to the courtyards of mosques in my neighborhood. The imam down the street has never called the word strike before, and I am transfixed by the spittle from her mouth, transfixed by the word. There is no prayer in her breath, only verbal missiles.

In the background, Umm Kulthum plays, and I reminisce about the Six-Day War, when her voice was what the Egyptian common man listened to despite the immense blow to the country. I am mute as I listen, the echoes of her audience, the applause. This is resilience. Music, art, love — things Egypt will always represent.

It is almost two weeks since the Gulf was implicated in this unnecessary violence, run by the American orang-utan and his Israeli puppeteers. The world is corrupt with men at the edge of life, men who wish doom on us because they are doomed. Men without conscience, men separate from mankind. We are merely scales, numbers, charts they use to arrange their speeches. They cannot see beyond themselves.

In the spirit of Ramadan, I share a single verse from the Qur’an:

“When they are told, ‘Do not spread corruption in the land,’ they reply, ‘We are only peace-makers!’” (2:11)

In the spirit of Lent, I share this from the Second Epistle of Peter:

“In their greed they will exploit you with false words; their judgment from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep.” (2 Peter 2:1–19)

In the spirit of Holi, I share the legend of Hiranyakashipu:

In the story, the demon king commands everyone to worship him, but his son Prahlad remains devoted to Vishnu. The king’s sister attempts to burn Prahlad alive, yet the fire-resistant cloak meant to protect her is swept away. She is reduced to ash. Prahlad remains unharmed.

I offer these passages because scripture returns again and again to the same theme: corruption is often masked as virtue. I also offer them to counter the woman in the video I mentioned. She is more Hiranyakashipu than a devotee of faith. And I offer them as a reminder of the karmic universe we inhabit: The earth, like our faces and the curves of our backs must orbit back into place. Nothing is eternal.

As I type out these holy texts, I feel rage more than anything. Though I want to scream it — I refrain. I see no pleasure in violence. In what remains of the holy month, I temper what I can. I grip the veins of my ire, unclench my fists, let my teeth grind less. I surrender to what may come.

I pause— I hear another boom in the distance.

There is no nobility in missiles. It is a broken thing that slams into you and leaves you destroyed. It strikes from afar. Someone pushes a button from an undisclosed armchair and you die in bits. There is no parlay. You are ribbons on a screen.

I’ve always hated how we have claimed civilization. We, like religious scripture indicates, have always been corrupt. Virtue is with the common men.

While I type this post, Lebanon is in tragedy again. A village priest was targeted mid-mass, the Isreali military excused the attack as a Hezbollah false alarm. Friar Pierre Al-Rahi was martyred hours ago. I lament at the violence a tank officer must have to target a village church. To shoot at a building while the bells echo. Why?

I regroup— virtue is Friar Pierre. Corruption is in the tanks that surrounded him.

In Arabic tradition, al-Marthiya— An elegy— is common practice in the coming of battle. A warrior recites it on the dawn of his departure. He calls on his memories, his journey through life, his accomplishments, his failures. He collects himself through words. Whatever he could utter of himself, he speaks before he is bound and dead. Verses upon verses while he tucks his sword, his legs levitate towards his steed. He is above ground, and yet he prepares to return to it.

Abd al-Yaghuth, a pre-Islamic Arab warrior, and son of a great tribe recites a very famous Ode mourning his life while he is under chains— his memories ablaze on his lips. The poetic elegy compiles themes of exile, alienation and mortality.

I include these partial verses as a means to show his last moments of defiance, his pride despite his chains. He calls on his many virtues like a final prayer. Through many of his verses, you are gifted an image, I translate some below: 

وَكانَ الرِماحُ يَختَطِفنَ المُحامِيا

And the spears in battle shattered while I protected my name (His tribe) 

وَتَضحَكُ مِنّي شَيخَةٌ عَبشَمِيَّةٌ

And Abshamia ( a woman from the tribe of Abd Shams-the Sun worshipers) laughs at me

كَأَن لَم تَرى قَبلي أَسيراً يَمانِيا

As if she has never seen a Yemenite captive before

أَنا اللَيثُ مَعدُوّاً عَلَيَّ وَعادِيا

I am a lion besieged

أَقولُ وَقَد شَدّوا لِساني بِنِسعَةٍ

I say this as my tongue fails me (Or in some stories they bind his mouth)

أَمَعشَرَ تَيمٍ أَطلِقوا عَن لِسانِيا

Oh tribe of Tamim, unbind my tongue

أَمَعشَرَ تَيمٍ قَد مَلَكتُم فَأَسجِحوا

Oh tribe of Tamim, you have me so show mercy

فَإِنَّ أَخاكُم لَم يَكُن مِن بَوائِيا

Your brother (AlNoman bin Jasas- an adversary of his ) was never my equal 

فَإِن تَقتُلوني تَقتُلوا بِيَ سَيِّداً

If you kill me, you kill a champion 

وَإِن تُطلِقوني تَحرُبوني بِمالِيا

and if you release me, you will be rewarded

وَكُنتُ إِذا ما الخَيلُ شَمَّصَها القَنا

I sense where the arrows will fall

لبيق بِتَصريفِ القَناة بنَانِيا

I move my spear in anticipation before my stead is irked

فيا عاصِ فكَّ القَيد عنّي فإنني

And so my disobeyer, loosen my chains

صَبور على مرِّ الحوادثِ ناكِيا

I am patient in calamity 

Another Marthiya is by Malik bin AlRaib, a poet of the al-Muʿayyad era, known for his part in a dissident group of poets called the Exiled and the Destitute—roaming marauders in a blank expanse, banished from their namesakes, bound together as bloodless brothers in arms.

Malik recites:

يَقولُ المُشفِقونَ عَلَيَّ حَتّى

And those who pity me say

مَتى تَلقى الجُنودَ بِغَيرِ جُندِ

When will you fight men with men?

وَما من كانَ ذا سَيفٍ وَرُمحٍ

An army is not your spear and sword

وَطابَ بِنَفسِهِ مَوتاً بِفَردِ

And I respond: It is pleasure to die alone

Malik takes it to his own throat, he is true to his path in life. He wishes for a deeper exile, a martyr-hood with himself alone. He gathers his pride, his will, his soul in the ode—

BOOM!

The sky growls. I flinch, my hand trembles. I try to clutch at Malik’s words, but I am back in the age of metallic explosions, sirens ablaze, an ambulance tears down the street. I receive messages, questions, I am not theirs. They send wishes of hope and I hope to hope too. But I revive beauty instead of questions. We witness, we endure, we write. The world may push, spittle from an armchair. The sky booms again, I turn to literature, music, poetry, art despite the unknown.

We are lions, champions, spears and swords. We remain resilient.

In the footnotes of this essay—(if you are still with me)—I’ll leave you with a playlist to refuel: to listen to what I listen to when fear wells up, when foreign generals twist their tongues in anger, when missiles follow, when the world watches through bored dispositions. It is a region seldom granted reprieve, but there is beauty here too. I urge my children to look at that instead of the bombs in their sky.

There is chaos and there is order, and the world— despite the missiles— must orbit back into place.

PROMPT: OLIVES

I type: Are we supposed to describe olives?
You can do anything you want, he answered.

Oh.

I think…

Olives?
Olives.
Ollie.
Oil.
All.

Words I harvest from one.

I write the following…

In a realm beyond this one, an olive tree grows.
A goddess planted it, they said.
A gift for peace after aeons of war.
A remnant of a lost promise.
It blossomed in spring — a swollen fruit, dew of green on green.
Seeds of salt plucked from the ocean and buried in soil.
First a root, then a twig, then a branch, until the trunk was thick and dark. A leaf at its temple, then another, and another.
A still giant, with a harvest that sank into your tongue and burrowed deep into your belly.
An oath of sea and soil.
A broken vow of earth and ocean.
A thing for gods to decipher — but not the mortals of our land.

They ate and swallowed and tore at its fruit without pause.
Gluttonous and heavy. Endless appetites for crops and comfort.
They gnawed at the pebbled green, white teeth sinking into the tree’s offering, their mouths louder than the waves beyond.

It is said that the Greek goddess Athena was the first to plant the olive tree, its salt drawn from Poseidon’s sea. My vignette was inspired by that story.
I did not intend to thicken the prompt. I realized I took a fruit, braided it to a heavenly offering, and linked it to what we mortals do with gifts.

Here, the prompt — the word turned into a question:
Do we deserve olives?

I know. A reflection. An interrogation. It echoes the world now.
The chaos in us is no longer prisoner. We have unleashed the beasts in men.
There are ships on the move by my shore, many whisper of a new aeon of war.
And the gods have left this realm; and the beasts roam again.

And I ask once more,
Do we deserve olives?

Rimsky’s Scheherazade was in loop play while editing this…

It is promised that during Ramadan the djinn will be chained — their whispers silenced, their claws drawn back from the ribs of men.

A stillness settles over the lunar month. A month not Muslim in origin, but in continuation. Ramadan means The Scorching — perhaps for the heat of the Arabian desert. Perhaps for the burning of one’s sins. The annual purification. A shedding of toxins. Of words. Of thought.

It is a practice older than scripture, yet made holy within the text of the third Abrahamic faith.

When I think of djinn, I think of a name; one who agreed to let me write a page about her. Please be wary. What follows may unsettle you. It is her experience I am sharing. Things she has told me. Things I have witnessed. Things I wish I had not.

My friend Azza once confessed that she was guarded by three genies who loved her.

She said one of them had surpassed the four thousand year mark. A teenager in djinn years, an adult in ours — the other two were younger versions of him, other faces of the same presence when he was absent.

I’ve dismissed her story, assuming she was another person who wanted to be written about. Many people want to be immortalized upon meeting a writer. I assumed Azza was the same, that she had presented herself to me as a character to scribble about.

But, I do believe in unseen things and Azza never asked to be immortalized. In fact, when I mentioned my plan for her, she looked downcast.

“Are you sure you want to write about me?”

I lift my gaze from my notebook to stare. How can I explain Azza?

Dark hair. Black denim. Gigantic tinted glasses that covered half her face, barely balanced on her small nose. Her lips were succulent, pink, lush — though she ruined the effect by biting down on them while staring at the pen in my hand. “Just keep talking,” I said, already in motion. An artist with a brush.

She fidgeted, glancing at the interior of my home and then back at me. Her pupils always seemed to be reading something, tracing something in the air. “There is — a feeling,” she said.

I stared.

There was nothing there.

“I saw someone,” she murmured. And in that instant, someone knocked at the door. I pressed the remote and the gate clicked open. A man stood there. He waved. She stared at him, startled by her premonition. But he, too, looked stunned. Most men tripped over themselves around her. My cousin passed so quickly he looked like a ghost in retreat. I stepped away to check on him, but he was already inside, absorbed into the family gathering.

I returned to her. Back to her moon-like face. Back to her dark eyes on mine. “That’s him,” she whispered as I sat down.

“Why do you think you saw him?”

“I think it’s because he’s sad,” she said softly. “Sad things always find me.”

I wish I could capture her forlorn gaze, her lush mouth pressed closed as she stared into the darkness of our courtyard. Dark because she had instructed me to keep the lights dim. Dark because darkness is her element. But she was right. He was sad. His test results had come in. They had found another tumor. None of us knew whether he would escape it this time.

“Are you sure you don’t want to go inside?” I asked.

“The voices are louder in enclosed spaces,” She responded

You see, my friend is cursed to see the world in shadows. She can look at you and sense a family secret, a curse, a spell or a djinn constant. Yes, she promises those exist.

“I watched a television show once,” she said, “about someone like me. He helped the police solve crimes.” She paused. “That would give this some purpose, wouldn’t it? Seeing them in the corner of my eyes every day.”

“Can you see them now?”

Her breath quickened. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

I pen this down. A code of silence.

She was always willing to explain her gift unless checked by those beyond me. Those in the corners of her vision. Those in the corners of mine.

The air always felt colder when she was near. A chill that sometimes numbed my left side more than my right. She would whisper that her constant was sitting there, that she had to keep him contained, that he would not hurt anyone else. That he would not hurt me. When she first told us, we were much younger. By us, I mean me and a couple of other younger women. I was the only one who did not laugh. I think that is why we are still friends.

There was such vicious gossip about her, back then. It is common to try to drown beauty, especially the kind that unsettles you. When others stared (as my poor cousin had) it was easier for people to jab at her image with stories of madness.

But she wasn’t mad. I believe there is more to her than that…

We were in London one summer, a hotel in Notting Hill. They could barely room us. A queen-sized bed we did not mind sharing. I slipped into crisp white sheets, and she let me pull most of the duvet. Azza curled on her side, hands folded beneath one cheek. She slept quickly. I did not. I was all ears, moonlight on my face as I listened to the drunken squabble below. I stayed awake until the voices died and it was silent again, save for her breathing beside me. I tried to surrender to the silence, to the moon, to the foggy city.

But it wasn’t breathing I heard anymore. She was panting, a tortured sound on her lips. I turned to seek her face. She was on her back. Arms stretched above her head, restrained. I pushed up onto my elbows. Her body was moving. Rhythmic. Accelerating. I did not know what I was looking at, only that dread settled in me — that I was witnessing something I shouldn’t have seen.

There was nothing there, nothing but her body beneath the sheets. Nothing but her face in torment. Her arm muscles were taut. The veins in her neck strained. A tear slipped down her cheek. “Hey!” I shouted, stumbling toward the light switch. “Hey!” I rushed back, grabbing her face, her shoulders. I shook her until whatever held her released. It was cold beside her. Wet cold. August cold that made my teeth chatter.

She was shivering, her gaze fixed on the ceiling, her hands clutching my arms as I pulled her upright. She was gasping for air now. Sweat on her temple despite the chill around us.

We took a moment to breathe. “H-how often does this happen?” I asked, careful not to offend. Though in reality, I wanted to get out of there— fast.

She wept into my neck, and I held her, aware of the incessant tapping around us. Like tapered fingers beating on wood — the sound of more hands in the room, hands that wished to reach farther toward us but could not. “I– don’t know. He showed me holy things,” she whispered. “And promised that I was too soiled for any of it.”

She did not explain further. And I did not press.

We left the next morning like shamed lovers. I did not look at her while she watched me pack in silence, watched me wheel my suitcase away. She did not stop me. It was a graceful parting. One she never begrudged.

Today, years later, she sits opposite me on an old wooden bench in the garden. My family gathers inside, their shadows flickering through the glass.

“It would be nice to join them,” I say.

She smiles. A small apology. “It’s calmer now,” she says. “They let me sleep more this time of year.”

“You need help,” I sigh.

“I’m either possessed or crazy.”

“You’re crazy because you’re possessed,” I say, trying to make sense of it.

“It isn’t that simple,” she replies. “There’s a line. A break in the realm of sight. Another layer in our reality.” She gestures into the air. “There. It moves. Like a veil in the wind. They look through it. They know I can see them.”

“Don’t,” I whisper.

“It’s a pull. There are things there. Things that will turn your veins to ice.”

She clicks her tongue, suddenly frustrated as she rises from beside me. “I wish I could write this down, or draw it or whatever else I can do to make it more visible.”

I am quiet. Expectant. The moon light is over us again, much like that night we shared years ago. “You can use me…” I say, hesitant but willing.

She is quiet for a long time, “I wouldn’t wish this on you.”

I did not say anything more, observant of the widening space between us. The clouds shift and the stars glimmer again.

“I have to go,” she says. “We’ve got to fast tomorrow and I’ve kept you long enough.” She bends over me, kisses me twice and I hold her tightly. We linger like this for a long moment.

“Call me. Anytime,” I whisper. She nods and speeds out. I glance toward the place she pointed to. The flutter in the air.

I peer in.

I romanticize this month. Thirty days of family gathered close. This year, though, I remember the promise — that demons are chained. I wonder whether it will benefit her. Whether hers are included. Whether she has ever known such reprieve.

While writing this story, I kept seeing flashes of One Thousand and One Nights — the stories of my childhood. I was captivated by the imagery: invisible palaces, enchanted princesses, djinn standing guard at their gates. The sheer impossibility of it all.

I was transported, too, to a day in Portobello Market, drifting between stalls, lifting the spines of antique books, inhaling the smell of them. A copy of One Thousand and One Nights lay among the stacks. I spoke with the bookseller — something I never tire of. Conversations with fellow book aficionados always leave me on such a high.

She admired my choice and asked my name. I told her. She smiled.

“Like the princess!” she said, gesturing toward the book in my hands.

“Like the princess,” I agreed.

Of course, this was in reference to the tale of The Three Princes and The Princess Nur Al-Nahar. Where three of the princess’s cousins must travel far and wide to retrieve various magical objects to win her hand.

Three, like my friend’s otherworldly paramours.

I wince at the thought. Grateful to have not been chosen. Grateful that I have set all my paramours free. Grateful for blessed lunar skies, and for existing on this side of our universe’s layer.

Happy Ramadan.

May your nights be magical.
May your fast be nourishing.
And may you sleep undisturbed, without the weight of another world upon you…

I was recently at a writing workshop, where our host quite literally stretched all our bitter horizons and made us write a romance. Writers at a long table, my hands shaking as I scribbled into my notebook. I didn’t know how to write a romance. Everything I wrote was doomsday quality. Being asked to write about two people finding each other and falling in love made me audibly grind my teeth.

But good news: the story I’ve come up with is done. I’ve sent it in for review. Now, do I believe that the saintly Valentine will bless it?
Pshaw.

Perhaps I should go back and try another scene. Another kind of love—the kind that doesn’t need a story to explain it. No beginning. No middle, but a conclusion to define it.

Please read on for a sample of what I had set out to do.

“Is there anything stronger than love?” she asked.
“Yes, fear.”
“Fear?”
“I’ve been afraid for a long time. I’ve lost so many of those I love; they are gone, underneath tombstones of crescents and crosses. It is the winter of my life, butterfly. I spent every day looking out into the horizon, toward the sea. And I wondered about the sea, how nobody comforts it when it rages, when it glides, and howls—and I think, is there anything better than a comforting love? One like ours. One where you hold my hand when I tap my foot too loudly, when I walk around the room restless within our walls, when you wake me up with the smell of coffee? When you kiss my head when I am too tired to speak? This is what you give me. You are the warmth at the end of my days, and I love you. In the very soul of my being, in the core of me, between all my dreams and prayers—there is you.”

She squeezed his hand, mouth too wet to speak. His eyes, brown once, grey now—eyes she wanted to look at forever. Eyes that held her even when his limbs could not.
“Do you promise to find me, Ali?” she whispered.
“I do not know the ways of God, if he’s there at all. If he has a further plan for me, if we are allowed more than this. But if there is more, if I am to return to this plain—I’ll find you. But even if I am no more, I want to watch you wander through the world and make it yours. I’ll be the breeze in your hand, in your hair. I’ll find you.”

She fell onto his chest and wailed. Sobs shook her, lingering when his heart could not. She remembered his smile, the hands that held hers, the way he carried her into their first house, laughed when she burnt their only meal for the day. How he stayed up too long, budgeting because things were too tight that month. How he would apologize even when it wasn’t his fault, and hold her when she cried about another lost child, another dream they could not have. This was love, the very essence of it. Love when her dark hair wasn’t as vivid anymore, when her body wasn’t as supple as he was used to. He called it the winter of his life; it was hers too. But still, he never included her in that. She was spring to him. A butterfly.

I was once told by an agent that I write grief very well. It is the most natural thing, to squeeze a scene like the one above and type away at it—I’ve seen scenes like this. Not exactly. But they are there. I’ve seen people much older than I am, much grander at life—but this is how they went. With a loved one at their side, crying for the life they had, unable to move on. I remember denouncing romantic love much earlier than most. I wanted the kind of love that isn’t horny, performative, socially accepted, or whatever nonsense we have made it to be. When you cling to someone because they are the very air in your lungs, that it is their face you want to tell things to, the reactions you can’t wait to see. However, I know as women we are conditioned to want the swooning. The flowers. The purple prose. The games they play with our hearts in hopes of an ending like that one.

As a teenager, I enjoyed watching others perform. It was educational to linger at the sidelines and watch bolder friends of mine throw themselves at whatever prey they thought was meatier. I think there is a quiet grief in being solitary, when there are less complicated individuals out there. Not to say I was not chosen, but I’ve become very careful at unveiling myself. I was never pristine. Never a butterfly. In the scene I’ve written, I am Ali. What a joy it is to have a comforting love beside you—someone to hold onto you when you are far gone from the world. Wouldn’t that be tragic? Beautiful? That there is someone still on earth holding onto your memory when you are no more.

What are we, if not memories? If not moments like that one?

I think that is love. That there is feeling, beyond this plain, between life and death—a feeling that erodes all self, a hand that clutches at your very heart. When you whimper recalling a face, your voice in tremors. To have touched someone so much. That is love. I think my tragedy is that I imagine love not at the beginning, but at the edge of things. Where we are finite beings, tugging at life to give us more, and doomed not to have it, because this is all we are. It is the very essence of our mortality.

I could sit here and type some nonsense about a unicorn turning vampire and the mermaid he loves. That would be fun, glorious fun—but it wouldn’t define my take on love as the scene above does. Perhaps if the unicorn were dying, or the mermaid was gasping for the sea… see? There is no curing me.

In the deathbed scene, There are echoes of Rumi’s last words to his wife too. She was inconsolable as he faded, and this was his way of comforting her:

I have two attachments to this world
one is my attachment to you
one is to the body.
When through God’s grace I rise above duality,
when the attachment to the body is lifted, that attachment to you will remain, and will still be yours.

In essence he promises his soul to her. That despite his loss of body, his soul will linger beside hers for all eternity. I lament the sensuality of his last message. The human and the godly. That we in turn have a balancing act within ourselves, and those we extend our being towards. It is a miracle to have your heart beat not only for yourself, but for those you’ve chosen.

To the left of my hand, I have a newly acquired antique—an illustrated book of Tristan and Isolde. It is the last scene in the tragedy, and Tristan (dying) looks to Isolde as she comes to him while he breathes his last.

This is what she says to hold him to her:
Ah! It is I! Sweetest beloved!
Just once more, listen to my call…
Stay here with me, even for an hour,
after all those days of longing.
Let us share the night in untroubled bliss…
united, extinguishing the light of life together…

His eyes dim; he is dead.

Grieving, Isolde says:
Must she now stand before you in misery…
she who joyously came to marry you?

And this is exactly why it lingers. Because this is a wound, it festers and stays. A memory, an unfulfilled wish, a dream untouched. And honestly? It makes for top-of-the-shelf stuff. This is what I believe would be blessed by a saint. This, to hold a hand even if it’s no longer there. To keep a face locked away in your heart, to want to be possessed so fully. I think, that is the truest idea of a romantic union.

I hope my words didn’t sink you down. That, whatever idea you have of a romance, isn’t pushed so totally out of the way because what I’ve hinted at is how it should be. It is tangible and yet, is it? In our modern times of swipe left and right? Of failed marriages? Of women who adore their single lives because the alternative has already broken them into a million pieces—does it hold? That a heart could beat so truly for one and for one alone?

Can love be our salvation? A saint that rings his bells? This one last miracle on earth before we are doomed for the unknown?

Maybe.

Happy V-Day.

Hold on to all those you love, my friends

And thank you for reading.

I am at 53,000 words in this would-be manuscript. Sentences, into paragraphs, into chapters of scenes I am knotting together. There is yet much to get to. So many faces I see. So many voices I hear. I want to keep at it, to will more life into this body of work. I push back against my desk. The pull is a lull, but my name is called out the door, and I must see to it. Back to life. Back to the voices outside of my head. I am in two realms: my mind and tongue, the spoken and the visualized.

I seek the outside. It rained, and I must join my fellow desert dwellers in the event of wet pavement. It’s so very lush today. Even the birds sing. I know they, despite their power of flight, wish for rain too.

I am in black, wool, suede, and leather. It comes together, my black hair brushed behind my ears. I draw my roof back; I am transported by the crisp air, how it fills my lungs. I greet my neighborhood athletes as I drive out, inspired by their diligence with their runs, be it sun, rain, or wind—they are always out.

Today, I’d rather sit at my local coffee shop and sip my date latte than waste away on the sidewalk—but that is why they are athletes and I am not.

A heavenly platter arrives: halloumi cheese on a waffle filled with labneh paste, sizzled with pomegranates, rocca, and a honey chili sauce that drizzles down the side of my mouth as I bite into it.

I gnaw at the bread slowly. I savor it. The pleasure of riotous flavors in my mouth. I swallow. I pause while a bird outside takes flight, loops, and disappears to the side of the window out of sight. I take a second to wonder if it is a seagull, too lost to return to sea, or if it is right where it wants to be.

I continue on with the rest of my food, pause, and decide I’ve had enough. I am a masochist when it comes to pleasure. I think of other things, other lives beyond mine, where the sky doesn’t rain and mornings are not as sweet. I refuse to be a glutton.

While I drive home, a song I play brings me back to a scene from الندم/Regret, a 2016 Syrian television series. The plot revolves around a writer, his family’s chronicles, and his love for—and grief over—his wife. He writes in his youth, he writes during his marriage, he writes next to his wife’s deathbed, he writes after she is gone, and as the city descends into chaos. He writes to keep his memories alive, to hold on to the beauty of a life long gone.

The series begins in vivid color, showing Syrian life before the war: the serenity of aged alleyways, overheard literary discussions, Arwa’s first attraction, Hanna’s philosophical conversations, and the deep love that results in marriage. Then the shift comes. Hanna falls, a heart condition, she is dying. The colors fade to black and white. Hanna is dead, and Arwa becomes a hermit writer who keeps her alive in letters. The setting deteriorates to war and grief, reflective of the true political reality of Syria during the so-called ‘Arab Spring’.

Arwa writes to Hanna in the scene above:

In cinema, like in our TV shows, good always wins in the end. But in reality, it fails. Hunger, cold, loneliness, sickness, neglect, fear, persecution. There is much degradation to our humanity.

We do not go to war. War comes for us. Even when I seduce you in our bedroom, an explosion erupts a minute later—then a rocket whizzes across the Damascene sky and bursts in the distance.

---

I cannot begin to explain how such melancholy speaks to me. That pensive quiet of a pen on paper. Subtle, scribbling. How silent ink is, like blood when it streams. The quiet grief I feel every time I fail to finish a thought because the noise makes me succumb, that it is not rockets in my sky but noise in my ear willing me to move away, to come back and dislodge from my mind.

I am often told how hard it must be, to have both feet in two places at once. This, my passion and pursuits and my responsibility of being a caretaker and a working mother. I put on so many hats, and I am rarely allowed to be a hermit even when it is what I desire most.

To log away within myself and scribble notes in notebooks while my breakfast is served. While I watch athletes in the distance. While I watch a bird soar and fall. I’ve always been a melancholy child, I suppose. Too aware that time is fleeting, that we are only allowed so much, that winter and summer is like our lives. The seasons of the earth are also our seasons while we age into dust.

There is no spring, for that does not exist in our plain. The concept of blooming flowers and turnabout green trees never comes. It is dust, and earth and sun until there are days like this one. Where the sky is kinder, and the clouds rain down their tears, and through it you imagine the world as a giant who can be melancholy despite his constant glare.

We ponder so much, gaze upon the stars, recite poetry of wonder and we dislodge, and retreat into our quiet where we question if it was good enough for the applause, or if your audience was simply trying to be courteous. If you are truly deserving of anything despite the many words you try to knot, you look at the work, the many pages upon pages of words you’ve strewn together. Braided into sentences of sense…

does it make sense?

You are here for answers, and yet there are none. You come with a question and you leave with many. There are no answers in your mind, for you like to wonder. A melancholy within another.

I’ve written this to appear in vibrant color at the beginning and slowly transcend into black and white. That is often the many moods of our humanity. Day and night, thoughts birthed in the moment and convictions we’ve always held.

We are here to wonder, and if you are reading this, I’m right there with you.

I know we doubt, we listen to the whispers in our head, and we try to pull away. In vivid color or darkness—the giant comes tomorrow, and it is a glare you’ll see.

Draw your sword.

Magic.

A full moon that spins. A voice that Oohs.

Cylinder, circular things.

No edges.

an eternity to draw.

He speaks in a small voice.

We do not own the earth.

We cannot carry it.

I look down at my hands. Round. riotous circles that type.

He draws and rhymes

We are merely lines in a cylinder.

Things to trace now before we are ghosts.

Uncarried like the earth.

There is wind. A howl. An open mouth.

That is round too.

I see the world in echoes. in circles.

I think of a cyclone. A storm.

Round.

Revolving.

It kills and breathes.

I push to the floor. Her face to mine.

She asks me for a kiss. A wink.

I pull. Flat, she is underneath me.

A struggle. We spin. Round and round before she is locked in a grip.

Enclosed, you think:

How often they mentioned your limbs. Small, they said.

How tender and raw. How your form is all round things.

No edges. Only Flesh.

That you cannot inflect pain

You cannot be a cyclone.

You are dainty pink.

Volcano red.

A lightning rod.

A flash. A kick.

A scream in your most silent depths.

And she’s down and you’re up like flame.

A cheer. A whizz.

Purple belts in loops.

Girls who sweat.

Who heave. They cry into their telephones.

Green orbs. She glares. Upset. She mulls.

Her face so round

A pout in a circle.

It is poison she spews.

Words on words of delirious mischief.

We share in the hatred of the things we cannot change.

A revolving door.

A conversation that stews.

I sip my cup as I craft

Oval porcelain

a comfort in the storm

The moon shines on my face,

the earth we cannot carry

and all that is round.

Huzzah. I am undead.

I owe the above to the many happenings of today.

A martial arts lesson, another rejection letter, a sound bath, and my friend on the other end of the line discussing our utmost discontent with current affairs.

All in a day’s work.

We trudge on.

She is on hurried feet — a woman in the doorway of her husband’s home, her child all fists and smoke. Fire in the girl’s breath as she lunges — fists for her father, poison for her mother. Al Jaleela is struck down and draws herself away. Fallen, she rides off, tears in her lungs.

When she finally reaches her father’s home, she is found in a state of anguish. Her father asks after her well-being. The response she gives him is unforgettable — a divide in which sorrow and grief are enveloped, and she is far too gone for hope.

This was her response:

“Heaviness, Father. Like stones in my belly. An eternal sorrow I cannot shake. A lost mate, the eventual death of my brother, and between this and that, arrows of hate — and my heart is no more.”

Al Jaleela speaks her own eulogy. Her own calling — the wife of a champion, a tribe, a home, a child — have evaporated, and she returns to her beginnings, her childhood room, where she watches her brother storm into his eventual death. Two halves of her at war.

I ponder what harshness it was to live through that, how brief a comfort her youth, her beauty, the love of all those who witnessed her. Jassas, her brother — proud and stubborn — and her husband Kulaib, a man promised much glory on his nameday, fell with an arrow in his throat.

I’ve discussed tragedy with my friend — the grief of a failed childhood, a failed family. How it, too, is an investment with no assurances. I think this is why so many women I know choose to be alone; they’d rather that than risk failure.

In short, women are afraid — and for good reason. There are so many examples of failure around us, so many disappointments, so many miserable conversations. We are saturated by it. We expect it.

During a recent date with a friend, she intoned that we — she and I — were too realistic for our own good. That we have embraced adulthood in the sense that we fear to dream. She reminded me of something I told her in a rare state of delirium:

“We should be delulu already — we’re just so boring!”

She reminded me of those words, of the big goofy grin I had while telling her I was choosing ruinous brain rot over factual mentality.

A horrific thing to recall.

“Don’t you see? We’re too serious. We have this trauma response to everything. We sit at the edge of our seats expecting the worst to hit us so we can be prepared.”

I blink. I don’t know how to take this. Everything is a trauma response, isn’t it? How else can we function?

“We need to change,” she says, hands in the air, jaw set — like a captain of a ship drifting through unknown waters. I am supposed to pull the sails, commandeer somehow, but I stare at her, confused.

“Seriously?”

“You said that, and I had an epiphany. Why can’t we be fun?”

“Hey, I am fun,” I say, tapping at the surface between us.

“You’re funny,” she says. “You’re one of the funniest people I know. But you’re also detached. You tell me men are a subpar species, and that women are disappointing.”

“It’s science! Men develop much later than we do. I didn’t make the rules.”

“And women?”

I shrug. “My experiences have been limiting with them. They all fail to launch somehow — and I’m including myself in that.”

“See? You douse us with gasoline, light it up, and usher in with snacks.”

“Am I lit too in this scenario?”

“Stop,” she sighs.

“Fine. We’ll all be delulu.”

“You mean that?”

“Yes,” I finally say.

“We should have delulu meetings and discuss all the mad amazing things in our lives.”

I roll my eyes, imagining that arrow in Kulaib’s throat. I’m sure Al Jaleela never had delulu meetings — but this is Arabia in 2026. I have music playing, my coffee brewing, and the hint of possible war on the horizon.

I suppose ignoring catastrophe and immersing oneself in fantasy is, too, a trauma response — albeit a different one. I do not share this with my friend. I am too tired to debate. I think we are all traumatized, no matter how we go about things.

And here, dear reader, I stop the incessant typing on the black buttons of this screen. I review. I have always been internal with my thoughts, attracted to the darkness within, the melancholy in the human condition. This is a new challenge — to look at the sun instead of the moon.

“Mad amazing things,” she says. A captain on her own ship, a drifter on waters untouched. I am there for the ride, my gaze behind us while hers is so steadily forward.

I long for hope in the heartbreak, for starstruck delirium again. For my voice to scream into your ear, “Let’s dance!” amidst the decay of the world.

Delulu meetings in the afterdark, of gushed girlish voices that refuse to grow up, pink cheeks instead of sallow ones. Hair slicked back instead of over our faces in anguish.

We refuse to be shaped by the tragedies of the past. Marital or patriarchal tribes forgotten. We are ourselves. Fully. Entirely.

Fun, I think.
We shall see.

XX

Happy New Year, Comrades.

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In the crescendo, there is breath. I am astute. Immobile. I listen and draw it deeper into my lungs. Music I will never play. Music I can never embody. A grief I will take with me. But I breathe it. It is in my bloodstream. A voice echoes from within me. A song.

I ponder the imagery of a soul, a voice—if we are truly more than flesh and bones.

If there is life inside the one I am. A life in a life in a life. I pause. A hiccup in the mind. What a marvelous thing. That we carry both—in our mortality. Life and death combined.

In a recent workshop I joined, I was paired with another writer. I fell into the joint exercise we were given: a collaboration to join forces and create a myth of our own. A new beginning. A second chance.

Here it went;

—

O Breath and Air and Heart.

A stirring in Its lungs.

Movement in Its limbs.

It reaches, but stops.

The sun, a glare;

It burns red.

There is a thirst for blue,

Colors—a sheen after the dark.

There is a—pause.

A thought.

Her.

It trembles.

There is blue in the folds,

Away from the uncharted expanse.

It reaches again.

Again— O stubborn need.

To make an imprint in the sand.

It seethes, soundless.

The world looks on.

A challenge—will this one wake?

It crumbles, long, hard, broken.

Her.

A name.

A face.

Eyes that no longer blink.

Eyes still in the dark.

It slides.

It slithers.

It seeks.

Move!—the world wills.

O Roots that bend and ache.

A second chance,

Unwanted, but stands.

It weeps.

The colors—too bright.

The world—too vast.

And It is alone.

Her—

A voice unheard.

A dream unspoken.

The world watches it crawl.

Leaves on untouched paths.

Branches that lengthen…

and climb.

Her—

The sun and moon bear witness.

The mountains—unmoved.

The sea—so still.

The world—unlatched.

It sighs.

An arm.

A hand.

She is there in the folds,

A blue too white to see,

A thing unspoiled.

A world in the world It seeks.

It reaches again,

Towards the light,

Towards the dream.

Move!—the world wills.

And the roots slither into legs.

The sap—are tears.

Wood is skin.

A mouth.

It parts.

The world sings.

Move!—

Lips speak a name.

Her—

It is nearly dusk, I write while it rains—a rare happening in my world of sand and dust. When I wrote the above, I was in a common mood: a seeker, like always. However, my partner during this gave an image I could not shake. Her. A lover. A partner. A friend. A feminine to the masculine. A sister to the creature we drew up. A wish. A hope. A memory. A true embodiment of life’s very beginning.

I took my own liberties with the continuation here. I hope I succeeded in combing through the image, leaving it as abstract as I could—a jigsaw which anyone may piece together as they willed.

Cheers,

xx

A very dear friend of mine asks me if I can share any Bedouin rituals on sacrifice. I send her what I know while also thinking of a very sad incident. Catastrophic, actually.

A young girl, barely four, was fascinated with a mare in her father’s farmhouse. She waddles into the stall. The horse is alone with her fowl. The mare jolts up suddenly. Hooves like knives. She crushes the little girl into a fleshy heap.

When the girl’s father learns of this, he takes the mare. Four groomsmen hold her back while the man slaughters her fowl before her eyes.

A life for a life.

Blood for blood.

They are both shattered. Shadows of their previous selves.

Death begets death.

I stop typing for days after writing the above. It is an actionable sequence. My want for a good story wobbles when I am face to face with the far cries of a child’s death. A child of any kind — that is less innocence in the world. Lives incomplete. This very real pain of a man and his mare. Their bottomless rage. A ravine with claws. A torment that will remain forever.

Nothing will console them. Nothing will put them back together again. Broken spirits are real too. They will float on until death comes knocking, while the world marches to an indifferent tune.

Broken and whole, the living are emotion, rocket-speed passion, blood and heat. We feel too much — too many things. This is why we are bombarded by the robotic alternative. An automated man on a platform speaks in a voice I do not like — he says there are better things to come while he pockets millions upon his trillions.

Rich man, poor man — the balance is imbalance.

One names his children by a codex of numbers; another names that crushed heap after a flower.

I think of angrier people, watching him spew all that. I think of that powerful collective outside of screens, outside of text boxes — muted because they are poor and weary.

My mother always says this, in accordance with the Muslim tradition of unmarked graves and non-celebrated tombs. The symmetry of an all-for-one death: poor or rich, death is the equalizer.

“Everyone will leave in a white shroud with nothing.”

I wonder how white that little girl’s shroud was. If it was as bloody as they found her. And that fowl, if he was buried at all…

I imagine that story amidst the ancient burial tombs I pass by every day. I imagine the things those shadows have seen.

Here’s a poem to lament—

Dust by Rupert Brooke

When the white flame in us is gone,
And we that lost the world’s delight
Stiffen in darkness, left alone
To crumble in our separate night;

When your swift hair is quiet in death,
And through the lips corruption thrust
Has stilled the labour of my breath —
When we are dust, when we are dust! —

Not dead, not undesirous yet,
Still sentient, still unsatisfied,
We’ll ride the air, and shine, and flit,
Around the places where we died,

And dance as dust before the sun,
And light of foot, and unconfined,
Hurry from road to road, and run
About the errands of the wind.

And every mote, on earth or air,
Will speed and gleam, down later days,
And like a secret pilgrim fare
By eager and invisible ways,

Nor ever rest, nor ever lie,
Till, beyond thinking, out of view,
One mote of all the dust that’s I
Shall meet one atom that was you.

Birthday

I am not a crushed heap. I am whole. A soul returned.

The most alive I’ve ever felt was on a horse. I am aware of so much. Too much. His breath, his belly, the air in my lungs, the sweat in my palms. His jaw, my reins, the tempo drawn from his legs. Powerful and steady. He lets his eyes fall, and I draw him back, gaze onwards. Chin up. The world is pink. I glimpse a dog sniffing the scattered shrubs. I see crabs saunter sideways back into the sea. I feel the earth shiver. They sense. We come.

Faster and faster we go.

Wind and flesh. We are one here. I hold on. He draws a deeper breath and rushes from beneath me.

We are on sand. On clouds. I see the sun wink from behind a dune. I feel powerful. One with the world. I touch no plastic. No blinking gadgets. It is leather, and flesh, and hair. This is what I love most about it. It is beast and man — or in my case, woman.

It is hard to doubt myself here. That I might fall with this tempo, so early in the morning, on the day of my birth.

I’ve fallen off before, though. I’ve also gotten back up. Not getting up is a white flag. A dead knight in battle.

But I am not dead. Not yet.

Years of this. On and off. Like getting back on a bike. Hooves and hands — we are a single column, living on the page. Something that contains so much.

Alive. That is what I feel most today.

I am a child again. My horse is calm, he’s weary like me. I hold him before I go, his forehead to mine. We’ve seen things.

I retreat into the sunny sky, the Monday morning rush, the world ablaze. I am sore and giddy. I have a hundred cakes this name day. I remind my mother that I made her a mother — a tradition I’ve created while she rolls her eyes.

Another year. We blow the flame together — her and I.

I was in a quiet bookstore when I discovered the small black book. In bold white lettering, the title read How to Use Your Enemies.

I picked it up. It was the sort of self-help I needed. Though I do not pretend to have enemies—only people I dislike, and I’m sure the feeling is mutual—it is here I pick it apart.

Break its spine.

Read the first page

This line felt like it was written by a friend. A whisper through the ages. A Spanish priest of the seventeenth century speaking into the ear of an Arab girl in the twenty-first. I devour this line like an antidote to my disposition:

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Knowledge and courage contribute in turn to greatness. Since they are immortal, they immortalize. You are as much as you know, and a wise person can do anything.

I am in the modern world—so far out of reach to touch the feather of a man from the past—and yet his words still resonate. I breathe.

Here’s more about the man–

In The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence, the introduction to Baltasar Gracián goes:

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He posits a world of deception and illusion, in which appearances predominate and malice and cunning are omnipresent. Hence the distrust, pessimism, and misanthropy that characterize his worldview. The key concept here is deceit (engaño): this covers, for Gracián, not simply the deception of one individual by another, but self-deception as to the true nature and value of the world, and hence our deception by the world. It is a term at once moral and epistemological: to fail to know the world for what it is condemns us to moral error and failure. Because of our tendency to accept appearances and to follow our desires, passions, and emotions, we are mired in a world of deceit.

Indeed.

It is the time for time. It is all I can think of—how life is so very fleeting, how it passes us by. I can still recall myself on monkey bars, struggling to hold on while my friends try to pull me down to the sand. I can still hear myself gasp and curse at them, and I can still see my fists on those handles. Red and white, the metal a peeling grey. I hold tightly, my hands chafe, my legs numb from their pulling. I stick on. They pull me rougher still; my grip loosens. I do not levitate. I slam into the ground. Into them.

I do not know when we stopped grasping for monkey bars. I do not know when we preferred the sand. Time ticks by us, and I hate its frozen grin on the wall. It is there, a constant, like death—a thing that stalks your corner and waits until someone’s clock has run out. Until the sand is no longer a landing.

I contemplate death too much. I think of it often. I should not, perhaps. But it is this dark abyss I cannot fathom to cross.

A friend just lost her father a few months ago, and I asked her today if she thinks there is anything beyond this for us. If we’re truly not food for worms…

She stilled, her hot coffee in hand. That would be cruel, she said.

“What? To be food for worms?”
“Yes. I do not think this is it.”

And here is where most Muslim girls won’t tread. I am quiet for a moment, chuckling as I contemplate that religion, despite most things, is hope too. Hope that the worms won’t eat you. Hope that there is something in the clouds, that our souls will plunge into the sun and cross over into an eternal dimension.

Baltasar writes to me:

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In Heaven, everything is good; in hell, everything bad. In the world, since it lies between the two, you find both. We are placed between two extremes, and so participate in both. Good and bad luck alternate; not all is happy, nor all hostile. This world is a zero: on its own, it’s worth nothing; joined to heaven, a great deal. Indifference to its variety constitutes good sense—the wise are never surprised. Our life is arranged like a play; everything will be sorted out in the end. Take care, then, to end it well.

Time is now. I am here while the grin on the wall ticks on. I type while the arrows of the face with numbers smile—a sneer. I stare at it, catlike, murderous. I miss myself. It is what little I can do to trace my world now: to write it down here, to immortalize these hands, the eyes that look upon this screen. This is my comfort—to come here and speak into myself, into the white void that is you too. A constant thread that moves, and lengthens, and tugs despite the arrows that want to cut it away, to hold and hand it back to me.

That smile on the wall—a thing. Something. And yet we are bound to it.

Baltasar’s ghost is in the room with me. He speaks:

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Live as circumstances demand. Ruling, reasoning—everything must be opportune. Act when you can, for time and tide wait for no one.

It saddens me that we are such hurried creatures. Bees in the hive, ants in a colony, whales in a pod—we do not stop, we seldom pause. The clock on the wall ticks. I think about Baltasar and agree.

That clock will never wait.

November 5th

I find myself eager for the moon. I seek its face—round like that face I abhor. And yet, this one has light. This one smiles.

I paint my nails black. Shadows on my lighter skin. I’ve always been a queer medium tone—brown yet not olive. Paler than my darker-skinned counterparts, and yet not white at all.

I wear black tonight. Black because I do not want to be spoken to. I do not want to be approached. Black is a veil, a cocoon, a color that does not wish to be seen. I drive out, the moon with me. I am at a studio. I am bathed in sound. My being vibrates with it.

My healer says I should wear white next time, and I nod in understanding.

Black for the cosmos. White for the stars.

Verse

The following day, I wear a red scarf.

The moon is red too

It is neither black nor white.

It is ever-changing.

Bloody.

Like time.

It flees—colorful and blind.

I bathe in the red.

in the black.

White is the clock. It ticks.

as I head out and buy plants by a forgotten temple.

A modern day in the old world.

Bahrain and Delmun.

The dying and the dead.

I wrote this after being completely taken by Baltasar. His words—like those vibrations I felt during my first sound bath. It resonates. He is dead and yet still speaks to me. To you. I still my hand. Time goes on, the moon waxes and wanes. The ground spins. We are ever-changing. We die, and yet not completely—for ghosts still speak.

A priest in my room.

He watches the crescent outside.

I type.

Goodnight.

October has been a month of oddities. I’ve suffered a throbbing in my head. A tick. A knock knock knock behind my temple. There are no voices there. Just a ringing. A doorbell that never stops ringing. Noise. This, along with outside noise like the excessive chatter of workmates, the squealing of schoolgirls in the halls, the churlish school bell. God, I hate that bell.

It’s an urging to get going, to pick up and follow the sound—a submission that comes over everyone in the arena of schoolwork. I feel for the teachers most. They do not have the luxury to leave during midday and check in with a specialist.

The man behind the desk receives me. He smiles. I mention the name of a patient he knows. That’s how doctors are introduced to us. We cross-check them before meeting them. He’s not surprised. He decides it’s not my ears and that I must check in with another doctor—a neurologist.

I sigh. He calls the other man’s office. They say his appointments are filled up until December. Lots of people with brain trouble. The doctor looks at me and tells me to drive over anyway—there’s, in his experience, a forty percent chance patients never show up. He says this to me in confidence, I recall. No matter, I’m posting this anyway.

I leave to seek the neurologist. It takes so many more steps before I’m inching along a long, winding corridor. Finally, I’m at his nurse’s office. She tells me to take a seat.

I settle down, swallowing another pang behind my left ear. I take out my phone. I scroll through the many faces I don’t know on Instagram. So many products to pursue, so many things I do not own and do not need.

“Noor?” the nurse utters, and I rise up to follow her.

The man I want is beyond another desk. He barely glances my way as he types on a computer. Busy. I am a little worried. He’s not old. He then looks at me and asks what’s wrong. I tell him. He doesn’t ask me anymore. He turns away and types some more on the screen. I wonder if this is a condition—one must be socially awkward when specializing in the brain. He asks me to sit on the bed, right before he stands and comes over to my end of the room.

This doctor dwarfs me. His eyes are behind round glasses. His irises are as dark as his pupils. He looks so bored. He presses both of his hands on my shoulders and asks me to resist. I do, adamant that I am still capable of controlling my body. He pulls out two digits and asks me to squeeze them. Again, my small hand circles his two digits. It felt like he was giving me more evidence of my frailty. Big fingers, small hand. I squeeze before I release him. He then asks me to walk one foot after the other. I’ve done this part countless times—feet aligned on tile corners.

“Okay.” He finishes. There’s a brief smile on his lips. Again, detached.

“So, what’s wrong with me?” I ask, impatient.

“You’ll need an MRI, but I think it’s a migraine.”

I stare at him.

“Most of the people in that waiting room are women,” he explains. “It’s the usual culprit. If not, it’s usually something worse.”

I swallow. I don’t want a brain tumor. I don’t want an MRI either.

The last time I was in that machine, I felt like I was buried alive.

I leave his office. He mumbles something about it being all okay.

There will be a lot of ‘okays’ in this post.

The God of Scans

The next day, I am set to go get one. My technician’s name is Anub. I joke that it must be a shortened version of the Egyptian god Anubis—God of mummification, the afterlife, the protector of the dead.

He smiles and asks if I’d like to watch a movie while I’m in my modern tomb. This Anub doesn’t hand me a balm for this god-ridden ritual. Instead, he glances to my entertainment options within the thing.

“You can watch Moana,” he says.

I blink. Okay.

I am on my back. Anub tucks the blanket over me. I am in a shroud. The machine calls me inside it. I swallow. My head is cradled on a plastic pillow with handles. The screen is above me—a floating screen. I decide I can’t do it.

Anub pulls me out. I hurry into a seated position, gasping for breath. Anub asks if I’m ready to get in again. I decide it’s all in my head. I live too much in my head as it is.

Fine.

I breathe. In and out. In and out.

“Not too loud,” Anub pipes in.

I grit my teeth.

Fine.

Eventually, I get into the habit of it. I self-soothe. I cope. It’s something I’ve done in the past. Alone. My head breathes. I imagine hands on my temple. Invisible but my own. Safe.

“You’re doing great,” Anub tells me. “So, so great.”

“Okay.”

“Five more minutes.”

“okay,” I say—this one shaky.

I hear the ringing in my ear. It repeats. An intrusion. I will the breathing into my head.

Anub finally pulls me out. Hands out. High five. “You did it!”

I am on my feet again.

Blessed legs. Blessed earth.

My sister peeks in.
“Hey… you finished?”

“No. Close the door. I’m sleeping here.”

She rolls her eyes—a classic little-sister response to my sarcasm.

Am I finished indeed.

Halloween

My youngest was born on Halloween. It should be terrifying, marking the date you were sliced open. A gash. A hole. A mouth drawn on your stomach. Except this one bleeds. Gruesome. I am forever scarred. I celebrate that day. Her day.

It comes in chaos. Running children. Cake. Lots of screaming. I decided early that day that whatever happens, I won’t bother to change it. She is happy. That is all that matters to me.

The word “Mama” echoes many times.

“I love you, Mama.”

I weep. There is very little else I could tell you.

We indulge in trick-or-treating—things I didn’t grow up with, but have welcomed into our yearly traditions. The streets are alive with tiny witches and superheroes, glowing pumpkins on every doorstep. I see a lot of mothers. A lot of knowing smiles. They can tell I didn’t grow up with doorbells ringing in English, with the ridiculous costumes, with the chaotic joy that surrounds this holiday. There’s a small pause in my chest, a reminder of a childhood I never had, and yet, watching my youngest run ahead, I am grateful.

Meh.

I insist. She is happy. And that is enough.

It is the first of November—my birth month. A blend of dread at the thought of growing up again and a sigh of relief at the coda of October.

My Halloween child is upset. She purses her lips.
“Goodbye, October,” she says. She does not dread the growing up. I make it look easy.

“Mama…” she begins. A question.

“Hmm?”

“Why were you covering your ears when my friends and I were screaming?”

“You saw?” I ask her.

“Yeah, did we bother you?”

It broke my heart—her question. Her worrying about bothering me on a day where she was allowed all her selfish desire.

“You never bother me,” I tell her.
“Do you want to get back inside?”

Inside me. An ongoing joke we have—of my tucking her inside my shirt, a faux pregnancy, her face squeezed through the neckline to meet mine.

She smiles into my shirt.
“I think I’m too big now.”

I swallow. I don’t want her to see me cry.

“okay.” I say- this one shaky.

She kisses my cheek before slipping outside to play.

I look out the window, rubbing my eyes into my sleeve.

There’s no need for that.

The fun bits

I’ve included this playlist because I can’t get the first song out of my head. Do me a favor? Play it in the background. Trust me.

Current Read

Ancestral horror. Short stories that flow so seamlessly. Is spooky season ever over?

Hot cocoa weather. This was divine! The perfect conclusion.

And here it ends, rather abruptly, but it’s done. I write for the few of you out there. I write for myself too. I write to dive into the shittiness, to step outside it, through it, over it.

Thank you for reading. For being here. For letting me write it all out. xx

I evade words. I turn from pages. I avoid the shelves where books call me back. I am in a broken marriage again. I am retreating. Tucked under a mountain of sheets. I play brainless Americana on my tv. My teenage daughter glances from me to the large screen.

“You’re tired, aren’t you…” She says.

This is not a question. It is an observation. My eldest understands. She knows why I’m mostly tired. It isn’t physical. It isn’t emotional. It is the brain’s fatigue.

“You’re thinking too much again.”

Perhaps I am. I’m used to thinking. It’s a constant setting in my psyche. I sit with myself on a cloud and talk. The mental chatter wears me out, so I go silent while my mirror self recites the things she too has noticed. Somehow, I am finally detached.

I seek movement. Now, I am bent low on a yoga mat. The class ends. The instructor asks if we’d like five minutes of meditation to conclude. I am the only one who accepts this kindness as the others have their own commitments. I linger on the mat. I lay back. ‘close my eyes. ‘listen to an unseen waterfall. A flute. The chirping of birds. I am not here anymore. I am away. Adrift, on a cloud of my own creation. This one floats over a forest in the tropics. My other self is unseen. I am alone, content again.

Five minutes. The instructor calls me back. I am on solid ground. Not on softness. The change is immediate. I sit up.

The day is before me. I roll up my mat, slide it into the straps. I carry my belongings into the next room. Downstairs. Into the street. I am a traveling merchant. A wanderer. An Adventurer. The voice in my head whispers again. “Relax.”

Fine. I am a woman on her way back to reality, and that is okay.

I am home. I light a candle. A friend once confessed she speaks to the flame. I whisper something there. I yield to all things now. I am a vessel of words and handshakes, of forgotten names spoken into the wind. Things flow through me—into my mouth, into my voice, into that rampage I call a mind. I am a speck. A thing that will recede into darkness as soon as the lights go out. I will wake again, if God breathes life into me tomorrow. I am back on a cloud. Flat on the mat. A granule that wanders, blinks, and ponders what she cannot undo.-

It is Friday.

Friday is family day. The kids are across the bridge visiting relatives. I am awake. It is too quiet. I rise and sleep again—a lucidity I am rarely allowed. I glance at the clock. It’s nearly noon when I finally place my feet on the floor. I blame the draining week behind me, my inability to rest until the day lies bare. I like this silence. It’s addictive, this stillness. No voices. Nothing but the shimmer of light. Even the cat slumbers. I am in a T-shirt that reads “Headache Princess,” an ode to the migraines I have. Today, nothing visits me. My mind is still. I slip into flip-flops and kidnap my sister on the way to eat. I see men pass, seeking their own lives beyond the muted call to prayer. Mosques empty like anthills. They aim for food too. I sip my coffee while my sister voices her dislike for my cat. I don’t care. The cat stays.

On the way back, I play French lo-fi while she sighs about a recent memory of Paris. A memory I am not a part of. I am quiet. I feel a slight pang of envy then, for the places she can go, and I cannot. It must be freeing to be untethered, with so much time on your hands.

I don’t have that luxury. Every minute counts. My quiet mornings are rare beside her constant ones. I wonder if she feels that envy too. It’s an unspoken thing, our private thoughts of one another. Silent, my mouth stays closed.

We digress. I light another candle. I am beyond a screen now, the one I type into. I am writing again. I pause. It’s the cards that call me. The books on the shelves are still. They watch as I shuffle the deck. This set of paper is rarely outspoken. Like a child waking from a nightmare, I hear my name in their folds.

One of my fates is The Hanged Man—a card of sacrifice, trials, and wisdom. I groan. I recall a friend saying I am most fulfilled through acts of service to the world. I crave selfishness instead—oneness. The self that is I, doing what I want, saying what I want.

It is a need that festers. I am more like that image in the background. It beckons. It sees nothing beyond itself. Let me sit there. I would rather linger with her under the sheets once again.

Myself—unsacrificing. Ungiving. Whole.

This evening, it is hot chocolate and marshmallows. A song. A dance in the shadows. The world glides—it doesn’t spin. I sink slowly. I mute a scream. My sister complains of stomach cramps and bad circulation. She is an echo in that revolving chamber of womanhood—the breaking of cells behind the softness of skin. An elegy for a woman at the brink. Pain and pleasure. Youth and age. I am between them. I float again, in that familiar haze. I see my other self. And another.

Mine, he had said. A man on a different screen. And yet, it is mine more. Mine because I make of it what I will. I blame this resonance of scenes and echoes—the sharpness of my high chin, my ancestral nose sniffing the air for murky fumes. I am a syllable, and the world breathes many. A word. A song. A misplaced comma in the middle of a phrase. I glance away. The screen flashes into another face. Another world.

I see trees. Horses. Riders in the sunrise. Hooves that pound while a crescendo of an unnamed pop song swells. Cliché. And yet, we tuck our pillows closer under our chins. This is wonder. This is a time to pause and grin idiotically at a man we do not know, at the confession he’s about to make to a woman with feathers in her hair.

Magic.

I blink. We move. My sister drifts upstairs in a long white robe that trails behind her. She looks like a ghost. Stark, dark hair in riots. I take a moment to wish her a confession of her own—something she could tuck into the folds of memory when we’re too gray to recall the darkness. I wonder how much of us will remain. I wonder if we’ll be the same at all, or turn into another set of women who complain of bad circulation. Perhaps those women will be completed versions of what we are.

This, right now, is a work in progress. Like this page. Like the many pages before me.