In Dakota’s Arms
the most beautiful cinematography I have ever seen
I was driving back from Frederick on a cloudy Sunday afternoon when a strong current of loneliness hit me. It felt both familiar and stronger than the ones I remembered. I was a swimmer standing with my back to the waves. I hadn't seen the bigger one coming. I wasn’t prepared.
I hadn’t driven far from the mountains, and I was desperate to find a place to park while they were still close enough to be seen. I tried two exits before I gave up and parked to the side of a strip mall over an unfinished path of gravel. The side doors parted to a small field of grass. Behind the field was an ugly development, but you could see the blue outlines of the mountains in the distance. I had forty pages left of a novel I couldn’t stop reading called “Against the Loveless World.” It was why I had badly wanted to find a place to stop. I needed to finish it, to find out what happens to Nahr, and because I found so much of me in her, I was, in a way, finding out what happens to me too. Can there be, despite mountains of horror, something good after all? Does it get better?
It does. And it was the unexpected portion of tenderness at the end of the novel that tore me apart. A light rain was falling over the van, and I sat inside, unable to move, to drive. I cried, for Nahr, for me, for wanting what I couldn’t have. I knew half her story well, really well; the half where she suffers captivity, solitude, abuse, the unforgiving talks of others. But I wanted to know the other half, the half where she finds a love exactly the way I imagine love would come if I could write it myself, the half where she spends tender moments with her mother, the precious friendships she discovers along the way. I was both envious of Nahr and deeply in love with her character, her life, what she gave, for love.
Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa
“Part of me wanted to know if men could be good; if it was possible for physical intimacy with a man to be something honest, loving, nurturing, powerful, and passionate. I wondered, too, where I was lovable. I need to know because I thought we might all die soon.”
“She was nearly blind and possessed the limitless generosity and kindness that often accompanies sightlessness, as if one’s love for the world increases as the ability to see it diminishes.
“It seemed to me the freest individuals were the ones who ended up in state prisons.”
“No one had ever kissed me with such love, and it occurred to me that happiness can reach such depths that it becomes something akin to grief.”
“The decades we have crossed wrap around us both.”
“We would eat together as a family and go home tired after a long day of being whole and free on earth. I feel the loss of what we never had, and it feels good to know that my heart stirs.”
[James Baldwin] “Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.”
Summer to Summer
***
I stopped the other day and thought to myself, “Right now, where can I go to be tenderly loved? Where can I go to be held for a minute? And I realized there was no place I could go to to have it, and that’s really scary, having no place to go to get what you need. I feel like a stubborn plant that’s clinging to life by a thread, but I’m worn down and thirsty and fruitless. What’s the point of a tree that can’t bear any fruit? I can’t stand to just be a useless shape in the fields. I have to be more, to offer more. — (excerpt from my morning journal)
***
It’s getting late and I’ve been getting tired earlier and earlier in the day. There’s still so much I want to say, but I’ve become familiar with this nagging feeling that settles in me after every journal… this unshakeable feeling that what needs to be said hasn’t been said, what’s important hasn’t been told.
It’s been almost exactly a year since I began this journal. So much has changed, so much remains the same. On this week last year, I was driving north from Florida, crying every hour of the way. This week, I cried too, not the same way. Not at all the same kind of crying. Today, we filed for divorce.
I can’t tell the difference anymore between growing numb and growing stronger. I don’t know which one it is I am growing into it. Or maybe, I am neither stronger nor numb but simply too tired to feel anything. At the same time I was begging him to sign the papers this morning, I was trying to write a poem in the corner of my room. It doesn’t make sense at all, and it only struck me tonight how odd my life must appear to others. I’ve got no stable gig, no simple answer for that insistent question that seems to find me each day through a different person. What do you do?
I make at least 3 trips each day to my sketchy looking van with the words “Florida blood” still showing on either side. I speak with strangers, most of them people I probably shouldn't be speaking with, though sometimes it seems like its only the outliers that have the time, ex-cons, drug-addicts, people recovering from drugs, crazies, pot heads, people whose source of livelihood remains a total mystery.
And I’m no less of an outlier. I set up a strange looking bookstall once or twice a week (last summer, I was setting up lemonade stalls by the beach). I wake up without any agenda, nothing definite, nothing specific. I follow vague dreams obediently and torturously, doubting and questioning every step of the way but stubborn enough to stick with it, more from defiance and not knowing what else I could do than from a strong, determined will. I paint a little, experiment with clothes and fabrics, write, or try to. Somedays I film, somedays, when I’m feeling more confident, I try to plan for the bigger film I have in mind. I read. I take impulsive trips in the van when I need to reclaim some semblance of peace and remind myself I am free. Sometimes, I spend all the money I’ve made that week driving out to Fort Valley, because the time I’m out there on Don’s land with Roger (my favorite horse) is the only thing I do that makes any sense to me. Most of the time, it feels like its the only hours that matter.
Some days, I ride my bike around the city or I get some friends to skateboard with me in the evening. Most of the time, I want to be alone, but I hate it too, all that time alone. The problem with me is that I always, always want two opposing things at the same time: travel and home; solitude and company; the road and a stable place to work; being single and being in love; being completely alone and belonging to a family, my own kind of family. I want to hide. I want to be noticed too. I want days of silence, and I want chaos just as much. ..
Before I leave, I have to write about my time with the white horse last week, how Don told me to ride it bareback with no harness, how it spun and spun in small circles, how he told me to close my eyes while it spun, to feel the horse. Don could see me for what I was: a girl driving an hour and a half from the city to answer something inside her. (I stubbornly refuse anything I’m told to do except when the order comes from inside me. I can’t say no). I’d never dared asked for more than an hour with a horse each time I came, but this time felt different. Don sat with me for a long time before I rode and after too. He told me what it’s like to wake up to a thick trail of white fog over the land in the morning, how it feels like to ride a horse through the snow, how you can get so close to a horse you can feel its heartbeat. He could tell I was needing something, he even probably knew what that something was (though I didn’t). He made me a promise, and it sounded just the way I imagined it would. He promised and he didn’t. The rest was on me. He didn’t say it out loud, but I heard it. He would deliver half of the promise, and I’d had to work through the other half. I know without knowing what it is I’m supposed to do, what I’ve committed to…
Re-creating the Syria of His Memories, Through Miniatures
“If you can’t get home, make home”
“Marathi — it describes a state of extreme homesickness to a homeland that is no longer existed or has never existed.”