Signposts.
The curious are always in some danger.
If you are curious you might never come home.
What constitutes a connection?
That spark that need not even be ardent,
but you can feel it goes deeper, perhaps under your skin?
Maybe it is about interpreting the signs without explanation.
Knowing that things are important that others simply do not see.
Appreciating gestures forgotten by most.
Perhaps such people are the signposts of our lives,
helping us along the road, pointing us in the right direction
cheering us on when we are on track to where we are supposed to be.
Silent recognition, easy breathing, simple living.
In a world that is anything but easy.
- connections make all the difference.
The most difficult thing to find is the way to the signposts.
A Question mark is an Exclamation mark that stops to inspect itself.
And while I sat there in the plane, gazing out at the sky all around us
-above, below, everywhere-lost in cloud-covered contemplation,
a doubt came creeping.
Is it possible that I spent the past years tormented by fictitious douleur exquise,
simply because it did not occur to me to ask the right questions?
That I have been misleading myself, quoting all the wrong authors,
Assuming I was always right, my interpretation more correct than the truth.
When- really- I was stubbornly holding on, refusing to let go,
ignoring the get-out-of-jail-freecard sitting there in my pocket all this time.
- What do you want?
And it slowly dawns on me.
That I lived with the Arabic translation of this question, taped to my door for years,
yet I never thought to apply the words to my own life, to me.
Or to him.
ماذا تريد ؟
Is it possible that I am merely fooling myself, proclaiming my preference for stories over reality.
So I can keep hiding my emotional cowardice, passing it off as emotional algebra.
A story can be whatever I choose it to be.
It is comfortable in its infinite possibilities and void of actual consequences.
Mistakes become heroic defeats, breakups the tragic milestones that shape the protagonist,
desire the meaning of life and Weltschmerz the most powerful Leitmotif.
- What do you want?
And maybe- quite possibly-
I will find that there is usually little need for weapons when my questions are answered.
Sometimes the answer is cheese cake.
Jigsaw falling into place.
It was a trick, of course, a fluke of the weak sun magnified through the thick glass.
And yet my heart leapt.
Sometimes, I am afraid.
That this is all there is.
Ironically, a very heavy Nothing.
One day I wrote on a piece of paper,
"If he broke her, where would the pieces fly?"
And it felt fatalistic, the way a good phrase can feel.
I could not know it was a borrowed presentiment, a foreboding.
That a million pieces later, I still don't know where they went.
So many of them are missing.
I wish I would not shatter others only because I am fragmented.
And that the jigsaw will eventually fall into place.
Maybe not like before, but in this new space that is me.
