We left on a bus to Riyadh. 12 hours, only because 80 mph and border control don’t help in cutting out the distance between closed and open airspaces. Everyone travelling with us mostly teachers, we make jokes and slight conversation between deliberating whether this was really necessary or not. The X notifications and Jazeera Live in the background deepening a sense of doom mostly planted by conspiracy-theorist online professors and family that live far away. At a gas station near Khafji, one of the teachers, an Egyptian-American who swears she’ll never go back to the US, feeds a pack of stray dogs fatayer and I watch her give love despite the fear. The dogs, barking wildly, care less about the food and more about the two-storey truckload of sheep parked on the other side of the station. I picture us as sheep, safe in captivity. I picture us as dogs, our violence misunderstood by too much empathy.

It took a week before the bus ride for us to decide to go. I am more passive than I think I am, and more attached to my comforts than I understand. Sulaiman less so. We’d been thinking of leaving later in the year, anyway. To nowhere specific. To somewhere other than here. It was easy to imagine when the timeline was so far away, when all we would be leaving is a nice apartment and routines we deemed boring. As we packed, I saw the same image of my parents, who left Kuwait for good a few months ago, hunched over suitcases, minimizing an inventory of what makes them feel at home. I packed what I could, besides a coat. The privilege of two suitcases and a safety net took me through it without much complaining. The shadow, again, reminding me that I did not need to go. That I was choosing this. That many have done worse, that many do not get to choose.

What can we do with guilt besides numbing it with reason? Overexplaining, over the dinner table, why others should choose this too? My father in law, after telling us stories of a war the soil still holds, reminded us that our choices should not be about them. Should not be about anyone else. He said, on the armchair in the corner without prompt,

Baba, I release you. Don’t think about us. We will do what we think is right, and you are free to do what you think is right.

And what really can we say in response? What happens to uncertain decisions when you cannot differ them onto others? Who would we blame, then, if things don’t work out? If we come back sooner than later, having run from the shadow of a shadow’s shadow, not knowing it was our own?

It has been almost three weeks since we left, and every conversation is tinged with an anxiety I don’t know how to tame. I escape into many things, and none fold distance, none bring me closer to an understanding that I cannot do anything but sit here and wait. To count my blessings, I look at the mountains. I watch a slug climb slowly up a step for long enough to learn some sort of lesson about rushing. I pick up an addiction to my phone. I search for ways to be more active, both physically and politically. I attempt to pull myself out of the present and look for ways to release myself from guilt.

It is still raining in Istanbul and I’m still deliberating over whether I should buy a coat. There are more stray dogs in this city than I’ve ever seen anywhere. I don’t attempt to feed them, but I do notice the fear that jumps through me when I walk past, even when they are asleep. Almost everyone looks Arab (in my bias) so I stop asking aloud, insulting fewer and fewer people throughout my day. I still don’t know what I think is right, but maybe enough time will pass that I will get used to a larger, heavier shadow than what walked with me before.

.الغربة جهاد

Exile is a necessary suffering.

It is a test for all the rewards we will receive in the afterlife. In jannah, she promises, all of our homes will be lined up as close to our loved ones as possible. All of us neighbors to our mothers, fathers, siblings, despite not being able to live in the countries they were buried in.

Later, at a farewell breakfast a week before my parents pack up their knicknack-filled Funaitees apartment, I ask their best friends, desperate for some hope, what it’s like to have lived apart from their families for so long. Originally from the same village my dad grew up in, Amo Tawfiq says, point-blank, as if it is gospel:

Don’t stop to think. Just move forward.

The only return is to God, whenever He wills it.

He looks me in the eye, blinks slowly, and reminds me that just a week ago, he lost a brother he hadn’t seen in years. He pulls out his phone and reads, in typical falasteeni dad fashion, some of the most gut-wrenching lines of poetry that I will ever hear. There is a lot to say about repression, and how it fills a being so full of so much until it finally finds respite over eggs and mini waffles.

I spent my life in exile.
In it, I lost a father, a mother, a brother, a sister.
Damn a country that does not tolerate its children,
and damn the occupier at its doors destroying every heart already broken.

I take the poem as a sign. My personal جهاد, already at full-volume through the generational trauma of displacement, is only going to get louder.

Growing up in Kuwait, I only knew my mother as the greatest teacher to hit the private school circuit, and my dad as chief engineer of his own world. Through tears, I watch them turn everything they were into souvenirs wrapped in tissue paper and unorganized photo albums. An entire phase of their lives, culminating in cancelled iqamas and 24 years of toil on a land they cannot rest in.

While I spend an indeterminate amount of years building a business under someone else’s name and attempting to cultivate creativity in a scene excluding most of its people, I find more proof that everything I am doing is temporary. Not only in my approach to death, but also in my approach to leaving. To having nothing left here but a vague memory of my face and an instagram account I hope to no longer keep up with.

We are all leaving. Some to places with more welcoming citizenship processes, some back to their families, and some to new countries that will never really feel like home. When we are gone, what happens to our footprints in the concrete that built an infrastructure that does not support our weight? What happens to the work that goes uncredited? Does the tree know of the hands that planted it, or only of those that enjoy its fruits?

As my parents settle into the snow of their new life, and I search for my mother’s smile in Salmiya, or my father’s gait in Hawalli, I am reminded of my temporary belonging as one of the teachers and engineers, storekeepers and architects and designers, charity organizers and community leaders, artists and cleaners and taxi drivers, HR professionals and product managers, quasi-business owners and real estate brokers, who have no choice but to only move forward, forward, forward, until they are forced to leave. Or to return, whenever God wills it.

While we wait for eventual departure, we are on group messenger calls brainstorming floor plans of our combined jannah villages, built brick by brick through a جهاد we never got to claim.

The sacrificial woman in me is always in the driver’s seat, trying to make it to whatever destination you need to reach to feel some sort of fruition, some sort of completion in a task I wasn’t that interested in completing in the first place. In the passenger, the fighter- the person who throws up at the thought of a boundary-less existence, reaching out over the steering wheel and hitting the left clicker to signal a u-turn to get us right back to the start, right back to where I said “yes” when I meant “actually…” when I meant “that really doesn’t align” when I meant “I would rather die than drive you there” when I meant “but what’s in it for me?” when I meant “but I’m gonna need you to promise you’re putting in your own work too” when I meant “if you don’t, I’m devouring it all, eating everything in front of me: a buffet of industry that has been chewing at my patience since I walked in.”

The sacrificial woman is inherited. She sees how much her support, her kind words, her nudging in this direction and that creates a fire that warms the village. She sits in my stomach, or in my head, or in my chest when I am sat in a room that doesn’t listen, just asks for a base to structure what it isn’t sure it really wants. It wants, it wants, it wants, like machine with no output. It wants, it wants, it wants, but won’t do the work necessary to be able to get it. This is when the sacrificial mother cooks. She asks for just a few basic ingredients and a mouth to feed and comes back with twelve-course meal and warm open arms ready to embrace the grumpy, the tired, the hungry. She takes from nothing and makes a home. She takes from nothing and makes a village. I am used to taking from nothing, and giving to everyone, to all, and leaving nothing for myself. The sacrificial mother tells me this is natural. That this is the way of the world.

As a community organizer, and later someone trying to build something sustainable, I thought mothering was a feasible business model. If I just spend my energy on getting other people what they want, I’ll get paid, become fulfilled by seeing my ‘children’ succeed, and never have to think about the monster of desire inside of me that wants someone else to mother me. Someone else to build me a path to success and believe in my goals. I spent my energy on management, leadership and executing other people’s ideas. I didn’t think to build myself up. I didn’t think to focus on what I wanted, just on what I saw in other people.

In relationships, the martyr mother shows up as constant disappointment. There is resentment when I’m doing things for you, and resentment when you don’t allow me to take care of you. Overstretching is my comfort zone. I identify with being overworked and under appreciated. This is, unfortunately, a calling card for being both a Middle Eastern Woman and an expat in a gulf country constantly proving their worth. If you’re not wife, then you are mom (sometimes you are both) and because I don’t try to be wife to every one who crosses my path, I am immediately considered motherly, which is often a shocking realization of how people treat their own mothers. This is not exclusive to men, but to anyone yearning for some sort of feminine-tasting guidance. I’ve caught myself calling people mom in my head, searching for someone to go to in the middle of the night when I’ve just thrown up and want someone to hold my head in their hands.

I grew up around sacrificial women. Everywhere I looked, I saw the ways they held up each other and the people around them, without considering themselves. Each time I have the choice to consider my own desires, I’m met with the internal and external resistance of stop being so selfish. It is not selfish to think of yourself as well as the people around you. It is selfish to consider that you are the only person who can really see the best in everyone. It is selfish to think “they couldn’t do this without me.” It is selfish to force your community to rely on you and you alone, without empowering them to make their own decisions and go on their own paths.

So: instead of denying the sacrificial woman inside me, I ask her for one more (and perhaps the ultimate) sacrifice- to let go. Let go of the reality in which you are the only one carrying the weight of the family. Let go of the resentment, the hyper-independence, the need to prove yourself strong. Give yourself the space to care for you, to make your own decisions about what you want to do and how to do it. Let go of the steering wheel and find your own ride. You really can’t tell where everyone else wants to go.

My relationship with masculinity and femininity is constantly shifting. For those who grew up rejecting femininity, it’s a hard realization that maybe we only rejected it because others told us it was a weakness. To be safe, we tried to fit into an ideal: either fully masculine or fully feminine, depending on how we were perceived. That rejection intertwines with ideas of modesty and 7aya, the expectation that femininity and beauty must be safeguarded from the world. And then what? You end up wearing loose trousers and shopping in the men’s section of Pull & Bear until your body outwardly rejects shopping anywhere else.

But what do we even mean by masculinity and femininity? We talk about energies, submission and force, security and safety, Venus and Mars, but what are we really talking about? The infinite cannot be named and separated. The cosmos is spinning and endlessly expanding, holding every god we’ve named, every thought we’ve had, yet we still cycle between rigid systems of belief. We move from gender roles to their rejection, then back to the comfort of what we were taught. And then? We forget? Or pretend we have? Until that shadow seeps from the edges of the picture frame, carrying the anger of generations who never wanted to be boxed in, who never wanted to wear the mask they were forced into. The entire cosmos, endlessly expanding, rejects a canvas so small you can’t even see it in full.

I don’t have many women friends anymore, maybe because I’m in a male-dominated industry, or maybe because for years, I relied on a lazy spontaneity: Hey, wanna hang out in five minutes? at 11 PM. A spontaneity that, in hindsight, doesn’t work for anyone who isn’t just sitting in their car waiting for something to happen. In high school and most of college, I wore my “masculinity” like a crown, like I was somehow more worthy of my work and my accomplishments because I didn’t care how I looked (turns out, that’s just poor hygiene, not masculinity). I didn’t want to sit and watch life pass me by while others (often men) grabbed experience and ran with it. I wanted to let myself be taken by this infinite, expanding life.

And I found proof, online and in my circles, that I could be anything. Neither, or both, or not the one I had rejected. People everywhere were changing, becoming more themselves, finding ways to fit the canvas without suffocating. I looked for my way. I tried different words, different outfits, different ways of existing, asking people to see that I wasn’t just one thing.

I’m not just one thing! Please! Stop putting me in your tiny box! Look at my pants! Look at my hair! Look at the way I walk! There’s more to me than meets the eye!

And? That was it. That was all I was saying, for years. There’s more. I didn’t even know what more was, I just knew it existed, just beneath the surface. But the world told me otherwise. That there isn’t more. That we are only what exists in this physical plane: doing this work, visiting these people, sending these emails. That there’s nothing else until we die, and then maybe we return to the darkness.

But I’ve seen the infinite expressed. I’ve heard the music. I’ve watched the binary melt into something swirling, spinning. I’ve seen it go from black and white to red and bursting, pink and swelling, blue and overflowing. I’ve seen it pierced and misshapen, kept pristine and protected. I’ve seen it protest and keep the peace. I’ve seen it go with the flow and change everything at once. I’ve seen the binary destroyed, and I’ve seen it fuel movements and revolutions.

There is more. There has always been more. And it’s spilling from a cup too small to contain it. If we keep trying to force it back in, to stop it from overflowing, we’ll only trap ourselves in an endless loop of frustration.

So yeah, I struggle with the binary. But so does everything. I don’t think we were ever meant to choose. I think we were meant to embrace it all—and hope, from a distance, it looks like something beautiful. Or at least, something resembling a life.

I’ve never met an artist who didn’t say something about wanting to move to the forest/beach/middle of nowhere and never speak to anyone again. Farah once told me, “if it was just me and my delusions alone in a cabin, I would be fine.” So many want to sit in a cave alone, and paint our masterpieces until it’s time to lay in the sand, and watch the sun melt skin off bone while a passerby calls it a miracle, a work of genius—it’s almost Quranic in the way we wrap ourselves in cloth and hope the Earth will swallow us before we are fully seen. When I ask enough questions, almost everyone brings up obsession as the only way, as the only path towards mastery that will pay off when we play, or sing, or sketch– a way towards a satisfaction that we’ll finally recognize when it’s there, in the moment– where all that we have been reaching towards, in perfectionism, or God, or pure expression will finally be laid out in front of us.

I consider myself a connector. Aside from existing as an artist, I pick up the role of manager or event coordinator (or whatever you want to call banging on the cave walls to get some sort of murmur from the bear slumbering inside). It is often difficult because I must prove that it is worth coming out, that whatever garbage heap is burning outside the studio or the farm or the writer’s apartment, is worth seeing and touching and being a part of. In the creative mind, the world is just as they have built it: a series of images or geometries, of notes and melodies, of stories that will never be told. In the creative mind, everything is terrible but everything is perfectly terrible, and the realities of the contradictory beauty and destruction exist only as concepts, or as a film to watch behind tired, sleepless eyes.

It’s not to say that all artists are the same, but isolationist artists quite often are. Obsessive artists quite often are. The reality is, they do not know what to do, so they’ve retreated into some sort of protective abyss that blinds them to the dirt underneath their fingernails. They’ve decided it’s enough—the stumbling and fumbling, and the issues with their approach so far is too much, so strumming along or sketching the eyes of the man they see themselves in, is the best they can do.

I could be wrong, and my world-view is dependent on the artists I interact with in a narrow scope of what art is, but what I have noticed is: when we create spaces that focus  on competitively considering craft, the necessity of art is lost—the connection created from cultivating creativity, from the way we express, from the way we communicate, becomes a byproduct—something that happens that we don’t have to think about. If we focus on art and getting better at it personally, we think: whatever comes from that will come. 

Jad says he feels the most importance when it comes to relational art, finding the serendipity in interaction of art and humanity, and in the coding that’s going on in the background. I ask him if he sees any patterns and he laughs, mostly, and says my questions are too broad for anyone to answer. In community spaces, like Art Scene, or DIY creative scenes in any suburb or city or corner of the world, art is the gateway, it  is what brings you together: it’s the coffee you sip in between chitchatting, the music you listen to in between trips to buy another drink or trauma-dumping on the couch in between the palm trees. In this perspective, keeping art and your craft to yourself is not only a shame but counterproductive to the goal of the scene. It is a way of saying to the world that actually: me and my thoughts are so different. Actually, I choose to connect only to myself. I choose to dance alone. And this is fine. It’s fine to be selfish, especially with something you’ve created so close to your chest.

Sometimes I sit in my cave walls, with my paintings and my music and my writing, and wonder if whatever is out there is worth seeing and touching and being a part of.

I organize community spaces to connect people with each other, to see the group chats created out of open mics and music circles, to watch a ripple effect of mutual understanding and creation, out of an inherent need to nurture: to nurture others, to nurture art and connection, and to give myself the satisfaction of having brought all these colors together into some sort of makeshift canvas that looks a lot like family, or…non-loneliness. The truth is, I do not avoid sharing my art out of fear of being misunderstood. I often avoid it out of fear of being the same. And what happens then? When you realize the thing you’ve created to differentiate yourself, to say “ACTUALLY SOCIETY’S FLAWS ARE SOMETHING I HAVE LEARNED TO POINT AT FROM AFAR” but society’s flaws are all of your problems, all of your issues, all of the things we avoid by staring at the studio ceiling and practicing your scales without any idea of what’s happening outside of it. 

Here’s the case for community: the human necessity for connection.
Here’s the case for isolation: the human necessity for self-expression, and self-protection. 

And isn’t it Quranic, the way we will sometimes come together for something we consider bigger than us? For something we consider inherent to human survival? Isn’t it Godly? Even in the most exclusive spaces, we reach for each other as a way to understand. We use our community as a backdrop, to explore what is happening inside of us. To me, the open mic is church because we pray to something and hope it does not spite us. The open mic is church because I ask everyone to repeat after me, There is Space for Us. And who is us? With questions of language and accessibility, of outcast-ness created by this need to feel unique, I wonder if the echoes are loud enough for folks (for me, for me) to realize: there is no us, and no them. There is only fingers reaching across the infinite, trying to get a closer look at themselves. 

I haven’t been back in Indiana since I promised I wouldn’t be back in Indiana. Some parts of the Midwest feel like a blackhole at a costume party, promising everyone that they actually ARE a livable space. They actually ARE part of an America you can stomach past five years and an irrelevant college degree. Since I moved back, the playlists I put together and the memories I make are much softer. They’re settled into scales that don’t tip over with the weight of their melodies. I was angry in Indiana because it is easy to be angry in Indiana. I am restless in Kuwait because I know there is not much time left to build what I need to build, to carve something that can home me past an academic year and a renewed work visa.

The homies and I are so restless that we sit around a table and write meeting notes when we could be laying on the beach. The homies and I are so restless we spend a week in a warehouse breathing in spray paint to clean up the space in our chests that we’ve abandoned. We ask “where have you been?” and the answer is everywhere but here, together. On the way to setup, I gush about how cool it is to bring the general vibe of a basement show into fruition. There’s something about standing in a crowd half a meter from the band- sweaty, a little uncomfortable, and ready to push some people around. The lineup we readied wasn’t exactly the hardest, but hit the spot of emo and drums that was perfect for a little shoving, a little dancing, a little bit of in-between.

Setup was 7 days of feeling like everything was falling apart. In the mornings, Mohammad and I drink coffee and wonder why we do these things to ourselves. The first 3 days, we went from no budget to full budget to no budget at all. In the last 4 days, we went from best friends to coworkers to not speaking at all. I say everything is an improv show because we’re making stuff up as we go, and the stage is just whatever morning routine I can muster up the energy to motion, to meditate, to write down a thought about the anxiety-fueled dreams involving photobooths and concession stands, dance battles and financial breakdowns.

This is normal. I remind myself that it’s close to hell until you see it. Art is labor, is the grind of what you’ve known against what you know to be possible. Nothing is born without the stretching of skin, of container holding just enough water without toppling over. My cup gets bigger because I bang it against the bars and demand more. I wonder, sometimes, if I am even drinking enough of what I already have. If I should stop to see the ocean for what it is, or just keep swimming in search of depths and greater pressures. The show starts while I am behind the sound table, worrying about volume and crowd control and if the band knows just how beautiful the sight of a drum kit is in the Rihab-supplied RGB lights.

In the audience, I see myself 80 times. Winged eyeliner and sweaty foreheads, groups of 5 and singular loners banging their heads. The common statement is “this doesn’t feel like Kuwait!” and it hurts to accept. Italians congratulate me on setting something up that feels like home. Palestinians ask me where I’m from. Organizers ask me if I can stop the crowd from getting too close, from moving too much, from feeling the kick too close to their legs. I ask security to watch out, but I don’t know how to describe what they’re watching for.

You know the rules here. Nothing too crazy.

Yaz is the frontwoman of everybody’s dreams. She laughs with the guitarist, prompts a sing-along, and holds her home in her hands and asks everyone to pray with her. I remained in awe from soundcheck, and the few conversations we managed between meetings and pep talks. When the setlist is almost over, and the venue has cleared up of anyone who isn’t actively pumping their fists, she attempts the words I hadn’t prepared for. Yaz turns to the crowd and says “LET’S START A PIT!” and what a punch to the gut, what a fist to the mouth, what a shove against shoulders it is to hear that, to grin widely, then tell everyone to stay put. We can’t be doing that.

There are people watching.

شو راح يحكو الناس؟

For a minute, the crowd turns into 16 year-old versions of me, sewing patches onto Forever 21 jean jackets, and begging my mom for a septum ring. For a minute, everyone is reading slam poetry to themselves in their bedrooms, wondering why no one understands them. For a minute, I am the cop asking for the license. I am the principal measuring skirt lengths and searching through bookbags for vapes and loose cigarettes. For a minute, I want to forget about safety and Gantt charts, about inventories and digital marketing, and be angry. I want to be angry. That this is all we get, that this is all we have right now. Full meals with a grain of salt. Education systems with a lack of context. Oases of freedom, within an infrastructure of suppression.

Organizing spaces and people is an artform. I’ve learned this in the two years of making posters and creating group chats. One of the most important aspects of art is the limitation: the dimensions of the canvas, the skillset of the musician flittering through chords. Some of the greatest artists force themselves into limitation they have never explored, and try their best to create something beautiful. I try my best to create something beautiful. When the edge of the canvas threatens, it hurts that I cannot extend, that there is no infinite supply of paint, or 10 more fingertips to press against frets.

A friend of mine is pissed that we didn’t mosh, that we needed security, that we kept the venue operators in mind when setting our own limitations. I remind him that change is incremental, that we couldn’t be doing what we’re doing now even a year ago, that this is revolutionary in itself. He says that this is not enough. We must push for more. I agree. I agree, but my canvas is only so big right now. My cup can only hold so much water. And maybe this is my journey to forgiveness. I forgive my mom for saying no, for being afraid of what others would say about a piece of metal hanging from my nose. I forgive the principal, for being ordered into ordering what they think is best. I forgive myself, for my own limitation. I forgive an infrastructure that has yet to expand, and I choose to allow my anger to stretch it as much as it would take. As much as it will allow me until I, or it, break.

The jazz club is packed, but packed for a room that uses the stairs as extra seating. I take the chance to be higher up, and sit next to someone with a sax leaning against his leg, and a few artists from Berlin who agree that everyone is trying too hard and everyone is very, very confused. One of them shows me a painting of his confusion, and for a moment, I understand. His color choices mirror the words I use to describe my uncertainty.

Whatever the 5 piece band did to practice, I’m sure it was an endless trust exercise and the instruments were just the vehicles toward embrace. Drums set the stage, and an upright bass feels like holding the Earth in your hands and plucking to get its sense of roundedness. A shaky guitar, who plays despite, and keys that did not stop did not stop did not stop for a second holding everyone together. In the front, the contrast of a bird mid-flight and a nest in a tree in a forest of roots & rhythms. The front-woman, in full freedom, scatting and singing through choruses of made up words and improvised exchanges between her and the alto standing by her in full faith. He, a little too perfect, a little too studied, floats between her tongue clicks and embodied shakiness. She does not sing the whole time, he does not play the whole time. They both step down for soft moments, in grace, to allow the band to show themselves as the only reason either of them can stand on such high ground, can dance so heavily, without the wood breaking from underneath them. For a moment, the band plays and she rises, with flames or water or air or texture in time, and she finds what has already been there-nothing. Nothing, holding her back. She returned somewhere unseen, and the band held her. All of her. Without setting a time limit as to when she should come back.

I meet Othman because I lost my car. It’s normal, I lose most things- I am on my way from finding one thing to realizing I have to find another. I ask around if anyone has a scooter, mainly to fulfill a bucket list item, but also because I really have no idea which parking lot I turned into at midnight the night before to get to my hotel. This city is infinite alleyways and all of them are cliffs you have to jump off without a rope. He’s a friend of the hotel owner, and he’s on his way back now. He comes down the tight stairs of the office singing, and takes in a sharp exhale when he sees me sitting there. Between jokes about my absent-mindedness, and how many random parking lots there are within a 20-minute radius, he figures the rental car agency should have a location we can use. When he gets it, he starts putting his gloves on and I’m curious why he’s walking with me, but he does. We end up walking together a lot more over the four days I’m in the city, sometimes downtown, sometimes by the water, sometimes in our heads in entirely different directions.

On the last night, we sit in the same office next to the old washer/dryers. It smells like outside and inside at the same time. The cigarette smoke in this city is endless. We laugh together about how this is the fifth chicken wrap we’ve had this week, and in between he tells me they took everything from him. They took everything from him. This is the beginning of a story I’ve heard many times. Man loves, man lives, man is greeted by every boy and every bird as he walks down the street and is still stripped bare whenever someone gets the chance. He says, between Google translate and strong huffs of frustration,

           I used to be an Orthopedist. Now I am inside dead. I walk around, and everyone is inside dead. Like zombie, living. How am I supposed to be happy, when my people are dying? My family is dying? Two years ago, I am on Twitter saying the same thing. Next day, the police are at my door claiming I’m an organizer. They sent me to jail, for speaking about my people! Now I can’t get job except in business, and everywhere I look someone is watching me, judging me, waiting for me to make a mistake.

The dryer spins. I sit in silence, having grabbed my necklace out of habit, and he asks me what it is. A zeitiouna as the tree of life pendant that I got from Falasteen exactly a year ago. It reminds me of home, of my roots, of everyone who holds me up. It reminds me of where my current freedom comes from.

     Who is Othman, now that they’ve taken everything from you?

     I don’t know, who do you think Othman is, without any freedom?

I leave the next day, but I make sure to have one last cup of tea with him. Even while sick, even after the night before, he greets everyone on his street with full embrace. I give him a pendant I bought earlier that morning that looks very similar to mine. He puts it on without a second thought, and I’m almost embarrassed at how excited I am that he does.

I wonder, even now with slight texts and check-ins, if he will find a land, or a people, or a place, or a band, that will hold him up. All of him, without setting off alarms when he asks to bring his roots with him. Othman is Falasteen and I choose to talk about it. Seedo is where my tree grows from, and jazz is only free when it is fully alive.

sometimes a word is just a word,
sometimes it is a means
to an end.

i don’t mean to wish the
mouth closed, i mean to let
the ants tunnel just as they see fit,
bridging through beach to carve
a softness the water does not
know how to give. to name it,
or map it like tramway tracks to
a destination, is to wrap a body
in your arms and pretend like
that is all there is to hold.

sometimes i trust that meaning
and intention are
interchangeable.

i meant to say-
let me love you.
i intend to say-
i know.
i meant to say-
will you please?
will you please,
tunnel here with me?
i need a colony:
each hill has been built
for us to climb together.
i intend to say-
have i forgotten?
have we forgotten?
water is only gentle if we pour it slow.

-hanif abdurraqib

there are fires everywhere, though we sit around one made of olive wood and cheap starter. the castana cracks open too late. the knife is passed around with the blade facing up, because here we are safe, even from the minor mistake, even from the trip up wound in the stomach, the kidney, the heartspace. i spend every morning avoiding the part of me that wants to swallow the sunrise in a single bite, the one that is stuck in dreams and subconscious messaging. i don’t trust what she says that isn’t out of breath and suffocating, that isn’t desperate for help. “have you considered what we talked about?” she’ll say, but i can’t remember a conversation that wasn’t muffled and underwater and stuck across an inescapable timezone i chose to fly over.

i call her by my name when our conversations begin to deepen, when our lighthouses are facing opposite poles and the attendants have to squint to even see the ships that are supposed to dock against the bay. i don’t call her unless the heat in my hair follicles is hot enough to roast a marshmallow, or peel under fistfuls of nail looking frantically for a buried thing. i ask everyone i can what the point is. if all is ending, if all has a beginning only to have an end, then why sit down to watch in the first place? the credits are a list of casualties in a passion project, and now they’re all retired in homes with white picket fences and dogs that only bark when they are told to.

if life is as short as the ancestors say, why do i count the minutes i have left before i am late? why do i stare at a wall until the shadows ask me what i think i will find? all the anxiety lives in my chest, and visits my stomach on the weekends to make sure the bed is made and the drapes are clear of dust. i don’t know what to do but love every leaf and wait for the fall. how do i decide when to stop fighting, if the fight is in my daily commute, in my daily conversation, if the fight is in the mirror, and the credits and the coffee spill? how do i decide when to stop fighting if the revolution unravels from a spool that is wrapping itself up again at the other end? the faster i run the closer i am back here, to this moment, where all of the world and none of it matter.

some days i want to scream and post the recording as an assignment on google classroom. some days i want to skip being alive and sit in that one tree by the highway, with its branches long enough to touch the tiny toes pressed up against the the over-crowded van, driven by three women and their lineage of smog. i call her when i cannot see through the smoke, and she reminds me that lungs are how the heartspace gives and takes.

gives and takes.

how do i decide when to stop giving, and when it’s time to take? if all is ending, all the avoidance comes with a cost. i swallow the sunrise and birth a fire of olive wood and people, holding hands, and reading poems, and sitting in a pool of hopelessness that grew cold decades ago. if all is ending, why should i call her? i know she’ll hang up eventually, so i automate a reply and make sure she knows i’ll text her later.

to scream so loud, we must quiet down the others. i am the screamer, and the others. the drive-through is empty this morning, a little more full two weeks from now, back to how it was in a month. i am the boycott and the businessman. in the staff room, someone flips over their screen so i can get a clearer view of the body, the bleeding, the bombing, and i ask how i am supposed to teach about integers now. as if what is in front of me is more important than what is in front of me.

you add two opposites and the sum is 0. the addition of a negative integer and a smaller positive number is still well below substantial, still a tunnel underground and full of potential. power corrupts, they say, and discrimination creates a hatred embedded in truth, in reality. i am the balance tipped on both ends, overflowing and barren at exactly the same time. i face a shadow and beg for it to remember all my light. beg for me to remember all my light.

today, i practice in the car how to point to the blood in a way the children will understand. how to point to the fact that some of it is so old it is dried up and powdered, has created a soil for new growth to come from. these plants are also covered in blood, but bloom through it. we are all covered in it, but walk through it. and if you can’t walk, you crawl, and if you can’t crawl, you ask all those who are walking to drag you through the crimson mud and scream when they are no longer able to.

i face a shadow and there is no number line that can fit the feeling of failure, of imposter living on foreign land. i face a shadow and then hit repost to story, hoping someone will know what to do with all the acid in my stomach, all the acid in my mouth, all the acid in my veins. it’s not the time for any of this. i fundraise and fist raise and have coffee with americans. i meditate and mediate and manage conversations without the language to articulate just how much i am ready to run. to run. to her, to them, to the garden in the 7osh in kufur akab, to what is now refurbished in tulkarem. i face a shadow and learn that it looks just like me. i face a shadow, turn around to run, but stop as soon as I’ve seen the light.

“miss i stopped buying starbucks”

“ummmm…i bought starbucks this morning. i didn’t know! am i a bad person?”

“me and my cousins raided someone’s tiktok live with FP”

“i dreamt i could fight with them, i dreamt i could fight in sudan too.”

“i saw a dead baby on tiktok”

“miss do you have any family there?

the conversations haven’t changed much since i was their age. there is no answer anyone can give with a full mouth and enough breath to keep going. we are watching from far enough that the signal can be ignored, or avoided, or conversed about lightly before the first class activity. i don’t say much besides slight reassurance that they do not have to watch the video over and over again, that their turkey and cheese pretzel isn’t what’s causing all of this, that this has been going on for longer than they and i have been alive, and it takes a people speaking up for the rest of us to hear it.

i don’t say that i wonder what happens when the song is cut off mid-way. i don’t say that some of the posters i saw yesterday were the same that i saw three years ago, the same i saw seven years ago, the same i saw when i was their age. i don’t say that we live in a country with the most starbucks cafes per capita, that the first BDS call was formed in a country that suffered under the cloud of an apartheid that is still raining today. i don’t say that i don’t know the answer either. i don’t know how to feel or what to do or where to go.

i still ask the same questions i did when i was 12. how do we hold the contradiction, baba? i eat dirt to wash the taste of a question like that from my mouth, i cut off a tongue to alleviate a guilt i don’t know where to place. i speak about contradiction as if i am not sitting comfortably in the hyphen, sipping an iced americano. i watch the news silently with my mother. she asks if she should move her trip to ramallah in case they don’t let her in. i look at my phone to avoid the question, and she apologizes for wondering out loud. my grandmother says she will die there, whether they come to her or not.

“you have to learn how to live in between without making too much trouble for yourself or the people around you.”

what is trouble when this is peace? what is peace when it means someone must carry the burden of all our trouble?

”how’s your sister? did they leave for the south yet?”

what is a safe route if they know where you are going, if they forced you to take it?

the 12 year-olds gasp when i say 75 years. they ask what’s going to happen next. i say liberation can sometimes mean trouble. i say liberation is seeing the safe route for what it is.

“what can we do?”

at 12 years old, at 24, at 52.

“where in your life have you accepted something you know is not right? how does your existence depend on the exploitation of someone else’s? what do you allow, from your friends, from your family, from the people around you, that you know you could change, if it just meant….to fight?

and are you willing to do it?”

Donate to the Red Crescent.

Readings from Mohammed Al-Kurd, free Ebooks from Haymarket Books, Angela Davis’ Lectures on Liberation.

i am so used to choosing. exactly what i want. exactly what i need. everyday i choose to be a little late to work, to take the longer road to the parking lot so i can see the pretty building and bask in the mathematical systems of pedestrians and vehicles and car horns and coffee cups. every day i choose what i think is beautiful: the sunrise, the runny eggs, the good shoes that are comfortable.

when i first saw Bloom spin, i wondered what else there was. i waited for the garageband beats, the macbook setup, the mind blowing transitions. i waited for him to look down and find, within the song, a way to change. to manipulate. to say “this is mine now” without any notice. i waited for a taking. he kept spinning. record after record, placing them with careful fingertips and a knowing, focused look. jazz funk. the kind of music that makes your head bop and your hips sway and an ooooof slip through when the drums come in.

or when the americano comes out. the kind of coffee that is pre-measured into singular homes. ground, quietly, then moistened. the wrist is relaxed when it packs, when it pours. when it’s placed next to the dessert slightly off-center: an art-form. ode became the spot. every time, a cheerful smile, a how-are-you-doing like i had been there a thousand times. every time, a different dish. some okay, just a comfortable slice of lasagna or an omelette that begged for more. some…life-changing, a roasted pear, a kimchi cheese pancake that pulled apart before a fork could graze it.

i kept seeing Bloom. i kept coming to ode. i watched the sun filter in and took deep breaths that the minimal decor allowed me to. there are really only 15 items on the menu, several sitting in perfect platters on a buffet, waiting to be chosen. soon, it wasn’t enough to come alone. i brought a friend, then more, then a more-than-friend, then more. we shared ice cream and giggled over our reactions to browns and grays and art in the everyday.

i am so used to loving. when i love, i cook. it is an art-form. when i love, i write. it is an art-form. when i love, i give. it is an art-form. what i learn from watching Bloom, is that giving is a language with infinite dialects. each record speaks it differently, hits synapses that you haven’t danced with since that one song from childhood. what i learn from watching Bloom, is that sometimes, love is just a choice. the choice to play this, and then this, and then this. love is not just a shuffled playlist (it could be) but the wide smile before you switch, the how-are-you-feeling without any words, the room-reading you don’t even know is happening.

all my love begins in the kitchen. nour steps in and out of it, wraps the apron when it’s time to shuck some oysters, then comes out to ask how it tastes. do you need anything more. do you want another plate? a singular table of friends that grows into two, three, four. someone new walks in and says hi to the entire cafe, a line of hugs that ends with fork and knife and lilting conversation. between each song, sans mind blowing transition, i can hear the laughter. i can hear the room-reading. i can hear the choice, over and over, to give. to give. to give.

i am so used to choosing. when i saw you, it was easy. you were exactly what i thought was beautiful. in that choice, i gave. over and over. it was funky enough to get your head bopping, your hips swaying. i could tell why the vinyl would love the needle for allowing it to dance, to skirt. touching it softly but allowing it to play. i danced, and sang, and it was jazz until the giving became so loud i forgot to wait for the take. i forgot to balance out the zest with the mayo, the acid with the base. what i forgot to do was look around, and unwrap the apron, and ask you to choose for me sometimes.

.i come to ode, and i look for Bloom, when i want to see myself in others, when i want to hear someone give in a dialect that doesn’t fully feel comfortable in my mouth. i come to ode, and i look for Bloom, as if to ask somebody to dance. without changing. without manipulating. without claiming anything as mine.

i want to hear you speak your love, sway your love. i want to watch you cook your love, sketch your love. i want to choose to be your needle. to give you…the choice of choosing. of giving, without the ache.

hey y'all, 
its been a beautiful time. i am shifting and expanding and contracting with time and so my skin feels comfortable, feels like my favorite sweatshirt that i don't have to tug or pull at throughout the day. i've recently started understanding my anger, my frustration that seems to crop up in the middle of a work day, or on my way home. there's fire in my chest and i wonder, sometimes, what its use is. where is it coming from but inside the house? 

the anger points me, often, to the ways i have guidelined and ruled and obligated myself into living. if im angry at others, it's probably because they're living life in a way i don't allow myself to live. recently, i've been stuck in the contradiction of being angry at people who are angry at the world. 

"it's beautiful! look! if you take a deep breath you can feel it in every part of your body. if you listen, the mountain's frequency is a low hum and a high yodel at the same time and if you touch the part of the rock that's connected, you can feel that same lullaby in your fingertips" 

but just because i've decided to laser focus on the music, on the fifths circling in flocks over the picturesque mambar of a mosque, doesn't mean i must ignore what lies below. doesn't mean i can't be pissed when the distortion gets so loud all the echoes yell at me to scream. most of the time, i don't want to listen. screaming is hard on my throat, doesn't slide as smoothly as singing the notes i've been practicing all these years.

and am i really missing anything, choosing to loosen my tightened fists so i have more space to hold my lovers' hands? to pick the flower? to paint the portrait? or must i give the anger its space? to be disappointed? to be vengeful? to call everyone a motherf**ker every now and then and stay in a crawlspace that fits just the dimensions of me and my little spaceship? 

i don't know. i hope to figure it out. right now, i choose to hold onto hope and optimism until they've been sanded down to fit into a back pocket, as opposed to being lugged around in a backpack. maybe it's all a matter of time, maybe i won't let time make me so tired. 

speaking of anger, here's my god-i-wish-life-wasn't-like-this-sometime song of the month, 

Small, Bent and Ugly by Crucial Dudes
 

see the fire and roast a marshmallow, 

areej <3



 

 

hey friends! 
february is so fun, like the short week of school after a long weekend, where you're not really paying attention to anything but the passing of time. i continue to stay inconsistent with pretty much everything until im back to realizing that the least i can do is be inconsistent, which i have deemed better than not doing anything at all. and im not doing anything at all in a lot of different places.

i am, however, dredging the landscape of being an adult who doesn't know what they're doing. part of that, i think, is figuring out what to do about Other People. i am Me (whatever that is), but what about Other People? can i stay clear of them forever and not have to deal with having a mirror up in my face, pointing out my insecurities, my flaws, the way i judge things so quickly that its hard to keep my mouth shut? unfortunately, even the best loners are lonely sometimes, and im not sure meditating's gonna cut it forever. 

it's hard to figure out what your flavor of unloneliness looks like. mine is definitely the rocky road of a large social circle i can randomly spin and land on a new bite of whatever chocolate chip vanilla mint (ew) peach is available to have a feelings circle with me. there is loneliness, however, to being a guest on somebody else's show. like a passing wind, or a happy-birthday i'll see you next year. i enjoy the freedom of it though, so i accept the consequences of being that "we should hang out soon!!!!" person you haven't heard from in months. 

with love? don't ask me. i can't swipe right and pretend i didn't barf a little while doing it. we really are on earth doing mating dances, screaming at the top of our lungs, hoping someone, anyone will pick us. in the right way. so many people, saying "pick me, in the right way. in the way im imagining but not communicating because im scared it'll stop you from picking me at all."

chances are it's going to feel wrong 75% of the time. i don't even know if i want to take those chances. i don't know if 25% is enough to even get off the couch to grab my phone from the charger. maybe it is. maybe you can watch it grow. 

anyway, here's my nobody-will-ever-understand-me-in-the-way-i-want-them-to song of the month (forever on replay) 

Nobody by Mitski 
 

stop overthinking it, just feel it in your body, 
areej <3

hey friends, 

it’s been a while. every day is proof that we are magic & sometimes that is overwhelming. We can build & break & build & break & have nothing to show for it but a good night’s sleep once in a while. It is exhausting to listen to yourself & only hear all you must do to heal. And it is even more exhausting not to. Some days, I want the music in one ear and the sounds of my thoughts in the other, a balance I have searched for for so long. 

some say, it is disastrous to be normal. To go about your day as if there is nothing but what is in front of you, exhausted and emotional until we are back to sleep. Some say, it is the only way to know peace. What I say? Peace is an illusion and we are all chasing ideas we have never seen become tangible. Peace is a cup of coffee with friends, I think, for a few brief moments. Peace is the walk to the car. Peace is the tree, waving until the wind asks it not to. Peace is the short conversation with the cashier about how everything is a rip off. Everything is a rip off. Everything is terrible. Hey, everything is terrible and I know. We all know. Why can we not talk about it? Why must we whisper, “hey, I think everything we have and everything they give us is just some sort of promise that tomorrow will be just a little bit different” 

im hoping it is, friends. I’m hoping the sun brings more magic, in between all the yearning for peace. I’m hoping there is peace, in all the places we are not looking. I’m working on it, but work is often exhausting. Work is often having to look at all your mistakes and wonder why you thought to do them, why you thought to keep them hidden instead of reveling in the stupidity of humans with other humans. Maybe that’s it. Maybe peace is saying “hey, I think everything we have done alone is actually everything we have done together, so let’s hold hands in aloneness. In insanity.” That is the point we realize peace. That is the point we are finally sane. 

So, let’s go out in search for sanity. Let’s connect in our mistakes, in our history, in the ways we have reacted to the world around us. Let’s connect in our difficulty, and tell each other our strategies of navigating it. Tell me what you’ve done, I have done the same. Tell me what you’ve gone through, we have all gone through it, my love. 

Here’s my We-Are-All-The-Same-Lets-Leave-And-Come-Back-A-Little-More-Sane Song of the Month:

Bint El Khandaq by Mashrou Leila 

anyway, 
tell that tree it is your favorite, and maybe it will give you a leaf in the morning, right on your doorstep, 
aj 

 

hey friends, 

i'm gonna be honest with you, i'm not sure what's going on. it feels like i'm on a moving walkway that's been broken for years, waiting to get where ever i'm going. but for some reason, i'm angry about it. i'm angry about a lot of things. sometimes, the anger is a bird and it isn't real, but most times, it's an airplane and i forgot i booked every ticket without waiting for the pilot to tell me where the hell we're going. i'm on a train and then i'm not. i'm in bed and then i'm not. i'm at home but i'm still waiting to feel like something is mine without reason, without having to justify why. 

the issue with being angry is that it's often directed at intangible things. i know, who isn't? especially now. but the issue with being angry at systems and the way things are is that the easy way to direct things is outwards. i want to fight whoever is benefitting, despite the fact that they don't even know what they're doing. the anguish is real, though. it's real and it's usually debilitating enough to stop me from wanting to do the things that relieve it. this usually ends up with me just looking like an asshole. i don't want to be an asshole, so i end up angrier than i initially was, and ready to do something stupid. 

here's how my two braincells, barely making it already, have solved this: 
directing it inwards. great. simply awesome. now i'm angry at everything and myself. i'm angry that i can't control it, i'm angry that i'm sensitive despite living in these systems my whole life, i'm angry that i can't do shit about it without a nonexistent clean slate. there's nothing left but red and i miss the way green feels, the languid stretch of it. the way it feels on the skin. 

i hope i learn how to stop on red and be okay with it, know it's just the way things are. i hope it doesn't go away though, just turns into something i can actually work with, instead of a blinding rage. 

which brings us to my Song-That-Will-Make-Me-Stop-Dead-In-My-Tracks-And-Cry-If-I-Heard-It-In-Public of the month: 

Simple Song by The Shins
 

anyway i hope you feel like an ocean being warmed by the sun, 
aj saleh