in search of the woman they killed

It’s springtime. I am 15 and living in my grandmother’s prison. She’s allowed my best friend to come over. We’re bored in the house. We go outside with a camera and begin taking pictures by the forest behind the house. I feel her eyes watching us behind those large windows facing the river. Dannia is free, careless. I am trying too, but I feel my grandmother’s eyes too strongly. She hates me. She hates the woman I am becoming. And she will kill this woman, before I’ve had the chance to hold her, to speak with her, to know her. Later, back inside, with Dannia gone, my grandmother comes to shame me. She tells me how sensuous our poses were, how the neighbors could have seen us. She is cruel with her words, and it’s enough to make me feel like I’ve done something terrible.

We were just two girls trying to capture our essence before each other. We were wild with spring and sun. We were rising spring tulips. But one of us would go on rising, the other would be pulled at it’s root while it’s yellow head was still close to the dirt. I have never been able to return to her since then. And now, when I pose sensuous and defiant in front of a camera, I can feel her angry eyes watching, hating me for what she herself wants. Why else would she hate so strongly? Why did every attempt to appear beautiful and desired make her so angry? Is it because she truly believed in the ideas every Arab woman is raised on? Or is it for what she’s denied herself, for culture’s sake and religion, without ever fully believing in the reasons?

Random thoughts that come to me

I am miserable not because I am an artist. I am miserable because I run from art.

This emptiness, this nothing is heavy. To feel everything felt lighter. Life, with its palette of sentiments, sent me to bridges, to rivers and deserts and foreign cities, crying and laughing and lonely and human. To feel nothing …. to feel nothing…. it binds you to places that are no good for you. It sends you to old photos of yourself by bridges and rivers and deserts and foreign cities… while you sit on the floor of a place you swore you’d never return to…you hold her who was once you, in paper, and you touch the you that has become you now…and in touching, you risk it all…to know, and to be freed for knowing. Instead, you leave your notebook by the window, your body in bed. Untouched.

Art pours something in me when there is no longer something to hold. It fills the hollow part in me that begs to make art — and until art comes, that part of me hangs from a window sill, a stem of drying ivy. It lives the cyclic agony of the unheard.

I love art. I love film and poetry and paintings and messy studios. But I can’t stand my own work, my own space. There is sadness and war in me that spills into every new room; too much of the ugly in me controls my art and forces it into something beautiful…benign. Art is beautiful in its honesty. And while it can be beautiful in its lie, it doesn’t last. At its best, it captures you for a moment until the illusion begins to fade. At its worst, it remains unseen, however aggressive its desire to be otherwise.

I am too tired to study the reasons for my sadness. I am too tired to go on believing there are reasons. I was born sad as sad children are. It is the night of our school play. I am playing the lead character, and I’ve told my mother I have to wear a dress. She ignores me, dresses me in overalls. We arrive at the school. The teacher repeats to her what I’ve told her. My mother lifts me up, seats me on the table, yells at me. She drives home for the dress. Returns.

During the play, a man I’ve never seen before sits beside her. He comes with her after the play. He is kind to me, but something feels incredibly wrong. I will meet him again later, with his two other daughters in my mother’s apartment. Not long afterwards, she will sell my toys, my stuffed animals, anything that reminds her of my father, and we will move to the strange man’s house. I will sleep in a room with two other girls…

I was heavy on her.

Those who love me the way I loved mama are heavy on me. Maybe the past is stronger than my will to defy its prediction of me.

Excerpts from Sarah’s journal

you can look at your book of regrets and then choose a different life and live it and if you don't like it, you can come back to the library and choose something else. i'm the person whose anxiety spikes every time my kids watch the lion king and mufasa says "you are more than what you have become."

maybe there's no real midnight library, but the girl that started this blog feels like she belongs in a different book than the one writing this post today. maybe there are lots of books within me, that start and end with my decisions. sometimes i go back and have to relearn a lesson again and again before it sticks, changing small things before i can really understand what i'm meant to. how many books within me have the same title, the same plot, but a cast that's just that side of different?

and with every word i read and write, i feel like i'm finding more of myself. i'm piecing myself back together like a puzzle. and maybe by the end of it i'll find myself in the book that i want to stay in, and the midnight library may lose, if not its appeal, at least my desperation coloring that appeal.