presence with the self

I’ve never wanted to be good.

For god’s sake, maybe, but never for my own. All the symbols of ‘goodness’ bore me, the kind of painful boredom you feel in the silent scream of your body passing through a colorless gap of time. Mosques for example. I’ve always hated them. Everything woman and alive in me sinks to the gutters of life inside a mosque. I’ve always believed there was a cruel intention behind them, that in naming them houses of god, they lure people into conquer, as if they were built to destroy the architecture of our lives, to make one faceless mass of us all and leave us emptied of our drums and desires.

Life used to stop completely when I’d enter one. Inside those awful spaces, you can feel the stillness of time, not in the way spiritual moments pause life, but more like the stillness of the house of someone who hasn’t gone outside for years. The air in mosques feels stale and green and mocking, the way water becomes in it’s small, unmoving bed of space. God’s home is in the silhouette of a chain of mountains against a setting sun, the green river flowing backwards, the un-bordered desert, what right do you have to build this free god an ugly home and call it his when he’s already made his own? What vanity makes you believe that you’ve built him a home when he’s invited you as a guest to his?

So we sin in telling the truth. Let me be a sinner then, in exchange for the lie I’ve lived. Let at least some of what is still real and alive in me part through the war of beards and the haunting chant of verses that never made any sense to me. Let me push my way out of religion to find god.

Past the pulpit and the ugly voice of the men who preach from it lies god’s soft voice, without instruction, without warnings. The very avenue they set us on to reach god takes me far from him, the houses they build and call it his makes me feel only his absence. My grandpa used to talk about building a mosque while he drove…I remember the strange smile on his face, the grey sureness of his voice. it’s the only time I’ve ever seen him excited about something, something that never happened. They’ve taught us that in building a house for god here he builds you one in heaven, and the only reason why muslims are told to do anything has everything to do with heaven, forget god. That’s why you’ll drive through the poorest communities in the Middle East and find the most elaborate mosques in the midst of skeleton towns. Forget the living, some man out there wants that villa in heaven.

I wonder what kind of house my grandpa’s living in on the other side of life …

And speaking of boredom…men. Why do only the most soulless ones enter my life? These new men make me miss the monster I had, at least he wasn't any more of a monster than I was, and if only in the chaos, there was life. Until of course there wasn’t. I didn’t leave him for his war, I left him for his numbness, for exactly the reason I’ve hated all the ones who came after him. They remind me of the air inside a mosque. Life seems to happen around these men, but never in them. At the end of that love, I wrote about wishing to find life inside his body, something I could put my tongue against and taste the season. But each time I try to walk inside these men, I find no seasons, no branch swaying in the air, no water moving, no soft light falling on the edge of skin. Life in them reminds me of life in a mosque. The awful stillness, the dread of loss, of life happening out there, far from their bodies and stale beds.

There has to be others.

When my father used to take me to the mosque, when I used to go to that awful school that held the same quality of air, when I used to sit in my room at grandmother’s house, begging life to find me in that cage, to not pass me on its way to others closer to life than I was, what I feared and hated more than the boredom was that I couldn’t be certain I would reach the antonym of these spaces. The worst of boredom is the feeling of permanency. In the lack of movement…without the tidal motion of time, of course it will feel permanent. But I fear the same of men. In the stillness of their world, I can’t imagine what life could be, or that it can be, shared in motion. It’s either that I move, alone, or I stay, with them. I haven’t found anyone with motion inside their body, let alone someone who will agree to the motion beside mine. And in the world of men, everything that once bored me returns. The hours in bed, the world parting around our boring existence and resuming elsewhere, the irritation of a shut window, the headaches that have always been my body’s revolt against this life, the quiet Sundays, so much like those Sundays in the mosque, the seriousness, the endless reasons for anger, the buses and cars passing outside, the circle of rage, of the two of you angry while life tiptoes past you and picks up its laughter away from you, your blurred vision of the ocean because you hate them all and it makes you cry. In a mosque, in a man, you stop waiting for something to happen. You simply sink into the nothingness they hold, and which you fell for too easily in your search for tenderness, for something to part through the hole of your existence and fool you into thinking you are any less alone.

Finally, I could hear myself again. Last time I journaled, it was the academic in me speaking, that part of me that helped me survive and who I haven’t convinced yet to leave. Which makes me wonder, what part of me stays because I’ve failed to convince the body that the war is over. And what, in the greedy space these old parts take, do I miss encountering? It’s simpler than I thought — in the feeling of total safety, the old leaves and the new enters, the old being the parts of me that were never me, the new being the woman who would have entered earlier had the need to survive not claimed all the space.

"I decided to write for revenge...it began like that. It was something violent."