chasing pavements

I’ve come to a very clear realization in the past few days: I am terrible at interpersonal relationships. I think I get it, but I don’t. I think I am doing the right thing, but I’m not. People confound me. I certainly don’t believe things are in black and white, but I have a clear sense of my motivations, and I try to be transparent about my intent, and act accordingly. Either I am also wrong about myself, or my sometimes painful self awareness obscures knowledge of others. This, L would say, is my 4ness manifesting.
—
so much depends
upon

a wooden rolling
pin

glazed with pale
butter

beside the white
apron.

in case it is still unclear

here is what i want:
your body
against my body
feverish;
your desire
against my desire
unrelenting;
nothing more.

only so much longer
i’ll last against this mixed signal
madness before i break
and i break still wanting
waiting for a promise
unfulfilled and this fuse
perishes before we can implode
together, slick and salty
and undone.

the lust

If every Sunday were as productive as this one, I would totally wish for a week of Sundays. But then it would be like that short story about some kid who wishes for a week of Sundays, and by the end of the week, the family is eating leftovers in 7 day old church clothes, which is not a very good Sunday after all…but frankly, this is not dissimilar to most of my Sundays. Suck on that, moralizing fable.

/Study Date/
you are so handsome
in your tiny purple apartment
in your tiny purple shirt
making scrambled eggs in the morning
tilapia for dinner.

i peel the skin from this clementine,
pull back the peel on the banana:
what is innuendo when it’s blatant?
every time i use the bathroom
i see a box of condoms, begging.

across the table your face
such focus makes me distracted–
it’s the intensity that gets a girl.
i am only 3 feet away
from an unmade bed, begging.

how many more sundays like this?
i’d give you
every. single. one.

Fall Break (Down)

All three smoke alarms were going off at once. I didn’t know I *had* three smoke alarms. I’d cranked up the oven to bake biscuits, which need high heat to rise properly, and the heat must have been too much. Every time I fanned one off, another would start up until I was sure my head might burst. The cats were hiding, but couldn’t escape the sound no matter where they went. In the cacophony, the only choice was to take them all down. Then, blessed silence, but for the ringing in my ears, which eventually faded.

I had meant to stop being so maudlin on this forum. All this melancholy, melodramatic obsessive shit–I tire of it. I tire of myself, when I can’t shake it off and move on. I just want to be happy. I really do, but there’s the smoke alarms, the crazy parents, the unrelenting feeling of displacement, the loneliness. All these things combine to be more than me–shoving and pushing until I’m back where I started, talking endlessly about my feelings. I brood. I huff. I cry. I rant. I drown myself out, even as I try to stop speaking.

My mother called me. She wants to know about my brother’s sex life. These are things I deliberately don’t talk to my brother about. In fact, I avoid talking to my brother about many things, because I am constantly being mined for information. My mother calls me, 3 out of 4 times, to see if I know something she doesn’t. It’s awful, playing double agent between your brother and parents. They think he’s lost, and want to forcibly show him out of the forest. I sympathize, but I hate making him feel watched. I hate treating him like a child who can’t make his own mind, who needs to prodded into what’s “best” for him. They hate his girlfriend, and they want him to leave her. He works 70-90 hours a week, sends her money so she doesn’t have to work. I’m not crazy about the situation either, but I won’t make him choose between me and her. They will. They do. It breaks me. And even as I promise I will never make my love for him conditional, I know I’m guilty by association to both parties. My mother sees it as taking sides. If I take his, I’ll be out, too. If I take hers, I lose him. In some ways I already have, our closeness precariously wavering as we both avoid saying or doing something that can be traced, exploited. My baby brother. My beautiful brother. I think I failed him.

Whenever someone hurts me, I find a way to make their failure mine. It’s part narcissism, part control freak. If I had set the proper parameters, if I had done something better, smarter, differently–I wouldn’t feel hurt. If I control the source, I control the feeling. I can walk it off. I’ve been trying to make my way around my hurt feelings for two weeks. It hasn’t worked yet. The tenderness around my heart? It’s still there. Squeezing in my chest as I do the most mundane or elaborate tasks. What should have been something brief, beautiful and easy cut me deeper than I want to acknowledge. I don’t want to believe I let myself be so stupid, so open again. So I replay the moment over in my head, I replay the fallout every time I’m home, and I want to run screaming. Out of the house, out of the bar, out of the city. It follows me across county lines, and I bring the despair home, where I am already more isolated than I care to be.

I have friends, amazing, kind and supportive friends. I have sisters, smart and strong and loyal. I have so much, it feels greedy to want more. But I do–guilty even as I type it–erasing lines that sound too sad, too needy. I want so much my heart feels cavernous–my voice echoing so loud it’s a fire alarm, a siren’s song. I’ll swim until I drown. She’ll sing until I go down.

the re-return

I am skilled at leaving. I left Michigan when I was 10, Palestine when I was 14. I left Michigan again when I was 24, Ohio at 26. Over the years, I’ve dropped many schools, ended friendships, forgotten names and erased the banal minutiae that make up the everyday of places behind me. It’s easy now, the process of moving on, packing up, starting over. So few things and people have survived these overhauls, their staying power a sign that perhaps I am not as strong as I wish I were. Or if holding on is harder, stronger than I know.

My last day in Ma’in is also my last day in Jordan. We awake early, per my mother’s request, and go to the main fall before it’s open to the public. The water is steaming, pungent with the smell of minerals. Against my back the fall is the strongest, hardest shower I’ve ever taken, times 100, but more erratically distributed. Sometimes a shot of cool water makes it through, shocking and a pleasant change. It’s exhausting, the lap of the water against your body, the effort exerted to stay vertical against the pressure. We stay for an hour, slowly make our way back to the resort for breakfast, where a lush-lipped beady-eyed cook stalks me around the dining hall and all the way out to the pool. I ignore him, but even my mother notices. On this trip she is realizing something she never imagined: some people actually find me attractive, charming.

From Ma’in we make our way back to Amman, where I spend the afternoon with my family and relatives,  packing my suitcases. By some miracle (my mother) everything fits, under the weight limit and then I am just left with waiting. My relatives re-emerge, playing cards on the Veranda. Mina has found three more figs on the very top of the tree, and he saves them for me, so I eat them, thank him. By now I have won him over, and as he helps me lug my bags up the stairs, he implores me, “Stay a while longer.” I say so many goodbyes. Some heartfelt–because it was good to see you, meet you, be with you. Some perfunctory, for my presence or absence means nothing in your world. At the airport, farewells abound, and we are a tiny scene in Love Actually. I pass through inspection, get my tickets, check my bags, and now I am no longer we, I am just me, going.

The hour is late, my body and brain exhausted from simply everything, so I fall asleep before the plane even takes off. I am asleep the whole way to Paris. I appreciate the beauty of the Charles De Gaulle airport before I am sleeping again, from Paris to Amsterdam. I move through customs, get questioned about traveling from Palestine to Jordan by a curious security agent, and then I am aboard a third plane, my last, from Amsterdam to Detroit. By now I have my fill of sleep, so I subtly fight with my seatmate over the armrest, watch two movies which leave me feeling desolate and convinced I will never be in love again. Never feel loved again. I try hard to focus on leaving, but it’s all ambivalent, my real feelings projected away from myself and onto the heroines cheeky faces in forgettable romantic comedies.

When I watch the little digital plane hover and land in Detroit on the small screen in front of me, I finally feel excited. I am so close, so close. The plane lands, and I make the arduous rounds of US customs, where I lie about having food in my luggage, evade search, and walk outside into the heavy Detroit air. A friend picks me up from the airport, and I feel so strange, speaking entirely in English, peppering my language with curse words, which had been excised for most of my trip. There is no hitch here but I sound foreign to my own ears. Who has this pitch? Who has this inflection? The feeling fades quickly, and by the time I am at my apartment, I am marveling at how easy it was to come back, to remember, to fall into patterns of my life, with nothing visible to suggest a change but the suntan that will surely fade by winter.

In the next few days, I will pick up my parts that fractured, reassemble them: here is my sister, here is my niece, here is my friend, my cat, my car, my beer, my mail, my Meijer. Everything is in place, everything is slightly askew. I will wonder what Rachel is doing, and remember I left her. I will wake thinking about my mother’s tea, and there will be coffee. I will go to flush the toilet, but the lever is on the front of the tank, not the top. I will field questions about my trip, speak in the past tense. I will ache in my back, my throat, my heart. I will ache, divert my attention with work, crushes, laundry, the quest for my missing tank tops. I will fret over paying rent next month, I will consider cutting groceries from the budget. I will long for the figs, for the fackoose, for Mina’s smile, for Bishara’s laugh, for Yazin’s chubby little arms, his songs. I will drive and praise higher powers for lanes. I will wake early, sleep early as my  body copes with jet lag.

I will, willing myself to be here, to be happy, to be OK, to be something besides sad and lonely and aching. I will the ache to linger, proof I went, that I cared, that I didn’t already forget. I forget what I wanted, if I ever knew. At the end, there is no answer, no conclusion, no neat tidy understanding or lesson learned. There is just me, moving along, getting on, pushing through to something I can’t foresee.

A Tale of a Fateful Trip (Part Three)

The second morning of our trip, Rula ignores her alarm. One of my major pet peeves is being startled awake, so hearing “Imma Be” over and over again while she sleeps leaves me…put out. Our late start (which, by my standards, is still a startling 8am) also annoys Yousef, who is clearly over our charms, and is ready to be rid of us. The continental breakfast is a bizarre mix of croissants, cold cereal, and labana. I drink two cups of lukewarm coffee before giving up on proper caffeination, and we begin our journey to Yaffa.

Like Akka, Yaffa is one of the oldest cities in Palestine, also known for its port. Yousef drops us off at the “top” of the old city, which looks out over the ocean and the new city. Yaffa is, in a word, charming. The old city’s architecture is stunning, and it’s been maintained kindly. Next to it, skyscrapers play with the skyline and it’s the easiest metaphor for Palestine: old and new, tradition made modern. Unlike other cities we’ve visited, Yaffa’s population is composed of mostly Jewish Israelis. So here, the transition into Yaffa from Arab spaces is abrupt. In other places the Arab and Israeli bleed into one another, resisting the separation we all seem so intent on.

The city has planted gardens in every available space so that every angle, every view is a postcard, picture perfect. Rula is naturally delighted by this, and I spend some time reprising my role as professional photographer. I think if you can’t make beauty here, there’s no chance for you at all. Magically, Rula disappears each time I’d like to include myself in the scenery, so I make due with landscapes and details  unmarred by my comparative homeliness. In the old city, there is a sturdy rope bridge alongside one of the gardens. The ropes are linked with bronzed cylinders, each featuring a different sun sign. Legend holds that if you stand on the bridge, look out to the sea and make a wish, your wish will come true. Not one to miss such opportunities, I make mine grand. I feel like every holy site I’ve visited has come to this, acting from hope, hope a substitution for faith, or maybe a version of it.

Rula and I decide to walk alongside the ocean, on the pebbled promenade to the Yaffa port. The sea is sparkling and seductive, each crashing wave inviting the next. I am taken with her completely, resent Yousef waiting for us, resent that we’re here only for the day, and can’t go swimming. The sea is right there. Cars park in between glass and concrete shrines to capitalism and passengers take a five minute walk to sandy beaches. I imagine cubicle bound workers coming to eat lunch on the beach. I imagine teaching nearby, students asking to hold class amidst sun bathers. Could I resist?

Our walk is long, the sun doubly reflected off the water, so we barely reach the port before Yousef is ringing Rula’s cell, trying to hurry us along to the next leg of our journey: Jerusalem. Despite my repeated attempts to enter the city, or perhaps because of them, I am completely unprepared for the Old City, the massive wall that surrounds it, the seven gates. My breath catches in my throat and my eyes well. I chide myself over how many absurd tears I’ve cried on this trip but I can’t make myself see sense. The city is so changed, so foreign, but my body recognizes it, greets it like a lost lover. Here is where Lemma and I caught taxis to Jerusalem School, here is where Jacob helped me put in my new earring, here is where we bought falafel and ka’ak on the way home from school. I’m flooded with memories and they are crushing my air channels. Even entering the city I already feel its loss.

Yousef drops us off at one of the highest points in the city, looking down on the Old City, and we walk down, stopping at the Garden of Gethsemane to marvel over the 8 olive trees that have existed since before we changed our watches to AD. Here, a man gives us scarves to drape over our shoulders as we enter holy sites. The deference, like all things, turns a profit and he demands we pay him for the service. We haggle over the price, which seems petty now, and our argument escalates to insults, at which point I refuse to pay. Rula won’t engage, shrugging her shoulders passively so I am left only with aggression, and we walk away, down the slope, his words rolling behind us.

By the time we reach a gate into the city, the Lion’s Gate, we are exhausted and over-heated. We buy water at tourist prices and make our way inside. The sook is just as I remember. Lively, colorful, fragrant. I banter with shop keepers who treat me, for the first time in my visit, as an Arab and not a foreigner. I buy earrings and a necklace, a bag of Turkish Delight. Rula and I feast on falafel sandwiches in the center of the grocery market hustle and bustle. We visit the Holy Sepulchre, where Jesus woke up. In my excitement about the sook, I honestly forget to visit the other holy sites until we are long gone. But I’m content with the trip. I fear that if I see too much, do too much, I won’t be able to hold on to my memories of a happier time here. The reality of now is already intruding with the receding then, and I can’t bear to lose anymore–the image of Jacob and I making our way through the cities arches, him holding my hand secretly as we perused jewelry. The image of a woman blessing my mother’s children, and my mother stopping mid-stride to give her money. The taste of licorice sticks on my tongue, the rich smell of the spice bins.

We make our way out of the Old City through the Damascus gate (Bab Al A’mood), the gate we used to enter through. Bab Al A’mood has remained just so-boys playing soccer in the courtyard, young and old folks sitting on the steps, smoking, speaking, being. Rula and I sit for a while, and I take in as much as I can. Its sameness is a salve for the change in the city, for Jerusalem has been excavated of most of its Arabs, and it seems like we are only here, in the Old City, a tiny bubble that may pop at any moment. We make our way back to the buses for Beit Lehem since Yousef has abandoned us for good. The bus sits 30 minutes before leaving, and I think this is enough time to pull myself together and not cry (again). I’m wrong. As soon as the bus pulls out, I cry under my sunglasses, surreptitiously sniffling so the man next to me won’t notice. I leave my lover for the third time, and for the second time, I have no idea when I can return.

The bus drops us off at Mahsoom Beit Lehem, where we go through Israeli security to return to the Palestinian territories. The solider looks at my passport, looks for a visa, but asks nothing. She hands it to me and we make our way back through the gates and turnstiles in the sun on the other side of the wall, where fruit vendors ply cucumbers at 10 shekels a tray, and a yellow taxi cab waits to take us home.

gilded girlhood memories

My mother’s house (a designation my father finds troubling) has two living rooms. Many Arab homes have this more formal space, used to entertain guests, or generally indicate a family’s wealth. When we were little, my mother took this second space very seriously, perhaps because our means were meager at the time.  The Salon (as it was called) occupied the largest room of the house. My grandfather, my father’s father, built this house, and the Salon is one of its most elegant elements: the outer wall is rounded, and features four windows. There is a separate entrance to it from the Veranda (porch/balcony). It’s capacious interior held all of our birthday dances, as well as the pre-ceremony wedding celebration for my sister Lubnah. I see myself in that room as I was at 14, 14 or so years ago. I am wearing a short pastel floral dress with a fitted bodice, a skirt that flares out. The sweetheart neckline is laced white, my tan shoulders a stark contrast. My body is the body of what I imagine is an “average” 14-year-old girl: tiny waist, small shapely breasts, trim arms and calves. As anyone here could tell you, I was a vision, an angel, a toy doll.

The round room (what I have really always thought of as the ballroom) is no longer the Salon. Stripped of its grandeur, the ballroom feels naked and lonely to me. Inside the dancing ghosts of that girl and her family and friends trip over a broken coffee table, a storage cabinet, three twin size foam mattresses no longer in use. Now the Salon is a boxy room with one window off the side of the informal living room. It’s become a utilitarian space for guest overflow, a rare occurrence these days, where everyone is too busy getting by to visit, and we are all grown up, too big for birthday dances. I can’t say I miss the Salon’s opulence, but I miss what it seemed to symbolize. The celebration of my sister’s marriage (she remains the most stunning bride I’ve ever seen), the ignorant happiness of my girlhood.

To employ what by now is probably an obvious metaphor, I can’t help but feel about my body like I do the ballroom. Here I am, creeping up on 28, and my body can’t begin to approximate the girlish version of myself. I don’t miss that girl’s insecurities, for even then I was told I was too fat, and I believed. I don’t miss how she took her peer’s cruelty as her due. I don’t miss how she played down her intelligence as to not overstep boundaries with her friends. Still though, amidst all that tension, I was beautiful in a way I will never again be. Wasn’t I? Dredging it up, I can’t exactly recall. I don’t remember feeling pretty, but I remember being called fat. I ran with the popular kids, had a boyfriend five years older than me. Surely that means something?

When I greet folks who haven’t seen me in the last ten years, when my weight really increased, and I became officially, undeniably fat, they are shocked to see the body I have now. Some of them comment on it.  Lubnah’s mother in law, for example, told me to lay of the Kanafa (a kind of pastry) my first night here, so I wouldn’t get fat. When I told her it was a little late for that, she replied that I could still lose some weight during my trip. Hadn’t I been a beauty queen before, she said? She was so hopeful, I found myself bereft of a reply. Some say nothing, though I can see the surprise in their faces. Maybe they too are nostalgic for a better, thinner me. A more beautiful me. A more Arab me?

My fatness combined with my nose ring, I’m guessing, nail the final coffin in my foreignness. Or perhaps more broadly, my apparent lack of concern about my fatness combined with the way I present my body (piercings and cleavage included) indicate that I am no longer “bint al balad”, a daughter of the country. But then, I never was: our family was always the American family. It bolstered my adolescent popularity, marked me as an exotic entity. Even strangers can read it. I walk down the street with my niece, and can hear people speaking about us, speculating in Arabic about our origins, my dress, my nose ring. I speak to shop owners in fluent Arabic, pronouncing all its unique sounds, and they are befuddled. They ask if I am from the Arabs in Israel, and I reply I am from the Arabs in America.

Truthfully, being here takes me back to my girlishness, all that hope and fear but bottled in a much larger body. Standing in front of familiar strangers, I gather my will against their memory of my body, my identity, try to remember and be myself as I am, faltering enough to grant them psychic access. Being in the ballroom makes me long for the intimacies I shared with my friends and classmates of yesteryear, intimacies that distance and neglect on all our behalves have left dry and wilted. Standing in the shadow of my sister’s marriage, and the heteronormativity that’s as everyday as the occupation, makes me long for the girl who knew she wanted a husband, and children, a nice Arab life in this lovely Arab town. I find myself wondering about Rami J, what he’s doing, if he’s married. I shake the ghosts, as best I can, reconfiguring my body into its strength, its modest beauty. I think of the many rewarding, life altering friendships I have, and know that I am lucky to be shaped and blessed by the traces of those former connections. I tell myself that if I do run into Rami, I will at least kiss him this time. Both the girl and her contemporary deserve as much.

Traversing the Borderlands

I won’t keep you in suspense: I had the cigarette using the related concepts of academic obligation and deception. That second night in Amman, I explain to my uncle that I have some reading to do (Cruising Utopia) and would like to do it outside. Night has fallen, so we rig up a light above the old metal swing which is sort of in the front of the house, but down a few steps, effectively outside the visual range of the living room windows. I light up and crack open Munoz. He’s never sounded better.

smoker's paradise. seat cushions not included.

The next day, I leave Ammo’s house at 11am to make the journey to Beit Sahour (land of my well spent adolescence). The trip ought to take approximately five hours, though I make it in a timely seven point five. That’s over half the flight to Jordan from DTW for considerably less distance. First, my uncle drops me off at the taxi station, where authorized vehicles authoritatively drop you off at the “jisr” or bridge. It’s called a bridge because it links two lands, but it’s essentially an elaborate system of border controls. I don’t have photos from this (alas) because apparently, the governments don’t take kindly to you snapping photos of shady behavior. Fearing confiscation, I kept my camera to myself.

In order to cross from Jordan to Palestine, I must pass muster for three governments: Jordanian, Israeli, Palestinian, in that order. I entered Jordan on my US passport, and attempt to cross the Jordanian border from “jihit al ajanib” which basically means “the foreigner’s side”. This is not a joke. Non Arabs go to one side of the building, and Arabs toward the other. So, I haul my 4 bags to the first window at the Jordanian border where a fresh faced young man smiles shyly at my English, but pronounces my name correctly. He stamps some papers, slides them through to the next window, where a less-fresh-faced older man also pronounces my name correctly, but makes me feel as though my mere presence has caused him a serious case of indigestion. He not so quietly, not so kindly informs me that as a Palestinian, I cannot cross the Jordanian border on my US passport. This confuses me, since I came in the airport that way. When I ask for an explanation, he comes out of his booth, around the side of the window, lights up his cigarette, and says “Because. That’s the rule.”

So, I am escorted by a luggage handler old enough to be my grandfather over to the Arab side. At this window, another man informs me that since I have a US passport, I shouldn’t be on the Arab side and tells me I need to go to jihit al ajanib. At this point, sweat is dripping down my face and I’m pissed. These tools are looking at me like I’m an idiot, I feel like an idiot, and I’m starting to wonder if I’ll be able to get in to Palestine at all. I explain what’s happened, and someone who didn’t have a stick so far up his ass it was coming out of his mouth, told me that he can let me into Palestine as an Arab because I have a Palestinian ID card, but I will not be allowed to leave unless I get a Palestinian passport. He claims he is only treating me as Israel would, and while that’s the case, the other more nefarious purpose for this is to strip as many Palestinian refugees of their Jordanian citizenship as possible. You can’t hold two Arab passports, anymore. I don’t really want the Jordanian, mind you, but I figure this is a bad show of inter Arab support, and it will matter to my father, who has faithfully paid membership dues to a Farmer’s Union in Jordan for years, and relies on the retirement funds he receives from them each month. If he’s stripped of his Jordanian citizenship for a mostly fictive Palestinian one, he will no longer be eligible for those monies.

Carrying on: Stick-free fills out my paperwork, slides me to a second window where another soldier is also confused by my US passport and howwiyyah (Palestinian ID card), I direct him to consult with Stick-Free. He stamps some things, writes some things, slides me back to window one, where a third (fourth?) man looks at my documents, and tells me to have safe travels. Stick-free reminds me of my obligation to get a Palestinian passport, directs me to the buses for phase two, and smiles. Amidst this room of assholes, his smile is less creepy, and I am temporarily thankful. Yes. They are jerks. Yes. My hair is a mess. But he could have been like Indigestion from jihit al ajanib. I can’t tell if I’ve experienced genuine kindness here, or if I am so uncomfortable around the others that any scrap of decency is enough.

I board the bus that will take us to the Israeli checkpoint. I am sitting next to a woman who lives in Jerusalem, recognizes my surname. She tells me I have failed to secure a bus ticket and vouchers for my bags, which I hadn’t known were necessary. I hobble off the bus, meet the driver who sends me back on the bus, tells me the tickets aren’t necessary, and will just take cash. Back on the bus I stub my toe against the step, tripping onto the stairs. My face reddens like it’s high school and I gather what little grace I have to get back into my seat next to the woman with the drawn-on-eyebrows. Behind me the bus driver snickers and says “saabooki fil 3ain” which literally means “they touched you in the eye” and figuratively means that people were talking about you and jinxed you. I can’t tell if he’s doing sarcasm here, or admiring how great my butt must have looked in my leggings when I fell.

The bus to Israel’s checkpoint waits outside its gates for over an hour. There is one bus of Arabs ahead of us, and two buses of non-Arabs. I’ll let you guess who went first. When we finally get inside the gates, and off the bus, we send our bags to be scanned, are given vouchers in their place. We stand in line for security, which admittedly, makes the TSA look like overachievers. The Arab man who looks over my passport and hawwiyyah tells me to go in peace, and I stupidly think I’m done. I go inside to find another set of lines. One for people living in Palestine, a second for people visiting. I go to the visitors line. The woman working the counter says nothing to me as she takes my things. After a few moments of aggravated typing and sighing, she hands me back my documents, and moves me to a final window. I hand over my documents, again, and she barely glances at them, or me. I move on to find my bags, ignore the line for customs, exchange dollars for shekels, buy another bus ticket, smoke a cigarette, and proceed to phase three of the inspection.

We board a bus that will take us to “al istiraha” which translates into “the resting place” but is nothing of the sort. The istiraha is merely another port of authorized vehicles, that for a fee, will transport us to the various cities of Palestine. Before we istareeh/rest we stop at the Palestinian border. We’re allowed to remain on the bus while a man takes our hawwiyyat (plural of hawwiyyah) inside for checking. He’s gone for about 20 minutes before returning to distribute them like I would return papers after class: calling out our names before handing us the grade. All but two pass. Two men disembark and the bus moves on. At the Istiraha (and in the Arab world I know at large) queues are not generally taken seriously. Consequently, I am one of the last people of the bus, and a baggage handler has placed my luggage on a cart. I tell him where I’m going, and he escorts me to a driver who will take me to “bab il daar”, the front door of the house.  My driver is named Saalih, and I love him immediately. He tells me to take the front seat while we wait for a few more passengers, offers me a cigarette, and tells me about how he’s driven this route for over 15 years. He asks me about America, and we exchange jokes. His eyes are animated when he speaks, and when I tell him he can hop a ride to the US in my suitcase, I almost mean it. He’s so wire-y he could probably fit.

The other passengers seated behind us join in the conversation from time to time, long enough for me to recognize one as a boy my girlfriends and I had crushes in the previously mentioned well-spent youth. In our friend group there were at least 3 Ramis. Rami J I “dated” on and off. My best friend at the time, Dalia, used Rami S to make her boyfriend jealous. And Rami A everyone agreed had the most beautiful naturally lined eyes we’d ever seen, but was dumb as rock. This remains true. I giggled like that girl when I realized who he was, though I don’t think he ever did place me. Still, he came in handy later when as we traveled the long way to the West Bank through Wad il Naar (Valley of Fire) since we weren’t allowed through Jerusalem, the engine in a car ahead of us caught on fire and held up traffic. Rami slid out of our van to redirect traffic around the smoking vehicle. And I’m not ashamed to admit: I have made several jokes about flaming cars in Wad il Naar since then. What I lack in originality I make up for with charm.

Wad il Naar is hilly and winding. The paths are narrow and really only allow one car at a time. Of course, cars are traveling in both directions, so maneuvering past one another is an act of faith and physics I assume only seasoned drivers understand. Saalih breezes through, around massive trucks and cargo cars of cows. I come to Jesus six or seven times looking out the window at the distance we could fall, and Saalih quietly tells me we’re almost through. He is a king. A god among men.

Out of the valley, Beit Sahour is only 15 or so minutes more. The van is humming with anticipation, and I am the first to be dropped off. It’s out of Saalih’s way to drop me off first, but he knows I have had a long day, and that I haven’t been back for 11 years. Saalih is true to his word, parking the van directly in front of our house. My nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles and parents swarm around me. In the buzz I barely get to wave Saalih goodbye, but I catch his smile one last time and he tells me “koolik sharaf.” Sharaf is a word that can mean honor and/or dignity and/or class. I’m not any of these things, really, but koolik means you are all ____. I incline my head and tell him “Ana il itsharafit” which means I was the one honored–by his kindess and brief friendship. Saalih hops back in to deliver his passengers to other eager families and I remember the tiny arms around my waist, my kids looking up at me as I take in their faces, this sublime surreal moment.

Here.

I am finally home.

Arrival and Affect in Amman

Sitting on the plane as it descends into Amman, I can’t believe I’m so close. In the monitor nested in the back of the seat before me, I am watching a small digital rendition of the plane making it’s voyage, but somewhere the connection is faulty because my plane hovers an inch to the West of Amman, even as we are taxiing on the runway. The visual suggestion of the stalled trip is so convincing it anchors my disbelief. Passengers bolt up before we barely touch the ground. Their impatience comforts me; this is how Arabs do. We’re not going to take the pilot’s admonition or the fasten seat belts sign very seriously. What could possibly happen now that the wheels are on the ground? I peer out the window to find grapevines climbing their way up the sides of plane garages. I smile. I am beginning to believe.

The triggers are little. The chaos of the baggage check as you leave Queen Alia’s airport. The black and yellow checked curbs barely containing drivers who treat the roads as a competition, aggressively cutting across lanes—how many are there? Used to the regimented lines of the States, I couldn’t tell you. I look for more familiarity in the crowd, and my heart jerks a little when I realize for the first time in any memory, I won’t see my Ammo Manawail at the airport, waving vigorously. He is fine, just away at the moment, but the dissonance of my arrival mirrors my feelings. Everything is familiar. Everything is not.

My third uncle, Ammo Afif, picks me up in his red Toyota instead, which he bought the same year I was born. The car is spacious, and has held up exceedingly well over the years. I find myself thinking it’s aging more gracefully than I have. But then, I’ve become overly sentimental sometime between the stone facades of buildings and the rickety fruit stands scattered on the side of the road and am thinking everything here ages better. A fine mist of dust travels with us, and it functions like rose colored lenses. Everything here is beautiful. Everything is grand.

When we arrive at Ammo’s house, it’s the scent that clinches it. As soon as I open the car door, I smell Jasmine. I didn’t know I missed it. I didn’t know I loved it. It carries me into the house, mingles with the scent of stuffed grape leaves. It’s not long before other family members begin to arrive, kissing both my cheeks, thanking god for my safe arrival, asking about the welfare of the people I left behind. The greetings roll off my tongues deceptively easily, as later I will coax out casual language slowly, my mouth and brain stubbornly refusing to recall the right words, place them in the correct order. I’m forced to choose my sentences carefully, and alter meaning according to capability. The stiltedness of my speech makes me feel less like myself, and I spend the evening hugging my own shoulders, crossing my arms against my chest. I’m sure my posture speaks my discomfort, but my relatives here are unfailingly kind, and if they are thinking cruel thoughts, they’ve chosen not to voice them. I see messages in their eyes, glances to each other, but that language is something else I’m not fluent in. Better and fair, I suppose. I share these same intimacies with my sisters and close friends, and can’t wait until I see Lubnah again to begin exchanging them.

The evening winds on. Some of my relatives play cards at the square table while others chat over tea, then coffee, then chocolates. The thing I want the most, a cigarette, eludes me. I can’t bring myself to smoke in front of these folks, because I know it’s not done by women in public, and I know it’ll get back to my Dad. 27 and still put in my place by custom. It’s not like he doesn’t know. It’s just a courtesy, I suppose. When everyone heads home, I return to my room. The bed is hard, and the screen on the window won’t budge. I’ll have my cigarette tomorrow. I hope.

Mother of Pearl

oh WordPress. i wanted to be better. i wanted to post once a week, and then graduate school semester deux hit me like a chuck norris roundhouse to the face and here i am, 5 months since my last confession. apparently, blogging is like catholic church.

what can i say? it’s been…5 months. since we last spoke, i completed my first year of my PhD. i don’t feel different, unless more tired is a thing. i need a new bookshelf. SURPRISE. i spend half my life in Ikea, buying bookshelves, and kitchen canisters i can’t possibly need. i spend the other half assembling those bookshelves, and stuffing them with kitchen canisters. artistically. i am simultaneously over and under whelmed. overwhelmed by the quantity of work i have to do. underwhelmed by myself, and what i consider my strengths. i sometimes feel that  i have the depth of a petri dish and none of the complexity. le sigh. this is what graduate school ultimately teaches: mediocrity.

the summer promises more of the same, but a more subtle pace. i’ll be doing research for a couple of my profs starting tomorrow. and in june i’ll be traveling to Palestine for the first time in 10 years. i’ll stay there for a month, which produces what some people refer to as a “buttload” of anxiety. because it’s been 10 years. because i don’t know what i’ll feel when i’m in that place again. i don’t know how that place will feel about me. the fatness. and the singleness. and the detachment i’ve carefully cultivated for reasons i can’t quite articulate.  and the people. and the borders. and the visas. and jerusalem. and falafel. actually, i’m pretty sure how i’ll feel about falafel. we are going to get down.

so i meant to post about my mother. i meant to talk about all the different ways i love her. and the different ways she loves me that make me better. and the ways she loves me that make me worse, and how those things make it harder to remember the former. instead let me say my mother is grace and beauty. she is strength and courage, sacrifice disguised as selfish. she is maddening, complicated, confusing.  at the same time, transparent in her desire for goodness, for better things, for bigger safer happier dreams. she grounds us and without her i imagine we would flail helplessly. she makes the best food. her hands are divine. her face is…breathtaking. she giggles. she calls me “ya stupid”. she likes to Wii Golf. she will return a gift she doesn’t like, and tell you to your face.  sometimes she listens without hearing. sometimes she speaks without talking. she taught me to be proud. she taught me guilt and shame. she teaches me, still. she gave me life. she gives it still.