The "how are you"s never saved nobody. But they don't hurt either

   The 15th of August is an important christian holiday in most mediterranean countries and mine is not an exception. Though I no longer identify as a christian, many of my family members are tied to that day and besides we are always tied to the the rituals in our life. I tried calling them but they did not reply, perhaps due to the foreign number they did not recognise on their screen.

  It's been about two weeks since my move to a new country and on the outside I have been really lucky: we found a home easily and came across many people willing to help, in spite of the roadblocks that happen along the way (immigration has never been uncomplicated it seems and I have been fortunate.) The blessing of this has been remarkable, without it I think the last part of me would have crumbled on the spot. 

  I left the country while half of it was burning, watching image after image of forests and small towns being engulfed by flames as the fire progressed. A couple more femicides took place as well and though the new life here started as smoothly as it possibly could in my insides a turmoil took hold. I felt rage and the need to mourn rising, choking me and there were no people around with whom I could share how I have been feeling.

  And that has been the hard part: for all its smoothness, all that happened crushed into the pain of leaving my country not for chasing a dream but rather a sense of survival. And the pain was fueled further by all the destruction and pain I witnessed through the lens of others. And for now I have no space here to grieve, not for the future, my country, the things I felt being torn inside me.

  A few people have messaged me to ask how I am but for the most part the conversations feel almost hollow - there was too much in too little time and I did not know how to embark on this conversations. They were nonetheless appreciated even if I lacked words for answering. There is just one thread of conversation that continues to eat away at me and it's filled with goodmornings and goodnights and pretty much nothing else - I wonder whether perhaps neither of us is at fault for this. I'm working on auto-pilot, focusing on the task at hand and nothing further and he works an abominable amount of hours. When he asks how I am I can only say that I guess I am fine. I want to ask for more but there's hardly the space and time and, worst yet, I'm afraid that not only will I not be able to give any support but also that I will burden further and so I stay mute. I feel the silence grow further, every time he says he'll call but inevitably he never does.

  The mere fact that this hurts annoys me but I feel like I have been slipping back into known terrain, learning how to go about as if there never was another voice on the other side of the line and slowly I expect nothing but silence. I start to wonder who will write last into silence.

  At nights I have difficulty sleeping, especially since for now I need to share a bed until we're able to purchase a second one. That makes things harder because I don't have much personal space during the day and now I don't have ti during the night either. For the last couple of months before I left it was a similar situation back at the other home but all the new changes made the lack of space unbearable. Tonight's the first night that I am alone in the house and I have been almost praying that I will break into tears but instead there has been absolute silence. I picked up smoking again, it won't be for long so I allowed myself that one setback until I get some things back in my head.

  I waited for the tears to come but instead I sit in silence. 

  And again, I begin to write.

Packing a life and mind

   Packing is in itself a weird thing to do. Half a day goes by and the majority of your life is either in boxes or in a trash bag. The finalization of the date brought about a mixture of emotions - I cried a lot both for what I'm leaving behind but also for the realisation that with some very few exceptions that's not really a lot. Three decades of a life in one place and what is left? A pile of diaries, some books and three people that will miss you. As I started saying my goodbyes I realised that by the time I come back even that handful of people might not be around to see my return. I will exist either in small parenthesis for them or through my absence, my inability to be present. 

  "Sorry I wasn't there," the text wrote and I looked at the screen and it made me sad even further for when could he be present really? I realised I was angry at being sad, I am admittedly growing more and needy of his presence. Or perhaps I realise that that it's not quite enough as I want in my life. I think of my self as a luke-warm person but the more time passes I understand that I'm more "my way or the high way": whenever I try to be ok with the lukewarm thing that exists in the middle it's usually not nearly enough. I feel lonely enough by myself, there's no need for the supplement of other people.

  I might sound unreasonable: in fact I do realise all the things that are going on in the lives of others and too often I use them as the excuse for not getting what I want. The trouble is that I'm neither getting what I want nor making my peace with it, instead going back and forwards between two emotions, feeling guilty and anxious at all times. The problem does not lie with the people themselves, it lies withing me: there used to be people and things here that were important enough to make it easier to stay. At some point those things became so few that I chose to go because they were not fulfilling enough: I feel guilty for leave the few good behind but they can not make up for the mental struggle of this place.

  And I feel the same for many of my relationships: guilty that I do not feel fulfilled by them enough when in truth some times a situation is not enough to fulfill us. How do you know when to stick it out? Knowing I am not great at communication makes everything feel even more like my fault. To control one's own mind is the greatest asset but rather than control I strive to understand. I want to be absolute sure when I say that something is not enough and also that something is, in fact, enough, that it's not "settling".

  I always longed to be free from the restraints of my mind and this new move seems to be challenging what is and is not a restraint. I'm not living the kind of life I wished nor have I grown into the person I wanted - but perhaps this restraint can be the changing factor of what and where and I do things.

  I am unsure.

  I have cried and whined a lot these days - enough that I am tired of my own voice. I have also managed to push myself enough to go out some more, perhaps seize the day here while there is a day still to be seized. I am lost within my head and I write very little - a bad sign always, writing and working with my hands is what keeps me sane. I am scared. Scared of all the things I am likely to fail to do, all the situations I fear I will get stuck into.

  I don't know if I'm changing or not.

  I have been smoking a bit these days.

Past for future

   I don't write all this much these days - the space in my house is crammed and so is my schedule and, to be honest, so is my head. Everything is brimming with things all the time: they are like bubbles, in their enclosure there's almost always just air but when they're present it seems impossible, unimaginable even to try to remove them. 

  Departure looms like a ghost over everything and there's not much to be done about it - the race against time was there before hand but now you can trick your mind that you see a finish line. It's a sensation I had buried in the past and though I welcome it back into my life I dread that I won't be able to handle it as well, 

  You should learn to leave for the right reasons - the first time I had attempted to leave it was in a very safe mode, planned out and stuff and in truth I was running away from myself. I was aware of this too. Now I'm running away from the mess I have made in this country (and the mess they made of me) and the country itself. There are bleak days ahead, staying here is like having a choke-hold around your mind. There are moments when you're used to it but often it drives you into despair.

  A friend briefly returning from abroad explains how flat her emotions are in her new home of a few years, how people here feel everything so much more, the sparks are more present here than there - perhaps it's due to our culture, so open among all things, and our tendency towards tragedy but also due to the fact that we are, after all, also children of this land: where you grow it never leaves you, every little thing has a different way in your mother-tongue. And there are things that you can not find as easily when you leave home.

  But the problem is, she says, that the same environment that presents her with an explosion of emotions almost always propels her into despair: all the people here are drowning, the conversations, as stimulating as they might be, at some point inevitably head south into bleak visions of present and future. Our land can give you some of the things that you desire: but more often than not you will pay a heavy price for them, your health and mental stability among the sacrificed. 

  I have been thinking a lot about the connection of space and memory and growth. In the future I would like to be able to work on the land that my grandfather worked on, to preserve something of the past. As my relatives perish one after the other, so does the memory of the family. There are stories that have never reached my ears that die out with every passing year.

  I have been thinking about it a lot as I am preparing to leave for a new country: by leaving I am sacrificing the chance to understand the past in order to build a semblance of a future. 

A week in the woods

   That entire week felt like being lost in the woods. That's how it was being around him - like exploring territory half-known that in reality I had no idea what was hiding in it among the trees. It was a new experience to be around someone like this and being free to touch them. It was new to sleep so deeply next to someone else.

  Yes, forest is the right word to describe what my life feels like in this period of time. I feel lost in the woods, sometimes I can't make out the stars in the sky. It's not just the man on whose side I slept. If only it were a one-dimensional thing. But the woods can spread either way around you, thick with greenery that shuts out the noise and sounds of beyond and soon you hear nothing else except for the sounds of the forest itself. 

  I feel like a spider, not in the ability to weave but rather in having many legs. One is placed firmly in the place I live at the moment, the other in the country I'm supposed to move to in a matter of days. For a job I hate in a country I dislike, all for the sake of buying out my freedom in a year from now. Or rather a shot at freedom. 

  There's another country, to the west, and in it there's a village, and in an old house on the outer side of the village lives a man and I both wish and dread being there with him. In my gut I know it's too early, I know we're not even ready for ourselves, let alone each other. 

  And there's a fourth country, I don't know which it is yet, but another where I could run away and be whoever whenever. In every place I feel a stranger, in passing, not quite material enough. I thought of woods and I figured perhaps, in a year from now, it would be nice to move to a quieter place for some time - for a few months, maybe a year. Not a vacation but a journey in a way.

  More than a week, I hate single weeks, they are never quite enough.

Like water and wind

 The smallest things can trigger the realisation of just how much you've changed: a meeting that in the past you would have thought would send you into a possible down-ward spiral, a business venture that proved to be a waste of time, an act that fell into nothing, a ticket bought. Instead you take a moment to acknowledge that things did not go as desired or that what you thought would in some way touch you and yet it didn't and that is alright too. You realise that you're moving further from the person that you used to be and that perhaps you're healing and that shows in unsuspecting moments. 

  You realise you're ready to go too. For the first time in perhaps ever, you're ready to drop it all and really go. Not to escape but because there's hardly anything worth your time here so much so that you will step back from moving on. I look at my body a lot these days. I follow its lines. I realise it's the only home I've really got. 

  I make a mental note to call my family often. I've become aware of our time being limited as the days go by. If we argue on the phone I wonder whether I would want that to be our last conversation. I call them back. I have a certain guilt towards them, the more I grow the more I become a ghost in their lives but that's because for years I became a ghost in my life too. Learning to be present in my life means ringing them up more often than I used to. It means showing them they're in my thoughts more than I used to express in the past.

  I have not given up on people though it is true that I have resigned from them. When they ring me up I enjoy their company though I seek it much less. I feel like I am getting to know myself in ways I did not know I would choose to in the past. Solitude is necessary for that and company is useful some times, in the right ways. It's difficult to place your boundaries and after a life-time of not honouring them now you have to do it in absolute ways that for some don't make any sense. That's alright too so long as you accept the consequences and make your choices and honour them too.

  At times you will feel shapeless like water or wind, but determined nonetheless, full of possible force. You will accept and come to admire that too. You will lose hope, spread yourself thin and gather your self back into one. 

  It's alright for that to happen many times too. 

My aging hands

   "Oh you're growing old too", she said pointing at my hands. I looked at my hands, my trusted, sometimes pained hands and wondered what she meant. I noted the net of veins visible under the thin skin and figured they have come closer to it, sometimes they almost bulge under it. 

  "Do you mean my veins? They have always popped but I guess they do so now more than before."

  She has become obsessed with ageing over the last few years, noticing every little change, putting it under the microscope, reading in it the premonition of the gloom ahead. It did not concern me at first, mostly because we have a different approach to any signs of getting older: while I feel the pressure of the youth that's about to end, even the melancholia for it, sometimes I think: look, I grew old enough to get a white hair. The shadow of a wrinkle. I lived long enough for that to happen too.

  Whenever I see another sign of age it feels like my body is catching up to my soul - which saddens me because often I wish my soul would accommodate itself in my body, taking the time to be in the present, to breathe as light as I should. To enjoy the moment of the present. Instead I am almost always rushing, sometimes to reach others and other times to reach the idea of who I should be. I often think of who I ought to be according to society and it bothers - if I am not pleased with the world I live in, why do I feel my self lacking for conforming perfectly to it?

  The news is overwhelming, from Palestine to my country, to the other side of the world. It's too much to take in without being crushed by it, I envy the people strong enough to stand on their own two legs.  Forests are burning, the government is shutting down more and more places where people found either physical or emotional shelter and in the meantime we grow old and do not notice and do not get angry enough or perhaps we get so angry we drown in our powerlessness.

  She said "Some times I imagine our kids growing up and playing together like we did," and the thought of such children feels so faraway and cut off from us. I smiled and said nothing, the thought of a future where I want children and actually bringing them into this world that I have always longed to escape fills me with shame. Yes, indeed, children are the future, but I always believed that to take upon the role of the parent, one must always strive to make the world better for the future generations instead of dumping it on them and asking them to come up with the solutions. 

  We like to speak of glorious pasts but what of a glorious present?

  Ever since that conversation I look at my aging hands and wonder what small glorious and damning thing have they done today, yesterday, a year before that. My hands have caressed others and held myself, they have made things and washed dishes and cooked dinner. They have planted seeds and watered plants and turned pages and they have traveled many kilometres to hold someone and to trail their fingertips across their backs. They have stayed immobile and done nothing and not called the police, not pushed back, not resisted, not protected. They have typed out long and short messages and snapped photographs and carried furniture and built homes in tiny spaces and looked for the sun.

  My aging hands with their fragile, thin skin have carried all my life across. 

Stuck between the rock and the hard place

   That is how I feel. There is no right nor wrong answer - both are a trap and it seems to me that I must choose which trap to fall into. When I started facing the fact that I am putting off decisions indefinitely so as not to make the wrong one, I combated this instinctive response by jumping in head first, expecting nothing. And for the first time in a while, I get moments of clarity. The dread remains but there's relief in finishing something, no matter how small or big it was or how imperfect the outcome came. 

  I tossed the coin and I knew what the right answer was before it hit my palm, for I knew that I resented both options but one was an escape.

  It's hard to let go of the person I was and be the person I am and at least become friends with all that I need and want. I try to see the privileges that I have and use them to my advantage and it's a struggle to work through the fog of my mind. It's hard to see anything as a win if it's not exactly what I wanted it to be. If it's not even close to my dream. 

  I want to tear everything down and disappear. And expand.