*

i don’t know

or think

i don’t know if i want to fuck someone new

i don’t know if i just want the novelty 

the novelty of new flesh

new skin

new people 

the open end of possibility

as opposed

to the old

and

done for.

Lingering too much in the past - 

every pause is supposed to mean something 

but

all 

it means to me

is a new limit.

i feel that we are not allowed even this:

the newess of new 

bodies

versions of ourselves 

younger

and

more daring 

more

alive .

must i

be

one of you, 

in order to 

survive

there’s something to be said

about keeping 

the bile in

Dream

What an odd dream

I guess my desires

are desperate to 

take shape and

run free

A few

words of recognition

(Is it you?

Are you

                           here?

As if 

                           here is

one singular 

place

and we can only exist

in a common

                           here)

A series of light kisses

one landing after the other

trailing across

the length of lips

a sense of confusion

This has not happened

This is a dream

It's not even my own dream

Why it here? 

(Some times I wonder, when you dream of a face, does the person it belongs to also see your face in their dreams?)

Why don't I write

 If you

ask me "Why don't you

write to me,

anymore?" I 

don't have an answer. It's not

that I have nothing to say

though nothing exciting happens in any case.

But every time 

I attempt to reach you,

the wor(l)ds slip out 

from under my tongue

and my hands are too slow to catch them

and they say silence speaks on its own but 

in truth

sometimes silence itself doesn't speak at all. 

Why don't I write to you anymore?

I guess 

I don't know at all. 

It might be because underneath it all

I know I have changed too much

and no amount of words will turn me 

back

to what I was. 

Nest

 I want to nest by you

to shove my face

forcefully

shyly

at the nape of your neck. 

More than sex

more than desire

I dream we

wrap

around each other

into a ball

tender

hungry

desperate, lonely people

our fingertips guiding

our fingers

our arms

mapping the parts 

of the bizarre 

ball of flesh

of our small

minute

private planet.

*

   Sometimes survival over-takes us. The daily life becomes such a struggle but then you have everyone telling you that at least you're lucky: at least you have a job, even though the wage is not livable and you work unpaid overtime. Somehow I have gotten used to the heaps of work. After all our generation knew since before adulthood that we were losing ground. We watched our parents getting laid off and despairing over making ends meet and got used to the idea of never owning anything apart from what might trickle down if they're not sacrificed to necessity. 

  Still, it's getting more and more difficult by day to accept this reality. That this is all there is, the struggle for survival, the slow dissipation of the bonds between us. What helps me stay afloat is community, wherever I find it and as much as I have the energy to participate in it. It's the one thing that keeps me going. That somehow in spite of all the shit, we manage to try and stick together as much as we can.

  Is this alone enough to save us? I do not know. I am struggling to find the point in the continuous struggle when my mind hardly has any time to recover. I speak of the mind because the body has by now accepted the weight of working for 10 or 12 or 14 hours per day over time. I try to nourish it as a way of saying thanks, of trying to ensure that the machine will keep working.

  Most of all I can not stand the noise of this life. And yet, again, I am one of the lucky, the privileged ones. I am often isolated, sometimes I seek that out out of need. I have to choose: the recovery in silence or the community? And when presented with this choice, sooner or later the community dissipates.

  What am I rambling about? I do not know. I wish being tired and dissatisfied didn't make us sound egotistic and self-centered.

Silence and guilt

   I would be lying if I said that the silence did not hurt me, for it did. It hurt me in quiet, subtle ways. It was not just the thought that I would not get to talk to him again perhaps. It was not just the worry that perhaps something might have happened to him. There was also a small, sneaking suspicion, that perhaps I am being punished. Many people have punished me with silence -  it doesn't have the same effect as yelling. The yelling makes you shut down, it blocks out every other noise. The silence on the other hand has an eroding effect.

  I felt guilty for bringing up that the distance is slowly eating away at me. I did not say it all. I did not say how in spite of it all I feel like we have turned into Penelopes both of us, him waiting for me to arrive and me waiting for him to choose himself, to get better. I did not say how painful it is to sustain it all through a screen and meeting once per year. How lonely I am, how scared out of my wits I am half the time when he's not well. 

  I feel guilty for not knowing how to love better someone who can't choose his mental health when my own has also been collapsing for years. I feel guilty for not being able to sustain this better. I feel guilty for feeling that I have been chasing after a mirage. I feel guilty for seeing and not seeing that maybe we missed our chance or maybe it has not arrived yet. I feel guilty for it all.

  It scares me shitless. It does - I don't see how I can keep hanging on and I don't see how I can stop either. And there is another fear as well: noone will accept me the way that he has. And noone has understood and responded as quickly and openly as he has. Should that not be enough? I always wanted to believe that timing was mostly a myth but it turns out sometimes timing can truly fuck you up.

  I wanted to be more poetic about this. But sometimes there are no poetic words at hand.

*

   These days I turn to writing any chance I get - my writing is bad and without a flow but as imperfect as it is, it helps me process all the thoughts that have been running rampant. Taking a trip did me good but all the things that happened and those that were running in the background were overwhelming. My memories are inconsistent and I have to fight a losing battle to at least experience their aftertaste while it lasts.

  In truth I have grown so accustomed to being quiet and alone in the last couple of years that being in the presence of people - ones that matter - is almost a new experience. It fills me with the same rush of diving into the unknown and for the first time in a long time I found myself fighting against physical tiredness in order to win some extra time. That had stopped happening long before the pandemic hit, somehow I had wilted withing myself while trying to get better and fight the guilt for not being so.

  A new era is coming, that much I know. I do not know what it brings with it. But at the moment I am letting myself go with the "what the hell" feeling of the moment. It is odd to start taking off the shackles that you have been analysing for so long. It is odd also to come face to face with feelings and realities that you have tried to avoid for some time. In some stories no one can win the moral high ground. 

 The hardest thing has been to stop reminiscing about the past so much that you detach from the present. In my trip I saw people that I had not seen for more than a year and the gap of time required of me to be present 100% and to be open and receiving and to feel emotions bubble up within me.

  It was a freeing thing. 

  At the same time I realised how much I have been circling around my doubts. I wondered, in this impossible connection that I have built over the past three years, if I were in a better place psychologically, would it have taken me less time to realise that it's not covering my needs? I was near another person that was attracting me from the past and the reality of his physical presence made me almost physically dizzy - there was no sexual proximity but he was there and I could see him and hear him and it all had a different gravity. 

  I feel the end of many chapters approaching at the same time and it's scaring but at the same time I am tired of reading them.

  Soon I will leave.

Dog-days have been post-poned indefinitely

   The past month has not been so bad, somehow I managed to find some equilibrium in doing my official duties and over-looking the ones that I did in fact want to attend to. And then a sudden fight, it always surprised me when I get into a fight, I am much more accustomed to avoiding one, to staying silent and working around it. fighting shakes me, especially when I am thrown into the wrong without being certain what it was exactly that I have done wrong. 

  For two days I allowed myself to stay in bed and read and actually listen to music, as opposed to having just something to fill up the silence. And it was the oddest feeling, for I shut myself in the room and allowed for nothing else to exist other than my bewilderment and my anxiety and in a way my grief. And that was the most relaxed I have felt in a long, long time. Not that I do not still have a clock ticking time away at the back of my head. But that was the closest I have come in a long time to just being, in the moment, with nothing else to distract me from myself. 

  Some people think me crazy for wanting to resign and to leave this place but I do not see much of a way around it - there's hardly anything to keep me here except for money and even that money can not buy me the quiet that I crave. In some ways I have watched myself grow, I have in fact accumulated a small amount to buy myself at least a modicum of freedom for a short-while. I know more hard work will have to come but hopefully it will be hard work that I do not whole-heartedly detest. Perhaps I will like it so much that I will feel less guilty for not resting, or for having forgotten how to rest without feeling guilty.

  In the balcony the few plants we have have bloomed and I envy their certainty and repetition, the ability to bloom and hibernate and then with certainty bloom again. Dog-days are over but at least I can say that now I can rise much faster than I did in the past. My legs wobble at every step of the way.

  In my last post the last paragraph accidentally got deleted and it made me sad cause I remember I had felt very much in tune with it.

*

   In truth I write still. Every morning, on the kitchen table, once I ensure that I am alone in the house. It turns out that this temporary immigration did suit me in the least but I have been making the most of it, or at least the most that I think I can make of it. After months of heavy rain the clouds have blissfully parted and I can feel the sun on my skin. Around me it really looks like spring, the incessant fall of rain encouraged the local flora to grow at a maddening pace. I imagine that by the middle of the summer it will have all dried up and resolved it self into the muted yellow colour that I encountered when I moved here. It should be alright.

  All this time I have been waiting for the nearing of the end, the time where this self-imposed exile will finish. I even set a reminder on my phone for it, in case I grew too accustomed, too complacent. I did it in the first few weeks when there was hardly any privacy for one to cry. This house still does not feel like my private space but at the very least there are hours in which all is good. I am alone. And now the deadline is drawing closer, just a few more months and I look at it with some confusion. For I am still unsure what I will do after I leave and everyone has questions and I have questions too but I would like to feel that just this once it ok to not have answers, to not have a plan that I felt was so necessary all my life.

  It dawned on me that I have forgotten how to be idle. There is always a clock somewhere, or a screen, something to which my mind inevitably gets glued to. And so time passes, and I stuck watching, waiting, for who, for what I know not. But all this immobility has made a bit more aware and awareness brings stillness and it doesn't feel the same as being un-moving. 

  There is no plan, just a vague sense that something might follow or nothing might follow. I would like to stay idle for some time, after I leave. And I think I would like to go to the countryside for some time. It will be nice if I get to go to the countryside with him, but I am also considering just going down to the village of my childhood, in the little hut with the toilet separate from the house but with good proximity to the sea. In the summer the sun is unbearable and the food is quick simple and meant to be refreshing and there's little to do after the luncheon apart from taking a nap and reading, perhaps even studying a bit. 

  Last time we went we used to leave the door open, I have similar memories from a past that has long since turned into dust. The people of the place has died and with them part of the identity of the place as well.

  I find it odd that I long for those moments of stillness, for the absence of most things of my daily life, while at the same time I enjoy languorous pleasures, I aspire to certain power, certain independence. I have often been teased of being equally a person of the port and the salon as well. I want to be alone and also to my solitude. 

  I have become aware that contradicting character traits are not a bad thing.

  I

The way out is in

 I have actually been writing a lot in my diary in the last couple of months and it's a little bit odd for me to see. I have not expected it of me, it has not always been standard procedure that I should fill up page after page after on daily basis. When I get I make coffee and in the meantime I drink a glass of water. I bring my diary and my pen to the kitchen table, I look out of the window and then I dive into the page. 

  I have always looked out the window or balcony door or any opening to the outside right before starting to write. Sometimes in hope that something will be distracting and enticing enough for me to focus my attention there, others as a look to the outside before I turn my look inwards.

  And lately my writing turns more and more inwards. I have managed to write down things that I have never dared speak out loud, things that hurt me deeply, ways I realised I hurt others. All in an effort to map out what it is that drives me forward but also to alleviate the pressure of what is in the past. The truth will set you free but it will break your bones. I thought that perhaps even talking could help but talking a bit about something is nothing compared to spilling your mind on a page, completely sober, in the morning of the light. When you talk with people in your social circle there's always a bit of a dancing going on and that, that always changes things.

  Writing is cathartic but I end up crying almost every day. None of these are the worst things that could happen to a person, why do they hurt me so much? I do not ponder this too much. We're accustomed to measuring everything, but I am guessing that there is no point in measuring our dicks in the unhappiness, our own individual burden to bear.

  Some times we bleed to death due to a million small cuts - the trick is to keep them all open, to never let them heal. Or to let them get infected and fester. There are so many things that I have not let go and it takes time and forgiveness towards myself to look at them in the eye for what they are. I am sad on most days but often a little bit of the weight has been lifted. Often I realise how many things stem from experiences I had allowed myself to admit they hurt.

  And in my vulnerability, that is scary and painful every step of the way, I am slowly learning to open myself up. I am learning to keep the most important promises of all: those to myself.

  I try not to kid myself that it could be any easier.

*

   There days when it gets difficult to remember who you are or what you want or why. I find myself often in such days and the past two years have intensified that feeling. On such days I find it most beneficial to seclude myself from outside noise - I suppose the one good thing about moving here is that there are much fewer people living in the neighborhood and noise has reduced quite a lot. 

  Nonetheless, I do wonder whether I have grown to become neurotic. On my down days I have difficulty doing the simplest of things, completing the tasks that I know down the line will bring the rewards to me, not only physically but also mentally. In a way I suppose it's self-punishing myself.

  Almost everyone asks me when am I coming back. I give vague answers though in my head it has become clearer now that I will not stay here long either, When I first came I worried that I would get stuck here forever and be unable to move away, stuck in the money that is better from my home country but with all the disadvantages my old life had. But now I know a year here will prove to be a miracle, I know for a fact I might not even stay that long. And the fact that I feel even that I have enough power to do that makes me breathe a bit better some days. 

  Hope is an odd little thing, is it not? Except I am not sure whether it's hope exactly. Just certainty I suppose that I will try to play whatever cards I am dealt with in the best possible way. And to hell with it. 

  That's what I think whenever I low, very low, as I am today. 

  To hell with it.

*

   I did not come to this land to find happiness but I had hoped indeed for some semblance of peace. I had hoped that in spite of the hardships some things would be prettier but often I struggle to breathe.There is one thing that I do to make myself feel better and that is the slow but meticulous closing of old things left open for far too long. Tidying up things I left half-done. And I hate cleaning up any mess that is not physical and I can not simply scrub away.

  I am in complete denial of the ways that I block myself. I have gotten better at some parts though and that alone does bring me some hope. But part of me loathes even starting things that I know will make me feel better. And I am alone here and do not know how to keep pushing myself. 

  I wake up early most mornings. I write, I try to find time to breathe. I started moving my body somewhat just feel a little bit better. During that I feel calmer and more in control and somewhat grateful. Still I struggle with my mind. But I try to push forward, even for a little while. I get up, make coffee, eat some fruit, write, exercise, try to squeeze in a bit of something else. I go to work, I rot, I come back, cook and go to sleep. I often lose a lot of time on the internet. I'm thinking whether I should just turn off my connection past 9p.m.

  I don't find solace in myself these days, that is all. I took all the loneliness and unrest from one place and carried it to another. And there are no distractions here to keep me from facing myself. So I try to find some for myself. How ironic and fitting at the same time that I keep on going back to all those things that hardly ever did me any good. I know what will distract me, what will upset me, I seek it still.

  That being said, I think I like myself better now. It took some time to look square in the eye all the time I let others down and even longer the times when I let myself down. And somehow I like me better now than before I left my home. And much to my surprise, I even feel glad for the bridges I chose to burn. I never thought such a day would come. I was prepared to mourn and mourn and mourn and yet.

  And yet. 

  And yet I realised that there will always be someone in whose story I am a villain. And sometimes I have been exactly that. And other though I have tried, I will not be viewed in any other way than the one comforting to the other person. Let them put all the blame they want on me. I have carried my own. And in learning to tend to myself, I have learnt to carry that too.

  I always thought that I would pray to go back in time to salvage some connections. And though I still miss them, I want to see them not.

  Not now, not ever again.

The house in mountain

   It's been over a year that my thoughts roam to the house in the mountains. The last time I went it was a couple of years since my aunt had died and it was the first time that I came across it with a door locked. The garden was in a bad state, nature and the garbage of neighbors and passers by both taking it over and the house was worse. I went up the outer staircase and went to the upper two small rooms, or what was left of them. There was a hole on the floor in the second floor and I wondered whether the roof would off soon too. That was where her son used to live and paint.

  On the ground floor I could not enter some of the rooms, the bathroom was essentially destroyed and the kitchen I preferred to steer clear off but the bedroom - in the past the bedroom and the living room was the same thing - was easy to access. Her bed was there and the heavy wooden drawers too - the top was marble and the wood was carved because in the past that was what you did when you opened your home. The previous time I was in the house my aunt was on the double bed, she was the cousin - or was she the aunt - of my grandfather and at the time both he and her son were long dead and she had been bed-ridden for years. She called for me to go close and she gave me twenty euros, for pocket money, old habits die hard and all of my relatives of her generation are adamant to give us "youngsters" pocket-money whenever they can. It does not matter if they are bed-ridden in a dingy little room with little light coming in from the shutters or if they can hardly cover the medicine bills. They will slip the paper in their hands as they shake yours, like the bribe of gangsters in the movies. 

  When I tried to back away and refuse the money she grabbed my wrist and insisted, I was surprised by the strength in the grip f a woman who could not bring herself to even rise on her elbows. Her eyes had a gleam like she knew that that would be the last time and chance she would have to gift one of the youngsters.

  She had a soft spot for my grandfather who was many years younger than her and she would always talk of his children in one group, their descent being the thing that characterized their existence. She would always include me in the group of my grandfather's children as well, among my mother and her siblings, perhaps because I was oldest. She tried to give us what she could. When she died, she left hardly anyone behind and I came home to find two big black trash bags filled with papers and pencil - supplies of her only son who died long long before. All the relatives went after he death to the home, to clean out (and I suppose to take) what was left with no-one to claim. Seeing as I was the only other person in the family who still drew, my mother requested these things for me. 

  I found it odd and unsettling but up until those two trash-bags I was completely unaware that my uncle used to draw. I knew he had married and divorced and drank a lot but spoke little. It was unnerving to be around him, his parents felt easier to approach. To my knowledge none of his painting survives. Among the papers I found a doodle.

  Standing there in the living room I recalled being a small kid and having my mother make me pose by the entrance with my aunt and her prematurely-blind husband. When I asked why she did it, she told me so that I would not forget and indeed I did not. 

  Three lives came and went and perished in this house and of them remains a few blurred photographs and an abandoned house in the mountain, trapped in the bureaucracy of the always expanding family tree. I longed for that derelict little house with its generous garden with wild roses and fig-trees.

  I sometimes long for it still.

Salt

   I feel sad here - the same kind of sad that I felt in my own country except the distractions are less, I have less access to things that bring me joy but the pay is actually livable. I suppose you can't always get what you want and in any case, everything takes time. Disliking the job means that I will need to find something else to latch onto for dear life and most of the activities - at least the ones involving people - that I had in the past are all but flourishing here. On occasions when I have been invited to social gatherings I have sat quiet, observing the people around me - they were alright but I hardly felt any incline of a connection and so I preferred to shut up.

  That's another thing that I noticed about me: I really did quieten down. I did not swallow my tongue, it is not the timidity of shyness and shame but the complete disconnection with the surroundings. Back home it was less easy to notice though I suspected it but here, in new surroundings where there's less noise coming in it's become more obvious to me that I have grown a preference to keep my mouth shut. 

  I like the balcony of the house. It does not have a stunning view but the area is not so packed with tall houses - in fact, it has less buildings in general and that leaves an abundance of sky there for me to observe at any time of the day. All I have to do is look out of the window. There are moments when I do exactly that and the expanse of it cleanses my insides. For a few moments I am brought back within my body and I am present and I almost feel hopeful, above the tiredness, above it all.

  And in those moments I remember of going to the sea and wanting to cry and join one type of salt water with the other but there were too many people and that usually brings questions. The hindrance of it did not stop the sea from lending its healing hand to me. As a kid whenever I went to the beach and into the water I would always feel spooked and yet would steal away moments away from others during which I would bring my mouth to the surface of the water and I would whisper my secrets and my thanks. I was naturally superstitious and felt that I ought to show respect to water; after all the sea is capricious, it can give you life and it can also take it away.

  Since no-one felt so present for me to say my secrets, I took my loneliness as far out as I dared to venture and keeping my head from the nose-up above the surface, I whispered it all to the sea.  

  And the sea lent its salt for the wounds to try to heal.

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.