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I lost my mind.

Losing you.

Losing me.

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I was going through some of my undergraduate assignments for a gender class. I also just had a conversation with a friend whom I feel lost in translation with, about a gender topic. I feel sort of exhausted or lost. I am close to understanding why, but I can’t express it. I can’t express much anymore, unlike when I used to be myself back in the days, when writing and expressing were the easiest thing I can do. I read my assignment, and it was like I am reading a sophisticated paper submitted by someone else, not me. I read my texts to my friend, and it was full of distress and naivety, it is like I want to say two things, and I end up mixing them into a thread of nonsense. I wanted to know who he really is because I fear and doubt the idea of him, at the same time, it brings me joy and desire. I wanted to find the point where I shock myself with him, I wanted to expose a radical idea that would hurt me under the veil of an intellectual discussion. I feel like my biases and assumptions towards a person can take over my chain of thought and it would basically erase everything I used to use in an intellectual discussion with acceptance and an open mind. I felt part of me was trying to explain to him a similar argument he was making, but even though we spoke the same language, I feel lost in translation with him. Reminded of my old self that I have lost, he hurts by being there now, but I enjoy this pain.

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On suicide: beyond falling

The so-called “psychotically depressed” person who tries to kill themselves doesn’t do so out of “hopelessness” or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person whom its invisible level will kill him/herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-risk. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling “Don’t” and “Hang on!” can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

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Oh my, human needs, heartbeats I can see it all, by the way you smile I'm smiling too! I see myself in you I am with it! Ooh man I am wired! Ooh my lord! Ooh my lord!

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I'd swim across Lake Michigan I'd sell my shoes I'd give my body to be back again In the rest of the room

To be alone with you... 

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I was a willow last night in a dream

I bent down over a clear running stream

Sang you the song that I heard up above

And you kept me alive with your sweet flowing love

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The Waiting Place

I want to scream on top of my voice. A really loud and long scream. I feel trapped. I am in a waiting place. I just don’t know what I am waiting for. There are so many things that I want and need and there are so many things I do not want or need. I do not have the ability to express them, even to myself. I just want to scream so fucking loud, not in awe, just in hope that my waiting place becomes a place of knowledge of what I want and seek out of this fucking super annoying -yet incredibly lovely- life.

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If I could be 

Baby where you are 

If I could be 

Baby where you are 

If I could see 

Baby what you see 

Then I would know 

Baby what you know 

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My Odd Dreams

Cairo, Sunday 23/03/2020

I had a very weird and random dream last night. I dreamt that I was with a friend from work and we were at a mall. I had another very weird dream of her before…that also involved malls. Anyway…and we were lost but we were not worried we were enjoying each other's company, and our feet brought us to a lounge -that we thought had a door to outside- and in this lounge Suzanne Mubarak was sitting with her grandson (and it was mother’s day) and she was sipping coffee from a mug, her skin was really nice and her hair was done like when I used to see her on TV. Kay and I walked and we were sneaking looks at Suzanne Mubarak and then we bumped into a man who turns out to be Hosney Mubarak (in his 50s) and he said something and I couldn’t hear him, so I asked Kay about what he said and she said, “he said get out of my face.” We arrived to a narrow balcony, on the 2nd..3rd floor and kept watching cars passing by and waited for our ride, (one car came to pick up a guy who looked familiar and I said is that Ahmed Ezz? There was disruption in the street and five men in black suits came and took him into a car). Kay nodded and then went to make a mug of Nescafe, no milk, no sugar (like how I drink it) somewhere far away from the balcony. I asked the people in the next door office to let me use their utilities but they refused. And, we waited. 

Cairo, Tuesday 31/03/2020

Before I go to bed now, at almost 10am, I need to document this cuz last night before my friend from work interrupts my sleep with his phone call (it wasn’t really night, it was 5:30pm), I was having a dream of my friend from work in the previous entry and her favorite counsel at Litigation, whom also my friend. The dream was about the three of us going to an apartment that overlooked the Citadel. The place was pretty rough and we had to walk in very narrow alleys and climb old stairs to reach that apartment that was not a fancy apartment, in the dream I thought it was an okay apartment in a very poor area but with an amazing view of the Citadel, right in front of the dome. The weird thing about this dream is that we were going there for some traditional celebration and that our friend, who is (not the one from the mall dream haha) and who has a son in real life, had a son in the dream and we were supposedly attending some traditional celebration for him and it was just the three of us and his son and the people who he hired for the celebration, the people dressed in galabeya and one woman was wearing a red mandeel oya (something women used to wear on their head in the past and it showed they were sha3beyeen). The weird thing about the dream is that his son was a giant banana and that he pealed off the yellow peal off of him and my other friend and I were against this because we thought he would get cold. And the father just didn’t listen to us and the banana son was all pealed and standing there, occasionally dancing, and he was very white and had eyes and cartoon like legs. And, then I woke up by the phone ringing.

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Japanese ocean wave design. Ha Bun Shu. 1919. 

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“If you remember me, then I don’t care if everyone else forgets.” - Kafka On the Shore

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Derecho

I never thought vegetables can be so yummy until I got to know N. and her family. I believe this friendship we have can be simply described as yummy!

I feel like I am home and even with the differences in food and comedy, the language barrier (Spanish is so good to the ear), the routine and even the lens of which we view things. It all feels like music to the ear and all my senses feel a some sort of enjoyment that you only feel when you taste a new dish or for the first time you listen to your favorite song and you close your eyes and it’s just so damn right: A taste of music, warmth, aroma and souls.

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Let everything Happen to you, Beauty and Terror. Just keep going, No feeling is final.

Rainer Maria Rilke

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The garden behind the library

Beirut made me feel beautiful and interesting. I walked back in the streets of Cairo feeling slightly empty, less interesting, less beautiful. I was armed with many stories to impress the crowds at the AUC Library. I felt important and daring. I felt special. Until, I met you. 

I remember the first time we met at the garden behind the library, and it felt like a parallel universe to what I had inside the library. You sat there and starred at the skies, your pupils did not stretch or your jaw drop at my adventurous Hizbollah stories. I kept asking you so many questions, I caught up a lot of vibes out of you that day, and I knew what everyone knew, about who you were. I remember you being so unimpressed by me, unlike the others. I also remember your short answers, your face and your narrow squinty eyes behind the thick frames of your glasses. 

We met again...and again, and I watched you from afar. There was something frenzy that kept me drawn to you, no special idea, no interest to even being friends, just a story to be discovered.

Years go by, and you bring yourself to me. I wondered why this happened, but I did not care. I was suspicious and I remembered your face looking up to the skies at the garden behind the library. Something stopped within me, something else moved, something funny, something hurtful, something nice, scary and weird. So many things I didn’t understand. All I know, there was something fated on that day at the garden behind the library, and that thing happened without rationale or reason, without explanation and most of all without it revealing itself. 

It was not a romance, it was not a friendship, it was not therapy. It was a cosmic tradeoff. A give and take. What did we give and what did we take to and from each other are the things that we are not allowed to know or question.

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Che Guevara with Egyptian farmers during his visit to Egypt’s village Zankaloun (Sharkia governorate) 1966 

Che lived with the farmers for 3 days to witness Egypt’s experience of land reform.

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The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami, 1999)

cinematography: Mahmoud Kalari