sayasoyer

[sayasoyer]

"What, don’t you like what you see?"

Even to my own ears, my voice sounded foreign. Like a moment cut out of a record. As if I were speaking in a language I didn’t know. As if I wasn’t speaking at all. As if the whole dialogue was happening only in my head — like all the previous ones.

My father looked me up and down. I could see fragments of different emotions on his face, but my mind couldn’t piece them together. What was I seeing? Anger? Disappointment? Pain? Resentment? Or all of it at once? He shook his head.

"No…"

His voice sounded just like mine — detached, distant — and I doubted again whether I was really talking to my dad, or if he was just a product of my imagination.

"I don’t like what I see…"

He added, his eyes tiredly lowered, looking from under heavy lids as if they carried the weight of the whole world.

"Well, I don’t like neither.."

I said, laughing, though it sounded more like a snort. Nothing ever goes the way I plan. I reached up to wipe away the drool that wouldn’t stop, like a child who needs to be fed from a spoon, patted on the head when he eats “for mommy,” even though there never was a mommy. Maybe I really was that child. A child full of drugs. What’s the difference, right? A child who’s been picking things off the floor and putting them in his mouth since forever. We don’t change.

What have I become in these eighteen years?

I swayed slightly to the side, the floor of my room pulling me down like gravity itself, but I managed to catch myself on the vanity before my father took two steps to try and grab me. I laughed again, sinking to the floor, sitting by the bed. My hair fell into my eyes — not that I could see anything clearly anyway. In this state, vision didn’t matter much, right?

"Why do you keep going this..?"

His voice was soft. I rubbed my ears, trying to muffle the ringing, or maybe just to understand if he was still beside me or not.

I looked up. I could swear it was the first time I saw tears in my father’s eyes. Mind, don’t mess with me.

“I..I…I-I-I….."

My tongue seemed to want to recite a tongue twister and failed miserably. I raised my hands, gesturing as if I were mute — and in that moment, I truly felt that way.

I wanted to tell him it hurts. That I make stupid choices and regret them, but when I’m sober, I think about them, and then to stop thinking, I take more drugs.

I wanted to tell him I have nightmares — ones where someone chokes me, then grabs my limbs and rips me apart.

I wanted to ask where Mom was all this time.

Why are Deryan’s things in my room if it’s supposed to be mine?

Why do lilies grow in the garden when I’m allergic to them?

Why are there sometimes only five plates at the table when there are six of us?

I laughed, wiped my nose with the back of my hand, my head swaying like an infant who hasn’t learned to hold it up yet. I shook it and shrugged.

"I don’t know…."

But in the end, what difference does it make, right?

SS. 05.07.25.

[sayasoyer]

“I barely knew I had skin before I met you.”

// Sarah Waters, The Paying Guests, 2014

[sayasoyer]

I feel like someone stab me.

A rare picture of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and his Israeli lover Rita, about whom he wrote:

“I love you despite the nose of my tribe, my city and the chains of customs. But I'm afraid if I sell everyone, you will sell me and I'll return with disappointments.”

When it was discovered that she was working for the Israeli Mossad intelligence, he said:

“I felt like my homeland was occupied again.”