a lake. a river. a sea.

Jbeil, Lebanon

a lake, a river, a sea, in that order. Finland. Egypt. Lebanon.

To each body of water, more of me was lost. And all that I have to show is a tired harbor of skin, a hallow interior. A phantom of myself, emptied and burdened with the memories of what I used to carry.

The spilling of a woman into water, then, the memory of what was spilled, the longing for it, the search for it...

Gone is the colony of artists that lived in me, that “thing” I wanted more than life itself. In me lives a woman who knows nothing, tries for nothing. I have no way of answering, anymore, who I belong to, and where…who belongs to me. It’s all come undone. The planning, the dream, the desire to be other than who I am, go where I haven’t gone. I leave, and expect what I left to die without me. But they go on. It is me that dies. I carry my own absence.

I own nothing. The bird I thought was mine goes on without me. The man I thought was mine goes on just as well too. They sleep beside other bodies, pass their time easily with strangers. There’s no mourning, no longing for something missing.

I leave, then long for what I leave: my white van (that car that carried me through the end of love, the end of him); the paintings I spent months working on; my little studio by the river; my books, my work, my life.

It could just be that it’s just a quiet evening in Beirut and there’s nobody to speak with, to walk the shores and these half-emptied streets with. Only loneliness, nothing important. Just that it kills me. In giving me nothing — no company, no one to touch, to be held by, to hold — it has taken everything from me.

And with enough movement, you begin to forget who you are, what you meant to do, where you come from. I’ve got a dad who’s crazy, a mom’s who’s mean and bitter. Nobody can stand either of them. And these two monsters made me. Bad soil and a bad seed. Then there’s me, an unremarkable plant that wants nothing to do with the ground it came from.

So I leave. I go far. I travel up north to cold, quiet places, then down south where the streets never sleep, and everybody wants to leave. I keep to myself where I’ve come from. I don’t say American, or Syrian. With either answer, I am mistaken for what I am not.

Beirut

It’s morning here. I couldn’t think last night and had to stop trying to write. I went out for a walk and something to eat at 9:30p.m. The street lights were off, and my walk by the sea (that would have otherwise been beautiful) was full of dark shadows and danger. This used to be the busiest street in Beirut, that long, curved esplanade bordering the shore… I could hardly see where I was last night. When I got to the sandwich shop, it was nearly 10 and the man who worked there was telling me I shouldn’t be walking alone at this time of night. I had no choice, I had a 20 minute walk back through the same darkness, the same military outposts.

Beirut is full of them. I’ll be lost in thought, walking aimlessly, and suddenly I’ll find a long rifle and a camouflage leg reminding me where I am. I can’t seem to get used to them. Nothing is normal here. The dead streetlights, the empty apartments, the shuttered shops. There’s at least one person at each dumpster, searching for food or plastic bottles. Children begging that follow you until someone chases them away and you’re standing there tearing yourself apart with guilt because you wanted them to leave you alone but the way it had to be done…and you’re furious too, at their parents for using them this way, for making them recite pretty things to strangers, for teaching them that if you drive someone mad enough they’ll give you something just to make you go away. How, more than anything, they rely on the other person wanting them gone. And this is the way they begin their lives.

It reminds me of my own beginning too, of mama and how early on in life she taught me that I was unwanted, that I was something that had to be fed and clothed and tended to and who had the money for that? Why would she bother when my grandparents could just as easily do the job for her? Maybe that’s why I feel so much rage when I should feel more pity; maybe it reminds me too much of her, and I’ve got nothing but a frightening, boundless hatred for those kind of mothers.

Sysma, Finland

Egypt & Finland

A month ago, I was living up north in a remote town in Finland. There was rain and wind and bitter cold. A few hours of sunlight, so few I remember most of them. I lived in an old pink house, and when I felt lonely, I’d walk to that magical cafe that looked more like the house of an artist. I’d spend hours by a lake that never looked like the same lake I had seen the day before. It was quiet. I remember the warm nights in the small sauna, the two butterflies that had wandered into the house, the desk by the red curtains with the deep pencil marks on the left. I can imagine that writer, sitting by a page with every line crossed out, thinking, as I did, that if he’d come all the way out here the writing would come to him. Instead, he (or she) ends up driving the pencil deep into the wood of the desk, because if not here and not now then when and where will it come? I remember by own rage, my own mute hand each time I look at those marks. I could feel it now, that anger when that comes to me each time I need to say something important and can’t. Or each time I begin to say something that matters and find my listener wandering away…

Then there’s Cairo. The antonym of Finland and all its qualities. Seven days, a hundred new faces. Among them, a poet, a writer, a filmmaker. They gave reason for a woman without reason to come, to return. But even there, in the sleepless streets, the crowd of artists, I felt alone. The sadness wouldn’t let go. Twenty-six years worth of running away finally ended there, on a side street maybe, or in the backseat of a taxi. I gave up without meaning to. Something in me found its end. I’ve no idea where it happened or what took place, all I know is that I arrived in Beirut with something missing in me.
Beirut. I am watching somebody I love slowly dying. Or quickly, depending on who you ask. They lie. They tell her she will get better. They make plans. But she knows, and I can tell she knows. When one of them leaves and says they will be back in December, she tells them, “If I’m still alive by then.” When they talk about how nice it is to have the family come together again, she says, “They are coming to say goodbye to me.”

Then there’s me, holding it all. Her dying, her feelings about dying, their feelings of her dying. I watch her thin white legs, her emptied gaze, her colorless skin, her body that grows thinner each day, and I think about the last days of my own life. The truth of it scares me. I can see the girl that should have been me walking into the room, showing me what could have been and what, from fear, I left behind, her long dead figure telling me, in its own way, that the woman dying now hardly matters.