I feel that I want to pour my heart out here on my blog but the words fail to come out. I wish I could. All I know is that... Tonight I feel very alone. I just want a friend. I want someone to talk to. And I have many but not tonight. They are all busy; and those who are not, already have a heap of problems to deal with that my own little woes pale in comparison. I am even ashamed to present myself to them as someone with problems. And maybe they are right to consider me and my problems silly. I have everything so what's my problem? That kinda thing...

One insignificant thing I can mention here... This morning (most likely) I lost this little caramel-colored pouch I carried around in my handbag that contained my vitamins, my anti-histamine, some other meds and cotton buds. I don't know where I left it or if it fell from my bag. But I find it very odd. Only because it's something I'd usually notice. Anyways, this is not at all important.

It is one past midnight and I can see through my window that most of the city has gone to bed by now. And I am here cleaning up my studio. The lights are dim and my music list is playing randomly. This song comes up and I don't even think I like it that much but it makes me smile. Tonight, it makes me smile.

Fields of Gold in the voice of Eva Cassidy.

I am tired. And when I say I am tired, it is not the kind you can fix with a few nights of sleep. It is the tired that comes from the horror of knowing that you can not go back and change anything in yesterday. It is the tired that comes from the agony of not knowing what tomorrow has for you. It is the tired that comes from the pain of knowing that I did nothing when I could have done everything. It is the tired that comes from the fear of not knowing the difference between fantasy and reality...

لماذا

Nizar Qabbani is one of my favorite poets. He was the first poet I ever read of my own volition. I would go with my neighbor L to the library at the end of the street. It was quite an old library, built in 1946 and its interior had this rustic feel about it. The floor was wooden and the chairs were quite old, old enough to squeak at the slightest move or adjustment in one's seating. And on most afternoons, a few rays of sunlight would escape through the windows and line the floor. And we would sit there, L with whatever book she'd chosen, and I with my Nizar Qabbani book of poetry. It was the year before he passed away... And I would wonder to myself, where is my Nizar?

This is a song (of the poem) I enjoy listening to. It is not the full song and it features the voice of Taim al-Hasan (and a tacky video mix from some Egyptian film) as he recites Nizar Qabbani's poem لماذا from the Syrian series on the life of the poet himself.

What happened to you again, O my heart?
What trickery are you engaged in this time?
Yesterday, you were soaring into the sky like the prayer of the pious;
Like the light of the stars, you are falling down again.

-Rumi

Back to London

I'm on my way to the airport as I write this... A few days ago my grandparents threw a party in celebration of fifty years of marriage. My grandmother (yes, the one who had the stroke) sat while my grandfather, my uncle, my aunt and my mother stood behind her for a family photo. And then we, the grandchildren, joined. I think it is amazing what these two people, my grandparents, have accomplished: a beautiful family. My grandmother breaks my heart, in a way that I feel like sharing the same bed with her and listening to her tell me bedtime stories as in the older days.

I have been in Lebanon since April. I came back to Lebanon because everything went wrong and I needed to get back home to get better... And today I return to the same city, to London that I left last April, hopefully better and stronger and ready to finally complete my doctoral studies. I am filled with motivation and strength but a part of me feels broken for leaving behind many loved ones but most importantly my beautiful mother. She is the home I have in Lebanon. How I shall miss her and need her...

I think as I get older, I grow more sensitive to the cruelty of time. When I was five years younger, I had the heart of an eagle. I would travel and roam around without having to look back - only because I thought I could always come back and things would be the same. But after my grandmother had her stroke and my father discovering a not so common defect in his heart, more like a ticking bomb, and after the passing of many dear ones, I feel this strange fear of loss.

I was back in London at the station and you were there. I ran towards you and threw myself at you as I always would. But you pushed me back. "Who are you?" were the words you said. "It's me handsome. It's me." But you couldn't recognize me. That light in your eyes was gone. And it was as if we, our story, had never happened... I touched your hand but you pulled it away. And just like that, you walked away from me. You walked towards another lady. She looked exactly like me only she wasn't me. She wore my skirt and held my bag. You took her in your arms and played with her hair. And then you took her by the hand and disappeared with her into the crowd. I stood there and I couldn't move. Right then and there my heart stopped. I had died.

And I woke up. I was back in my familiar room and under my cream sheets. I took my phone and hurriedly wrote a message to you. "Saba7 al kheir" I wrote. "Saba7 al ward" you wrote back.

I smiled. It was only a nightmare.

I have walked through graveyards only a few times in my life. But each time it became more apparent to me that love stories are hidden amongst the tombs that mark these graves.

The dried rose petals, the withered jasmine, the burnt candles, all scattered over tombs that rest upon cushions of green. And then there is that one leaf rustling in the wind, breaking through the silence that wraps these graves.

And then in the background, there are the trees, that grow above the church, paying heed to the callous eyes of death. And there are the names that no longer are, and the stories that have ceased to be, some over here and some over there, some even carved into the stones...

I used to love Christmas when I was a little girl. I loved helping my mother decorate the tree and I enjoyed waking up on the morning of Christmas to find gift boxes under the tree. I believed that Santa Claus existed and I would try my best to stay up as late as possible to intercept him. But I couldn't. Those were the days when I was young and had a healthier sleep pattern.

This year my mother asked me to put up the tree - something which I had little interest in doing. But she said she was tired and had been complaining of backaches. What is a good daughter that doesn't do her mother this favor?

So, despite my lack of enthusiasm, for the first time in nearly a decade, I decorated the tree. I spent a whole evening and a few hours the next morning trying to create the perfect Christmas tree.

But meanwhile, it occurred to me that I felt quite uneasy about December, about Christmas, about the red and green and gold, about fairies and angels and dwarfs, about church bells and Christmas carols, about the lights and contrived festive atmosphere, the gifts and the food, the laughter and the noise.

Have I become a bit like Scrooge?

Dad this is the song you used to sing for us in the mornings when we were kids. I loved waking up to your gentle voice. I miss you, always...

I recently caught up with an old friend of mine from school and neighbor from the old building where we lived. I remember she was my main competition in our English Literature class and we were always trying to score points with our teacher. But we were also good friends but cautiously so, in the belief that it was best to keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

It had been some time so we proceeded to recall the good old days and what books we were currently reading. We moved from one book to another author and then to another poet and then to our vast and rich heritage of Arabic literature that we vowed to (re)discover and in depth. A must. And then we were back to our dear William Shakespeare. We began to exhibit our prowess in how much of Shakespearean literature we knew by heart. And I remembered...

...the first time I decided that I wanted to fall in love with Shakespeare. It was after I'd watched Marianne (played by Kate Winslet) in a scene from Sense and Sensibility recite the following stanzas from Shakespeare's Sonnet 116:

Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds, / Or bends with the remover to remove: / O no! it is an ever-fixed mark / That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

I don't think that at fourteen I really understood the significance of such a sonnet or the rest of his sonnets for that matter. But I was smitten and so it was the first sonnet that I'd decided to memorize; after I finished the film, I went into my room and repeated the sonnet until I could recite it by heart.

As I watch this scene again, I am taken back to that evening. How time flies. It feels like yesterday although a decade and a half has passed. I think I do understand the sonnet better today than I did then. And the scene too. How in the pursuit of love Marianne was convinced that it was (the unkind) Mr. Willloughby for whom she had traveled very far and with whom her happiness rested when all along her happiness was with the honest and loving Colonel Christopher Brandon. It was only a matter of time before she'd realized it - and she was fortunate he was still there to have her. Life is funny like that.

Sleep is a reconciling,
A rest that Peace begets.
Doth not the sun rise smiling
When fair at e'en he sets
Rest you then, rest, sad eyes,
Melt not in weeping
While she lies sleeping,
Softly, softly, now softly lies sleeping.

This weekend between morning walks and early dinners, I talked to him about home. He told me that he was able to adapt anywhere and everywhere but that he longed to return to the one and only home, to where his mother lives, to where his ancestors came from, to the land, to the Watan. And his words reminded me of my father because this is what he has always taught us. To long for and belong to the land.

I struggle heavily with the notion of home. And I shall not pretend otherwise. There are times when I feel like a flower in a garden, only I am bending in the other direction. A friend of mine studying psychology once told me that we are forever stuck in our childhoods. I don't know who said it or if it applies to everybody but sometimes it does to me. I sometimes think I am still that little girl in the Watan I once knew in my childhood - it is now but a memory. My father used to always say that the Watan for him was this triad of the land, the wife, and the family.

I am all by myself aimlessly wandering around this large mall and I look around me and observe the Britons and foreigners that surround me, and I wonder if they, like my father, know very well the word Watan...

I have again and again grown like grass;

I have experienced seven hundred and seventy moulds.

I died from minerality and became vegetable;

And from vegetativeness I died and became animal.

I died from animality and became man.

Then why fear disappearance through death?

Next time I should die

Bringing forth wings and feathers like angels,

After that soaring higher than angels -

What you cannot imagine, I shall be that.

- Rumi

This is a song that I love. I listened to it heavily last March. On my way to the supermarket, in the cab, walking to school, at the cafe, and on the tube. I loved listening to it particularly on the tube because it made British public transport seem sweet.

And Ziad Sahhab has the most soothing voice.

I had a dream last night and in my dream, I was back to the city of London in the early winter of 2008. It all seemed real and I was back to that person I used to be. I was at the station waiting for the 73 bus. It was very crowded. People were alighting and others getting on. Suddenly I noticed this old lady. She looked like my grandmother - only she wasn't. She had my grandmother's smile, my grandmother's nose and my grandmother's wrinkles. She had her blonde hair and her blue eyes with her bouffant hairstyle. She was wearing a green tailleur - one of grandmother's favorite. She looked at me and smiled. And in that moment I was inclined to approach her and ask her if she would agree to play grandmother and granddaughter with me. But I did not.

And I awoke.

This dream reminded me of a time when I had just started my doctoral studies and I was exhausted from trying to keep up with the required level of research and I was beginning to feel lonely. And, homesick.

I am glad I am not in that place anymore. It was just a dream.

I know I said I didn't appreciate the film. But I thought the music was beautiful, which was composed by Nadine Labaki's husband, Khaled Mouzannar.

Tonight this song makes a lot of sense.

Bambi

When I was a little girl, I was in such a hurry to grow up. I did live in the present, but I fantasized more about the future. I wanted to be so many things that I have not been able to be. Well, maybe soon I will become a doctor. That, I did dream of. Well, kind of.

I was in such a hurry to grow up that now I long for my childhood. It was a time when I thought that life was timeless, deathless, never-ending... I thought I could conquer the world and do many things while at it. I would be a doctor, an actress, a dancer, a maths teacher, a restauranteur, a taxi driver, a footballer, a princess and many other things. That was when I was an 8 year old girl living somewhere in a little home in Africa.

Back then I used to read Enid Blyton's The Faraway Tree series. These books outlined my earliest understanding of the world. I believed that anything was possible. There was a time when I actually thought little fairies and magical things did exist. But they only happened to those who believed in them, and I believed. And I thought that if I played under that huge tree in our back garden, fantastic things would happen to me just like in the book.

I was not afraid of bugs and I always looked for grasshoppers. I played with the little white kittens and went on lizard hunts and rode my bicycle in circles around the garden. I flew a heavy kite I'd designed and made after watching a children's TV show. But for some reason, my kite would barely lift. And I'd take it back inside for some remodeling. I'd enter through the front sliding doors into our sitting room and smell beautiful aromas from the kitchen. It would be noontime. Who else but my lovely mommy preparing lunch cause daddy was going to be home soon. And this song would be playing in the stereo. Back then, it was all about cassettes... and this is a song that has never left me.

Tonight I lost over 2500 pictures. Of places, of friends, of family, of grandmother, of my mother's 50th birthday this August...

And a good chunk of them were from my trip to Istanbul. I took particularly beautiful images from the Grand Bazaar. I remember I stopped every few meters trying to capture the shapes, the colors, the hanging ouds, the necklaces and the beads, the lanterns...

Oh well. I guess I'll have to go to Istanbul again and take that walk in the Grand Bazaar.