The Last Two Souls

I named both of his eyes: “Forever” and “Please Don’t Go” ’cause I know this kind of love; I’ve been here before. It’s good for a while, ’til he walks out the door. 

But I can’t change, even if I tried; even if I wanted to. My love, my love, my love, my love.

He keeps me warm, he keeps me warm.

Same Love – Mary Lambert

In the wilderness, we travel, you and I. We don’t know each other, we never met. We are the opposite sides of a magnet, we’re on the other sides of the globe. You’re my ice, and I’m your flame. We walk, unknowingly heading towards each other, yet pushing away from one another; and our roads stretch ahead so darkening, so puzzling, but we keep moving. 

I climb the towers of Babylon, and I call your name. I didn’t know at the time that that was your name; deep within, I just screamed it; and it became your name. 

You came through oceans; as if you’re a mystical creature; you heard my calling and you came, the last two souls on planet earth were about to collide, you didn’t know your own name, but I named you, and you answered. 

As we reach each others; and on arms length; we reach to each others with a kiss, lip on lip, hand on hand, and you drawn in my arms; and I melt in yours. We smash into each others like two shadows that merge to become one. We fall deeper into the cursed kiss; and we, so hungry for love, so thirsty for belonging, tight our arms around each others, in a deep cold corner in this world. Around us, circles of green grass is growing, trees are scratching the face of the earth again. The ruins are rebuilding; a stone jumps on top of a stone, the stones rubs each other, as our bodies rubs each others. My hand, firmly grabbing your back, squeeze water from within the mountains and it explodes like a heaven of sparkles; from within the womb of the mountains, fish jump alive and beautiful. Koi fish, just like that one tattooed on my left arm, every kiss you print on my tattoo, another Koi fish comes back to life. 

.. I hold you between my arms, and I look long and hard into your eyes: you’re my unknown lover, my one and only, my deepest secret and my only hope; you’re the dream that I didn’t dare to dream, and the balance to all my fears; you’re my partner, my brother, my father and my son. I rest my head on your shoulder, and it becomes a garden of fresh grass and gentle sun, overlooking a beach of wavy sea; from the sea, a fish is brave enough to step out, and try, and from the heart of the ocean; life comes out once again. evolution has all the letters of love in it; and our revolution over our damned bodies and souls is love read backwards. 

You keep me warm. You keep me warm. You keep me warm. you keep me warm.

My love, my love, my love, my love.

… and we create life.

As the drams calm down, and the world is becoming heavenly again, we fall into the normal, we face the routine, we fall, we die within a little; then we start our journey once again, and I find you.

… or you find me. 

I don’t want religion in my life, But …

I get email notifications of blogs I follows, yes, I’m that lame, I still use email notifications once in a while, and honestly, I find it cute to wake up to a new post by someone you care about, despite the fact that you never met them before. The Pink Agenda author, who is an interesting person, usually, with posts that are sometimes too personal for me to understand, wrote an hour ago this post: Is Islam Evil & Why Does Muhammad Look Mongolian?.

I read the post on my email, then gave it another read on his site, before I wrote him a comment. As a person who comes from a Muslim background, I felt like he sees Muslim people like this:

While, honestly speaking, Muslim people are more like this:

Yes. Muslims are a nation of family guys, with lots of misconceptions about the world, falling from the skies without parachutes and trying to enjoy it. Honestly speaking, they’re not all the bearded men you see on your TV waving guns and promising destruction on the safe families back in the States, and to steal your child’s lollipop while they are at it; those men exist, yet, they are a very small percentage of the Muslim community. I kid you not, I did not think that I’d ever write a post defending Islam, that religion basically was curl to my mother (and every woman I know), it was the reason why my father and I don’t see eye-to-eye on anything, especially that fact that I’m gay, and also the reason why I hated Fridays when I was young. You imagine to wear a dress-like thing called Abbayya and put a stupid hat on that mess up your hair and go to the mosque for two hours while some clerk is speaking in a sleepy voice. Yet, what religion is not exactly that, anyway? Isn’t Christianity all about Sunday Church and being anti-gay? Isn’t Judaism all about funny hats, hating on women and messed up hair?

Anyway, here is my comment on that article; I hope that it would open up a conversation here.

I was born to a Muslim father, and I know Quran by heart, and while I consider myself to have my own relation with whatever-higher-power-out-there, I still do not see Islam as a religion that calls for violence. The parts of Quran that you speak of, calling for Jihad, also comes with lots of undoubtable phrases that such Jihad should be done while not harming a woman, a child, an old man or even a tree. That Jihad should be done by the order of a reasoning leader, and done for the reason of spreading the word of Islam in other nations (which can be done by a TV channel nowadays, if someone is interested in such a matter) or to protect other Muslims around the world.
I don’t think that we should paint any violence done by any individual according to what religion they believe in. I know this will sound silly, but it’s like blaming McDonald’s for every fat man dying of a heart attack!
That said! I do not justify the Boston attack at all, and I consider it an act of terrorism: yet, the religion of the criminals who are behind it should not be an issue to discuss at all; they took their own sickness out on people, the religion was their justification. If they weren’t aware of Islam, they would be serial killers, or murderers, yet, they used Islam as a way to justify their hideous acts to themselves; and we should not encourage other people to use the fact that they were Muslims to also justify an attack on a certain religion; that’s sectarianism.

Finally, I don’t consider myself a Muslim, and I do believe that Islam has its faults and has its good sides, and I do believe that it’s faults are more than its good deeds, yet still, it’s a religion that is still developing itself, maybe in 600 years we would see an Islam that is closer to the current understandings of liberal Christians.

I, personally, do not need religion in my life, yet some people might need it; and there is no religion that is better than the other; there are religions that passed by the timeframe needed for it to be civilized, while others are still in the process.

Also, I leave you with this video, in part because it’s super funny, and also, because it somehow speaks about this kind of discrimination when the guy pretending to be Princess Jasmine speaks about her lost Aladdin, saying things like:

Hey, I’m OK, but I’m slightly scared. My husband’s a mark for the War on Terror. Aladdin was taken by the CIA. We’re not Taliban, you’ve got the wrong man in Guantanamo Bay. Prince Ali, where could he be, drowning in wawa! Interrogation from the nation of the “free”! Bin Laden’s taken the fall, We’re not trained pilots at all, Jafar went crazy and no one put up a fuss. We’re for freedom, Genie can vouch for us.
Bush was crazy, Obama’s lazy, al-Qaeda’s not in this country!! Set free my Prince Ali!!!

Reinventing

I’m gonna break the cycle; I’m gonna shake up the system. I’m gonna destroy my ego. I’m gonna close my body now. I think I’ll find another way: There’s so much more to know. I guess I’ll die another day: It’s not my time to go.

Madonna – Die Another Day

 As our bodies shatter, we reassemble ourselves in all sorts of acts to recreate the glory that once was our souls. These souls, now hiding in the shadows, are waiting for the right person to put our body parts together. We recreate, we rekindle, we remove parts, we reinstall others, we redesign our faces, our feet, or big bellies, our fat thighs, our body image, and we reinvent ourselves, over, and over, and over, and over.

I’m sitting inside the bus, getting myself together for a trip that would last around 40 hours, not knowing that the seat I got is broken, and it can never incline, which meant that I’ll be sitting like a rock statue for the next 40 hours, resulting in a back pain that I would ignore while I enjoy my first hours in Egypt, a country I visit for the first time. I was 21 at the time, I was naive and heartbroken.

I pick up the phone, and I call Hussam, a short and tearful goodbye with promises to meet merely months after this departure, a meeting that never took place ever since. As I head to Egypt, I start to think to myself, maybe it is a new beginning, maybe I will be accepted, maybe I would stand against the stream and open my arms wide, and maybe, for the first time in my life, I won’t drawn.

For a year or two, as I go through life in Egypt, I struggle, as you do, in finding my place among people, and I struggle some more with finding myself among all the places Cairo can provide you: What am I? Am I the young romantic writer destined to become a columnist one day in one of the Egyptian newspapers? Am I the new hot dude in the gay community in Cairo? Am I a journalist with a thirst to the unknown? Or am I the Syrian who is missing his country and family and wants to go back? I needed around 5 years to find out the answer to that question: That was about the time that I left Cairo.

I’m sitting inside the airplane, getting myself together for a trip I did not expect, less than 24 hours ago I was standing in the middle of Tahrir square, reporting about what is happening there, and  now I’m on a plane I did not plan to evacuate Egypt to Jordan, I thought, from my whole heart, that I will be back in Egypt in couple of weeks, which never actually happened. I call Jimmy, and we have one more goodbye, we were dating for a couple of months by then, we were getting ready to move to the next phase of our relationship, when I went out the door and I never returned.

As I sit there, in my father’s living room, with my grandmother crying and asking me to stay in Syria and never leave again, I think to myself, maybe I will be able to find my place here once more, maybe I can have friends and family and become who I really want to become, maybe I will plan my life around Syria again, and maybe this time it would work.

For six months, I went through life in Syria, I struggled to find a good home and a good life and a good job; as I’m settling into this new life, getting to know real people, and having the best relationships I had in my life, I was offered to come to Beirut for work. Was it needed? Did I really need the change in my life? Did I have to? I cannot tell, what I know is that I couldn’t say no to this job offer. I packed my back, and in less than a month, I was out of the door.

I’m sitting inside the car getting ready for the three hours trip to Beirut, worrying that the police at the borders might not like me that much and I might end up in some unknown prison, I make a final phone call to my boyfriend, who will follow me in couple of months; I couldn’t handle anymore reinventing, I couldn’t handle reimagining my life, I wanted him and  no one else, and I did not say goodbye, I did not reinvented the world around me, I decided to put my life back together.

Now, as I plan to go to Canada, I know that I’m facing the struggles of settling in yet another new country, Beirut is expensive, heartless, yet beautiful and welcoming. I’m facing the struggles I’m going to face once more when I move to Canada, but at least, for once, I’m facing it with someone I love.

In the Darkest Hour

It’s like a record going round. Yes, it’s going round, going round, going round. I know I should wanna take it off But I find it hard, why do I find it hard?

I used to have a vision I was sitting somewhere up there Looking down on myself doing right For once in my life.
It changes, hope my life changes. Gets alright somehow. Oh, I’m waiting for tomorrow. I hope it changes, can’t just stay the same, I’ve been out of luck for so long and I don’t get much so there’s nothing much to lose.

Will Young – Changes

It’s hard on him, I understand, I relate. He is sitting there in the shadows waiting for a break in the routine of his life, hoping that his heart would beat again with a joy other than the joy of love. Love makes you happy, but it doesn’t make you complete. He, and I, know that.

He feels stuck, like he has been tide up to a rocking chair that keeps on going back and forward until he can’t feel his toes anymore, and can’t handle his aching emptied head.

Inside his head, he is screaming with agony, like a mother watching her child taken away from a window on the third floor, helpless to get the child back, yet dying a sudden death on all emotional levels: like being stuck at the everlasting moment of the pain of the bullet as it enters his brains. Depression is a bitch, especially if you can’t answer yourself the question that is on the minds of everyone who loves you: “What the hell is wrong?”

He is homesick: It’s clear to me. However, what is he going back to, exactly? a ruined country, a city with  no future, a war that is closing its teeth upon the souls of its people; and chewing. The sound of breaking bones and spilling blood is echoing in everyone’s ears around the world: but who is listening anyways? Who cares for the lives and the separations of the roots in Syria? No one. No one cares.

When asked by a friend on when I’ll ever return to Syria, I told him that Syria has been “destroyed beyond fixing, the country is gone mad, and no one can save it anymore. It is now the rule of the  jungle, and the rule of every man for himself.”

So, why homesick? to the bombs? to the deaths? to the unspeakable reality that is being whispered everyday in the ears of the dead and in the wounds of the martyrs? to his family? to his loved ones? That is a concept I’ll never come to understand, simply for lack of experience: Me: family-less, rootless, lost between the countries of the world not finding my own since my very own existence. No toys from childhood to remember, no one to call me son with a loving tune to cherish, no beginning anywhere. 

I’m lost in my own mind while he is lost in his own abyss: trying to find a place for himself in a new city, a new country, with friends that are only mine, with dreams that are only mine, no friends but my own, no dreams for him but the shadows of my plans. If anyone should be blamed, it should be me; for allowing him to love me; to leave everything and come for me, solely me, and now that he misses everything else, he has nothing but me to blame.

… yet he doesn’t.

He doesn’t blame me, he sits ideally on the couch dreaming of what used to be; he talks to friends and family members planning trips to visit that I’m too worried to understand or support. He waits; and the waiting lingers, and the distance between my office and his couch looks bigger and bigger everyday.

Like a haunted ghost, while the ghost haunts the innocent people who just moved to the house, the ghost itself is haunted by his own past, can’t let go of his own stories; and he takes it out on people, rattling houses, creating noises, and scaring children.

The war in Syria is tunnel; and we are walking blind in that tunnel; smashing into one another; breaking each others backs with pain and suffering we carry on our own; and there is a light at the end of the tunnel; but it might very well be a train coming towards us to end our stories, once and for all.

Cabin Fever

I been dragging myself to the lowest of low. There’s such a way I just don’t know. 
If the path I take is something I can change. Well, if it’s in my way is the deepest shame.

Plan B – Deepest Shame

As my chosen solitude continues, days after I broke my leg on a bike ride in the streets of rainy Beirut, I find myself leaving the reality of my realm to the world of my own memories. I sit there, creating in my own imagination, a city inside my head, with wide streets, planted trees, and seven towers that does not look futuristic, but rather look authentic and lovable.    

I sit, on a side walk of my own city in my own head, with no broken leg and no care in the world, I have freshly trimmed my beard; and I have newly acquired a blue t-shirt with short sleeves, and a pair of shorts. I am wearing a sports shoes and sitting in the sun of my always warmly sunny city, looking at the cars, with funny cartoonish colors, and impossible structure, as they pass by me. I smile and try to drawn in the imaginary sun in my imaginary city in my imaginary world inside of my head. However, a sting of cold brings me back to my own house. Broken leg elevated on my desk, blocking the view of my TV from me; the room is dirty, darkish and never sees a direct burst of sun; and my dog is trying to snatch my sandwich from my hand. 

I sight, and I look at the TV.

Two shells has fallen on a mosque in Douma, in the province of Damascus, destroying the area around the mosque, and forcing the people inside to run without continuing their Friday prayer.

 As you watch the video, you can hear, in the distance, the cry of a child who was scared by the sound of the shelling. 

I go back to my city. 

Fractures of a Revolution

Baby I love you, but if you wanna leave take good care,
hope you make a lot of nice friends out there,
but just remember there’s a lot of bad,
and beware, beware,

oh baby baby it’s a wild world… 

Cat Stevens – Wild World

March 2012:

I call my Pierre, one of my best friends, on the phone again. It’s a Saturday afternoon and we were supposed to go to some park in Damascus to play cards with the gang. That, however, changed that morning when we heard the screams of protesters down the road from my house. He and another friend went out to join the protest, I told them not to.

We hear another shot, then a the sound of a big explosion. His phone is off.

I call him again, and rush to the door with my phone on my ear. It’s the other friend, they got lost in the crowd, he says, and he has no idea where Pierre is. He jumps to the window to try and see when we hear another explosion. I grab him by the ankle and scream at him to stay down. We sit, all five of us, on the floor of my living room. Hassan is asking us to pray to God, his voice is cracking, the agnostic inside me shivers, then gives up and start to pray.

We hear a loud noise; then the sound of a machine gun. His phone is off.

I call him again, while calculating in my head the odds of the possibility of regime troops storming houses in my area; we are five people from five different cities in Syria; we’re all guys. We’re a sitting duck for them to consider us a “terrorist group” and shoot us on sight. I keep my thoughts to myself, but our neighbor calls my roommate and tells him the same thoughts. My roommate is freaking out now. “Where would we go?” he asked me, and I thought loudly: “to the roof!”

I look through the small crack in my window, I see regime troops walking down my street with big knifes in their hands. His phone is off.

I call him again, I step outside our house front door, I look up and down the stairs before I start moving silently towards the building gate; opened like welcoming arms, I want to close it, limiting the possibilities of armed troops thinking of running inside, I start moving it slowly, trying not to get the attention of one of the armed troops walking down the road. “Go inside, you son of a bitch!” one of them screams, and I close the door shut and run back to our home. Close the front door behind me and lean on it breathless.

I slowly slide to the floor as the fighting rages outside, his phone is off.

Pierre, a month or two after this mess, got shot in the leg repeatedly while protesting back in his hometown limiting his ability to walk and leaving ugly scares on both of his legs. When he picked up this time to tell me that a family hosted him when troops stormed the square he was protesting in, my only thought was to curse him repeatedly, then to ask him to come home. “Just come home when you can, alright?!”

May 2012:

I woke up before you, my love, and watched you for an hour as you breath calmly next to me in my bed. I grab my mobile and start playing games, trying to adjust the way I’m sleeping so I snuggle up against your body, while having the freedom to play my silly games. You wake up, and without voicing a word, you plant a kiss on my back. I smile and continue my games. Hours goes by, and we’re leaving the realm of sleep to the brightness of the morning.

“I’m hungry,” I tell you, and you smile, “we have so many friends sleeping over from yesterday and we don’t have any food in the fridge, I’m thinking of going down to buy some ready-made Lava peas for breakfast.”

You tell me to stay, pull me down when I try to get up, I laugh while hearing the sounds of my friends waking up around the house. One is opening the bathroom door, with its door’s announcing sliding sound, another is asking a third how he likes his coffee; and a fourth is opening the windows in the livingroom where he slept on the couch. for 20 minutes, we discuss the idea of me getting food, we get into one of our small arguments where we’re both saying the same thing but we want to say it in different ways; we laugh at ourselves and I pull the window open, on top of our bed, while saying that it’s “getting hot in here.”

Next thing we know, you and I are on the floor, with dust and dirt coming from the opened window that its glass would have cracked and fall on us if I did not open it a minute ago. It takes us a moment to realize that there was an explosion downstairs from our building. It takes us a day or two to realize that it was right outside the doors of the lava peas shop I was going to go buy breakfast from right around the time of the explosion  if you did not stop me.

In the afternoon, and after a long morning of clashes between people we don’t know and people we don’t care about. Hunger was the name of the game in my house; no food in the fridge, six hungry men are sitting aimlessly drinking another cup of tea to keep awake; I gather my strength and decide to go and find food outside. “It’s calm outside now,” I tell you, and you grim. “I will come with you,” you insist, and I trick you to stay home and run like the wind outside. When I return, with food and bread, I see tears in your eyes; you punch me in my stomach and you tell me you love me for the first time.

June 2012:

As we are preparing to go to sleep, we hear that explosion, it’s only you and I in the house. We have decided to sleep in the livingroom watching TV, was it “Arab Got Talent”, or “Arab Idol” that we were watching? I can’t remember now. I just remember sleeping under a soft cover, I remember the soft touch of your hand upon mine while we’re watching the show. I remember looking at you and smiling as you absentmindedly smile to something on TV.

The explosion, far away from my house this time, freaks us out, and the insured clashes after it keeps us crawling from the livingroom floor to the bathroom floor in fears of a mortar bomb that might hit our wall and kill us both. We were scared; we tried to laugh it off.

Two hours of heavy clashes, two hours of unstoppable shooting outside. We didn’t know, at the time, that a guy with a machine gun decided to use our very own balcony to shoot at the rebels from. We just found, in the next day, the signs of him jumping from the street to our balcony on the first floor, and the empty bullet carriers on the floor of the balcony around my flowers. We had all the doors locked from inside, including the door of the balcony, and we turned off all the lights in the house when the clashes started.

That night, I spent the night awake, assuring you every time you wake up to the sound of the clashes that it’s “only a dream” and tell you to go back to sleep.

The next morning, we walked in Qudsiya, the streets are empty, the place is deserted; no one on the balconies, no shops are opened, no cars in the streets. Suddenly, we arrive at the main square of the city, and we see the Free Syrian Army fighters, covering their faces with mask, sitting around drinking tea and laughing; we saluted them quietly and they replied the morning greeting. Every wall has the flag of the revolution painted on it; every tree, ever burned down car.

We walk down the street, and a man tells us to go back, “unless you don’t value your lives.”

We tried to go from a side street, but a man told us that he saw a sniper there. a group of men are standing in the center of the street with the supposed sniper, all of them looking up and searching for him, as if they are saying to him “if you’re really a sniper, shoot us.”

After we begged a car to take us outside the city, we looked back and we saw the street we were in being shelled from tanks nearby; we saw the explosions we used to see on TV right in front of our eyes, we saw the big splash of dust flying in the air; we saw death.

That was my last night in Qudsiya.

July 2012:

As I visit Qudsiya for the last time in my life, I get in the city with a car who accepted to take me for a huge sum of money, to pick up my clothes before I head to Beirut. The streets are emptied out, the power cores are on the floor, dancing like a snake. The silence is falling upon the city and not a soul, except for me, is there.

I empty my closet in my bags, and head out. On the other side of the street, an old lady stands on her balcony, she used to look at my flowers, and me look at hers, every morning when we drink coffee silently from opposite balconies. We never said a word, but today she simply asked me: “You’re leaving?”  When I nodded with a yes, she told me to “take good care, everyone is leaving my son.”

I asked her, why she did not leave as well; and her only reply was: “and go where?”

A man of losses

These zombies in the park they’re looking for my heart. A dark world aches for a splash of the sun.
If I could find a way to see this straight, I’d run away to some fortune that I should have found by now. 
I’m waiting for this cough syrup to come down.

Young The Giant – Cough Syrup 

I am a man of loses, and for that, I can’t trust fate anymore with happiness. Everything that I ever loved something so much, that my heart would burst with flashes of joy that will cover the world around me; I tend to know that I’m at loss. That time may come when I’m losing this very thing that is making my existence matter. For that, I try my best to avoid loving completely: I had two long relationships and two short ones without really loving the person I’m with to the extend of happiness. That fearful feeling that I’m going to give my all to someone has been long lost in my mind; years passed and I did not really completely loved someone to the extend they might have loved me.

Mistake me not, I did love both my Egyptian boyfriend of two years and my Italian boyfriend of three years; however, the more comfortable I was in the relationship; especially with the Italian, the more fearful I feel about loving him; the more I feel that I might lose him in a sad twist of fate that God has planned so perfectly to break the remains of my already shattered heart. I remember sitting there, in a hotel room in the middle of the Egyptian revolution; and while people are demanding freedom from a dictator, my Italian boyfriend was demanding freedom from the ghost of our relationship; here comes the day, a month or two before that, when he arrived on an early afternoon from Yemen, or Libya, or Jordan, or wherever the hell he keeps travelling to for work; to find me sitting there on the bed; fully dressed and with my stuff gone from our bedroom. He wanted, that night in the hotel room, answers to why! Why did I leave him? Why did I have to cut short a seemingly perfect relationship between two men from different worlds that came together as one; then suddenly were shredded apart.

In our breakup day, I think I told him the usual cliches of “It’s not you, it’s me,” and “let’s try to be friends.” I might even have held him near, as his surprised face break a bit by bit into tears, and asked him that we might, after couple of years, decide to go back together. However, deep inside I wasn’t sure about anything anymore.

In that hotel room, I told him stories of my mother; how I had to abandon her to her sickness under pressure by her family; how I had to let go of every memory I had with her; how the feeling of loss made me incapable of loving someone completely. I never told him that the most horrible thing he ever screamed at me, in the middle of a fight, is what lead to our doom. A chain of events started when he screamed at my face that his friends are asking him how come he, in his mighty glory, can put up with someone like me. “Why are you dating him, they ask me,” he told me, months before our upcoming breakup, and while I was hurt to an extend I did not know how to react; the question did make sense to me later on; as I was laying in my bed at night; in the days when he was travelling; and asking myself; why indeed? Why would someone like Ray date someone like me? incapable of loving, a snub, yet over attentive, a person with so many sad backstories that he is broken beyond repair?

I discovered; the day before he returned from his travel to God-knows-where, that I wasn’t giving that relationship the best of me; simply because I didn’t have it. I did not have the best of me simply because it was taken away from me; over the span of years and years.

I remember asking Eyad not to leave that morning, I told him, so softly, that it’s raining outside, that I’m not feeling good about his trip; I told him to stay with me in bed; and promised him to order chocolate cakes and watch hours of Friends. He left, never to come back, and whenever I pass by that road that he had that car accident on over 9 years ago; I feel the rush of pain going through my veins; the pain that my boyfriend, my lover, my partner in crime, my mother’s best friend, my everything, was dead; sitting there on a table among friends in collage, 9 years ago, the news shocked me; I thought that everyone around me was joking; I thought that they are being nasty; and I threaten never to talk to any of my friends; gathered around the table silently, if they are prancing me with some lame ass joke.

I remember how my mother placed me on that plane and told me to go; to leave and never look back; her brother, standing next to her, was squeezing her shoulder as I was looking back at her; freshly shaved after months of staying home crying over a dead boyfriend and hugging every shirt I find of him for hours. Destroying painting her painted of us in bed; crashing frames with pictures of us that I shall never find again. For three years, I won’t see my mother again, I won’t even talk to her on the phone, mad at her for burning all the memories I had with Eyad, forced to stay away by her family who refused to allow me as part of them; being the homosexual son of a Muslim man.

The day she died; I was in Damascus and she was in Beirut; her sister called me to the office and told me about her death; noting that I shouldn’t go; that I should stay in Damascus. “We as a family feel that it won’t be appropriate if you were there in the funeral,” she says, and I’m not listening, “Let me know if you need anything.” she says, “I need my mother back, is that too much to ask?” I reply.

That night I sleep in my bed after hours of crying; I relax my body and mourn the losses I had; my shattered heart and my loneliness that I feel. Back in the hotel room, with Ray, he asks me why, and all I want to answer is with “I don’t know how to fix me. I just don’t know.” I still echoed that same statement the night my mother died.

Now, as I’m opening up to a new relationship, lasting seven months so far and carrying the hope of real fixation to my problems; I stand there in the middle of my living room; waiting for my boyfriend to rent from his job; wondering at every turn of the clock if he’ll make it safe and sound; and when he returns, and while he is falling asleep in my arms while watching the latest episode of “How I Met Your Mother”, I ask myself, will he still love me tomorrow? I believe that the love I have for my boyfriend now is unconditional and evergreen; but will fate leave him be to me? Would I be able to grow older with him? Would he stay in my arms every night? I’ll download him all the silly sitcoms he likes; and wash the dishes after every meal; I’ll tell him I love him a million time a day and I’ll protect him with my own life. Just, fate, please, keep me fixed; don’t break me again.

 

 

 

The future of my story

My future is scattered all over the pieces that are remaining of Syria; to which I belong. In my eyes, Syria used to be this glass ballerina hidden inside my soul like a treasure in an locked chest: only goes outside for my eyes to gaze upon it as it revolves around itself and shines small bursts of light. 

This glass ballerina fall and broke to thousands of pieces, some pieces are so sharp they will cut my fingers as I try to pick them up and their glass will shine like blood diamonds. The damage is done; the ballerina will never revolve around itself, with her leg stretched in a forever pose; her head, beheaded by the fall, stairs as me asking me to re-figure her. Her arms, dismembered from her beautiful body, are laying hopelessly on the floor. 

Stereotypically, I always thought of Afghans, in my head but never out-loud, as nation-less people. Their part of the world is destroyed, their history revolves around their struggle with terrorism, American invasion and Qaida. their nation, their collective pride in identity and nationalism is limited to their own pride in themselves. When I met an Afghan person, and I rarely did, I would feel sorry for them. Their passports are limited, their hopes for a better future in their own land is nearly impossible; and hoping to leave the country will put them right down on a list of refugees in this country or that country.  

With the state of my country, Syria, and the conflict that is becoming more and more destructive, not only by the clashes on the ground and their effect on people, families and politics; but also to the collective human pride of a nation. I am starting to wonder; what is the future holding for me as a person carrying a Syrian passport: How will the collective understanding of the world see me under the stereotype of my nationality? Am I to sit, someday, silently, in a cafe in some downtown area of an aggressive city; smoking a lonely cigarette and talking to passersby about a country that used to be. 

The abyss is opening its mouth up to swallow my nation: it started to nip on the pieces of my ballerina, to eat away at her headless body and her dismembered stretched leg. Like sand in the wind: my memories of Damascus, Aleppo, Lattakia and Homs are dispersed away into the unknown; and replaced with videos of destruction, memories of dead faces with open eyes that always stair at you at night, right before you fall asleep. 

People speak of politics afflictions, of religions, of sectarianism, of coalitions that will decide the future of this country: But will there be a country left after all of these talks. I have been hearing talks for the past 20 months; where did that leave us? It left me as lonely and insecure about my country. 

My boyfriend, when he is not looking for a job here in Beirut, spends his day looking at photos of Damascus; trying to keep the memory alive of a city he was born, lived all his life in it; and now he doesn’t know what to do with these memories. They haunt him: and haunt me with him. 

It is sailing time from now on: but there is no lighthouse at the edge of the land.

Some nights in Qudsiya

This is it, boys, this is war – what are we waiting for? Why don’t we break the rules already?

 I was never one to believe the hype – save that for the black and white. I try twice as hard and I’m half as liked.

FUN. – Some Nights

It’s 10PM and it’s raining outside. Hazem, my roommate in our little house in Qudsiya is trying to get the fireplace to work; giving us some seriously-needed warmth. Another five friends of ours are roaming the house; Fahed, who is originally from Raqqa, is sitting in the arms of his boyfriend. I never liked the boyfriend and I always thought that Fahed deserves better: However, who am I to judge? I dated the worst losers in Damascus you can imagine. They say don’t cast your stone if your house is made of glass.

The house is broken now. One wall is down and the furniture are covered in dust and rocks. The fireplace? I’m not sure if it’s still in its location by now. Fahed broke up with that boyfriend of his. Fahed is back in his hometown; I assume he is alive. I can’t tell for sure.

Bello is sitting next to me: We tuck ourselves closer under the redish cover, with a painting of a tiger on it, as we try to figure out how much we want love and how badly are we willing to put an effort into it. Bello has this smile; you won’t believe it until you see it. He smiles and his whole face glimpse with lights. He is so innocent and sweet. He holds me closer as we feel the cold breeze coming from some cracked window somewhere. We talk about love and hopes; he tells me that he loves me like a brother. No one ever loved me like a brother. Hazem, in his naughty ways, is trying to lift up the atmosphere: telling dirty jokes and calling me a “sister” of his. I laugh as hard as I can. Then lit the candle next to me as the power turns off: it’s the third time power goes off today. Goes away for long hours. It’s cold. But Bello pulls the covers and ask us if we want to play another round of cards.

That was the last time I saw Bello without the ugly scars on his legs; after he was shot twice there. One bullet went through his left leg and landed in his upper right leg. The other? It destroyed his knee. When I saw him: After months of operations, physical therapy and pain; he managed to visit Damascus for my birthday. He was still smiling that smile of his: However, something little, unmatchable, unseeable, is gone from there. Maybe forever. 

Bisso shows up, late as usual, carrying cheap drinks with him; we cheer him, Bello, Fahed and I, and we start to toss the drinks around. I ask anyone if they are hungry; and suddenly everyone remembers that they are. We think of cooking; we thinking of killing our hunger with some fruits or maybe some tea. But then we decide that “the hell with it,” we want to eat Shawerma. We walk down, Bisso and I, to the Shawerma place; we order food enough for everyone; we laugh as the little kittens in the streets suddenly decided to fall in love with us. We look at a hottie passing by and we start to push each other to go talk to him.

He is in a relationship: Bisso is always in a relationship: sometimes I feel that his heart is so tired of looking it’s just settling down to the available. I tell him so, sometimes, and I let him live his life as he pleases some other times. We go up; talk about his mother, coming to visit from Aleppo in couple of days, and we reach the house; where the hungry squad is waiting for us.

Bisso was stuck in Tadamoun for over a week under shelling. He couldn’t leave his office for a week. The office had no drinkable water, no food, and sometimes no power. When the power was around he’d talk to me on Facebook; telling me that he is eating the last breaks of bread he has. His mother? She is worried that if she, and his little brother, left the house, they might get arrested and the brother would be forced to join the Syrian Army. She hasn’t left her house in Aleppo for two months now. 

We never talk about his boyfriend anymore. I’m worried that if I asked, I might get a sad answer. “He broke up with me,” is not what I’m talking about anymore. 

I’m sitting on the balcony, after a first date that ended up in my house. The guy I’m with is smiling. He is sitting next to me on the balcony. It’s 3AM in the morning and we’re a bit cold; but the streets is empty, and the world is quite. I just wanted to sing. According to the guy, who ended up being my lovely boyfriend, I was singing “Cough Syrup”. I’m glad I picked that song and not Nicki Minaj’s “Starships”. I’m not sure how my relationship with my boyfriend would have went if I picked “starships”.

We are sitting among all the flowers and plants Hazem loves to take care of. They are scattered everywhere on the balcony, from the smallest of flowers to an actual tree planted in the biggest can I’ve seen in my life. My boyfriend did not notice, and maybe I was a bit drunk myself: but there was a bird sleeping on the side of that balcony. I thought it was a good sign.

On our last phone call, Hazem tells me that Qudsiya is burned to the grounds; he is trying to find a house somewhere else but the rents are rising crazily, he is hoping to find somewhere safe but what is really safe anymore. He tells me that he tried to visit the house; but really couldn’t. Qudsiya, the city where I lived for the most of two years when I returned to Damascus, is gone. Disappeared. Nowhere to be found. The Shawerma place? Burned to the ground! The street that the balcony overlooks? destroyed! The wall behind me and Bello is gone. Nothing is left there but my heart. 

This is the street where I lived; or what’s left of it, anyways. 

Syria and the Vagina Monologues

Syria Using Rape as weapon against opposition women and men

” ….

My vagina was green water, soft pink fields, cow mooing, sun resting, sweet boyfriend, touching lightly with a soft piece of blonde straw.

There is something between my legs. I don’t know what it is. Not now, not anymore, not since. 

My vagina was chatty, can’t wait, so much saying, word talking, can’t quit trying. Can’t quit saying, “yes, yes,”

.. Not since I dream there is a dead animal sewn in down there with thick black fishing line. And the bad dead animal smell cannot be removed, and its throat is slit, and it bleeds through all of my summer dresses.

My Vagina singing all girl songs, all goat bell ringing songs, all wild autumn field songs, vagina songs, vagina home songs.

.. not since the soldiers put a long, thick rifle inside of me. So cold, the steel rod canceling my heart. Don’t know wether they’re gonna fire it, or shove it through my spinning brain. Six of them, with black masks shoving bottles up me too. There were sticks, and the end of a broom. 

My vagina swimming river water, clean. spilling water over sun-baked stones.

.. Not since I heard the skin tear, and made lemon screeching sounds. Not since a piece of my vagina came off in my hand, now one part of the lip, one side of the lip is completely gone.

My vagina, a live, wet, water village. My vagina was once my hometown, not since they took turns, they took turns for seven days. Smelling like feces and smoked meat. They left their dirty sperm inside of me. And I became a river of poison and pus, and all the crops died, and the fish. My vagina; a live, wet, water village. They invaded it. They butchered it. And burned it down. I do not touch now. I do not visit. I live someplace else now. I don’t know where that is.