Turning 29 & closing thoughts
who can she be… what can she make if she wasn’t interrupted by migrations and false loves
A year has passed… a year since a lump on my neck re-wrote the destiny of a white van, a green bird, and a woman who is just as lost today as she was then. All my attempts to leave- Vieques, Finland, Stockholm, Sinai, Beirut, Quebec, Ithaca, Lake Michigan and here I am. The past and the city are allies in this war. They merge in their power to hold me. And so I try. God knows I try to accept this fate, to pour myself into everything that comes my way, the museum, the magazine, Poeticwear, false loves, I pour, but this city pours nothing back into me. I feel hollowed. I could scream. And after this long journey, this long war, someone asks me, what do you deeply care about it, what do you long for? And I can’t answer. How can you be of this world and not hold an answer to that question? If this torment hasn’t leant me clarity, then for what, the torment? To be a woman standing here, taking up space on this earth, not knowing what she wants… it makes me want to give up this space for another who can make better use of this air, this chance that I am losing.
But one desire has always lived in me. Since my earliest memory, it has pounded against this city. And I can’t stand it any longer. This desire to leave pounding against the impossibility. Everything these hands make, everything I receive, I pour into a space that can hold me and the art that cages me. I want to be free. I want the antonym of this moment. This poisonous silence, this tortorous solitude, the thousand errors I’ve made in love, and the terrible art I’ve made. And so I’m reaching the end. It’s been a long, long ending. But what is ending?
She who is me is gone, gone.
But who was she?
—Forugh Farrokhzad
I want to live. I want to feel breath, just one, deep, young breath. I’ve been old for too long, and the ending feels longer than the beginning, longer than everything that’s happened in between. Each morning, you rise to this death, and you wait for the dying to end so you can rebirth and begin the work of that birth. But it doesn’t end. Each morning, half asleep, half in this world, there is a moment, an ephemeral, terrible moment when you ask, has it ended? But it hasn’t.
It took my grandpa 25 years to die. For my other grandpa, a few seconds on a clothesline…
Everything is in boxes. It’s my sixth move since October, the second without Nizar, my life… who held all of me that was alive. Without him, there is nothing nourishing this body, nothing waters the dry soil of the days. There was a Libyan author who said, “There are many kinds of silences.” The silence of a bird’s absence is the most terrible one I’ve passed through… and I hope you never come to know this silence.
She says, negation doesn’t work with the mind. Abandon the no, introduce the body to what it wants. But I don’t know. I can’t know. And the not knowing is killing me..
It’s my last day in this white house on the corner of Summit Place… a quiet street, far from the world. I am anonymous here. There’s no familiar eye to hold you, no language but one spoken here. You don’t pass through the world when you walk on this street. There is only one city, and it is DC and it speaks an awful English that knows only its own reality, its own shallow pains and losses, it’s own, it’s own... It’s a possessive English that wants for itself, lives for itself, feels only within the territory of the heart it holds, and touches nothing, offers nothing. Except for one neighbor with her soft voice and questioning eyes, eyes that want to know so much but receive so little from me.. except for her, this neighborhood holds its own death, and mine.
What happens after this?
So she moves with all her heavy art and books, loses herself in another mess…and then what?
There is such a deep longing for joy and softness. In me still lives that fourteen year old girl burning with a desire to be wild, holding a camera, rushing off to the trees. It was against the backdrop of nature that I led a woman to be photographed for the first time while my grandma watched from the large windows overlooking the forest and a river that was sometimes seen and often hidden. She watched while I slipped her sweater off her shoulders, asked her to lean into the nature around her. There was a longing for the sensuous world and all the bad possibilities it carried, long before I knew there was such a world and such a possibility. They were such deeply natural parts of me, and what is a part of you stays in your body and out of your mind until it is named for you. So it was named for me as soon as I came inside. It was shameful, dirty, wrong. And in dirtying it, I became aware of its existence. In a moment, what was in me became a forbidden place outside of me I couldn’t enter. It took me ten years to return to the camera again, and maybe my whole life to return to the woman who held it for the first time..
She who was in me is gone and she left before I got to know her. This world of everything that makes a woman feel alive, kept from her in the word of sin, was gone before I had the chance to walk in it. I stood at the top of the mountains, and to the air, to god, to myself, to the valleys, I said, this is what I want. Am I asking for too much? And a passing man, who gave up the city for these mountains, this air, this god, these valleys, himself, answered, No, you’re not. But how? I live in the prison of my art, an art that is so hungry to defeat the ghosts of my history that kept me small. She is seeking revenge through her art, and her art is seeking revenge on her. So she enters another war. A feeling of smallness begging art to make it feel big, and art avenging its body by caging her in this long unhappiness. The sadness grows, so she answers this sadness with more work, more begging, more rage.
And this is what she means when she asks, when will this long migration into death end? When will the land of death be reached, and she drop the woman she’s been carrying and step into the body of the one who held a camera, a reed, a pen for the first time, and fell in love? Who desired only this moment, and for whom an audience meant nothing.
“You will love many times, my son. And you will die many times...”
