Hypothetically
You stand there just like you always do,
Saying something irrelevant; you just want to tell me.
And I finally tell you all the reasons I cannot listen to your nonsense,
because it means more than everything that is real and relevant.
And the shared intimacy that comes from jokes you make on my expense don't make me laugh
Because all these things you see as faults and quirks are just for you.
I am not for you, but I am here for you.
You are silent now, looking at me in disbelief and- is it horror?
A. E Houseman:
He would not stay for me, and who can wonder? He would not stay for me to stand and gaze. I shook his hand, and tore my heart in sunder, And went with half my life about my ways.
Does this make me look fat?
Today's lesson on how appearence affects the perception of you got me thinking.
To achieve the greatest impact, it's vital to appear as genuine as possible,
meaning the clothing must match the personality.
Meaning you must have a certain level of self-perception to dress accordingly.
A dramatic person who tries to dress classic, comes off as false,
as does a natural person going for the excessively formal or glamorous.
Now, I am thinking that perhaps the same goes for cities; places you call home.
It is of outmost importance to choose a city that matches your personality,
lest the signals you are sending will simply be fake.
People will sense you are not genuinely being yourself.
Maybe this is why I have been going from place to place,
like someone running without knowing neither their origin nor destination.
Trying places out like others would try a new dress, to see if it fits.
Sometimes it looks OK, but mostly it just looks better on the hanger.
Rarely, very rarely, can the reality of the dress compare to the image of it.
Normally, I am not one to shop and tell,
but I think I'm looking pretty damn good in this dress.
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.
Weltschmerz.
Psychology.
First impressions and analysis.
Emotional intelligence and emotional stupidity.
I remember the innocence of not being disillusioned,
No walls around me, no weapons, no associations,
No disposition towards cowardice.
No emotional algebra; only simply addition and subtraction.
Only this moment and its infinite possibilities.
- How many fantasies in an infinitesimal space?
I want to roam, wild and uninhibited.
To let let the demons go, but they linger.
Reciting my worn out quotes as though they were the Qur'an or the Bible,
- without thinking.
Programmed to suspect, to mistrust.
I say I am open-minded, but what I think is.
And if it is, what does that make me?
What does that make you?
Exiger.
And I find myself where I said I would not return.
In the way of myself.
Tripping on a shoelace I left untied on purpose.
Cutting myself on knives laid out in perfect asymmetry on the floor.
Every inch of me asking why, but nobody ever answers.
When you are chasing ghosts you know what to expect.
When the ghosts are chasing you, you don't know where you are safe.
Are we ever safe?
I remember, althought it is not really a memory.
It is a familiar scent tugging at my heart,
Perhaps a premonition, perhaps a warning.
That giving everything and nothing simultaneously is unbearable.
However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
I need to come to terms with this before anything else.
| insert appropriate metaphor |
the unbearable weight of emotional algebra
The body can endure compromise and the mind can be seduced by it.
Only the heart protests.
In a new environment it is easy to forget.
Easy and impossible just like anything worth remembering always is.
I write to keep, but I do not want to keep all the things I write.
Erasing does not work in real life, so why would it do so in fiction?
At the beginning of every new chapter you must decide what to do with the past one.
And all the ones that came before that,
where do they fit in, how do they relate, what do they say about me?
Am I true to myself or do I make compromises so that I can go on writing?
It is easier to live among words and letters than people.
Is it the power? The manipulation? The detachment?
I don't want to connect the dots while disconnecting myself.
The distinction between these two worlds has never been more clear.
Having poured all of myself into words, phrases, aphorisms,
I do not want to become a closed book on the shelf.
Why keep writing emotional algebra when I never could solve equations?
It is written.
There is a part in me- as in most others- that doesn't want to grow up.
A part that violently rejects conformity, adhering to the rules, doing things in the right order.
For the past ten years I have lived in ten different places
home and away, big and small, exotic and mundane..
But this is the first time that I brought my whole self to my new home.
The first time I packed all my guardians, my safety blankets; all my books
Despite the burden, because it is an easy one to carry.
Books make everything easier.
Oscar Wilde wrote that literature always anticipates life, never copies it.
He felt literature is what actually makes life what it is, creating it, pushing it forward.
So much has been written about writing. Much more than what has been said about saying.
Words are all we have to try to describe what they do to us.
So I spread them around everywhere.
Reading yourself as fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open.
The only way to stop the story running away under its own momentum,
often towards an ending that nobody wants.
Grammatical technicality
It is a game we play
And if only it were so.
You play, you win- you play, you lose.
We play..
For you, whoever you might be, I want to make this clear.
I owe you a great deal.
I address you, make reference to you, blame you and miss you.
But the 'you' I use is not yours to claim.
You flow from one to the other,
sometimes improving reality,
other times adding to the disappointment,
building one failure on top of the other.
This is how I must write,
as though the people I think about were reading,
as though they were one and the same.
As if you were the only thing on my mind.
And- of course- you are.
Uncomfortable
I said: she thinks I am too weak to say no.
You said: what is weakness anyway?
Not knowing it was you.
You were the weakness, I was the one who had to fight it.
When most of your time is spent fighting emotions,
There isn't much space for the ordinary things.
And if you are good at shutting things and people out,
soon enough you find yourself struggling to feel anything at all.
This is not success, this is danger.
Comfortably numb is just a song, not something we should aspire to.
Story of my life.
We write ourselves as stories because it is comforting.
In a world that struggles to find meaning, a story gives us a sense of depth that anchors us to life.
And we never stop.
A constant stride of themes, motifs, aphorisms help us to understand ourselves
and justify us in front of others.
Today I wrote the end of a story long overdue.
This is also a part of writing, of being alive; putting an end to things.
We create some, we leave others behind,
choices that we hope will bring us more wondrous stories to tell.
Some tales are harder to end than others.
You put the fire out, but it blazes up anew every time, inexplicably more aggressive.
I am the writer, I decide.
But some protagonists claim their space and the story fades without them.
So, you compromise, you let him stay.
Waiting quietly for him to make you regret it and he does so, over and over.
When the protagonist starts taking charge of the plot, it's gone too far.
There are two ways of ending a story.
You must have the courage to write it or force the protagonist to quit.
Sometimes it is safer to do both, so he cannot come back to haunt you.
As a writer you become surrounded by ghosts.
Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become one.
Now I want to write about the living.
Now I will write about life.
Et plus le temps nous fait cortège...
Growing up, I suppose, is what this is partly about.
Signing french contracts, planning for the future, imagining more than I have had before.
More than I have wanted to imagine before.
I was waiting for right now, perhaps without knowing it.
Perhaps always.
Letting chances pass me by, thinking "as soon as.."
but never knowing how to end that sentence.
'As soon as I start my life', not realizing that is not something you choose to do.
C'est la vie.
Ceci est la vie.
This may not last but this is now.
Forever is composed of nows.
New steps in old shoes
You might say that I wasted my time.
Moving from city, to city,
From country to country,
Looking for the right place, for myself and for you.
All the streets I've worn out with my restless walks,
With my dreams of other places, another world, of everything.
Will I remember them all?
Will they remember the feel of the soles of my shoes?
The sound of my anxiety? My faraway gaze?
Few places make me nostalgic.
I never allowed myself to get attached, I was passing through.
A passenger is never weighed down with responsibility for anyone but herself.
A passenger can leave if she gets hurt.
As a passenger, I never relied on anyone.
But as this next transition comes closer, I wonder if I have made the right choices in the past.
Suddenly I yearn for an anchor, I want to be pulled down.
It is time to reconnect, break down the walls and be vulnerable.
New streets await my wear,
but this time my steps won't be heading somewhere else.
My feet will conquer Brussels as their own.
And so will I.
On the surface an intelligible lie.
It is autumn, and I pretend I've dreaded her arrival
while secretly welcoming the season of reflection and nostalgia.
I find excuses to turn everything off and sit silently in the dark, breathing.
only in autumn do I find this space,
For the soul, for the heart.
Autumn asks questions.
I know that searching the past for solutions for the future is futile
asking the same old questions makes you find the same answers,
perhaps mistaking them for brand new.
Still (I quote):
It was not I who did those things;
cut the knot, jemmied the door, made off with goods not mine.
The door was open.
True, he did not exactly open it himself. His butler opened it for him.
His name was Boredom. He said 'Boredom, fetch me a plaything'.
He said 'Very well', and putting on his gloves so that the finger prints would not show,
he tapped at my heart and I thought he said his name was Love.
I still struggle with guilt and blame.
Sometimes I play the heroine in the playback version. Sometimes the witch.
Mostly, I am one of the extras, wishing I was allowed on stage.
Then I remember, this is fiction.
They say if you repeat a lie enough times it becomes true.
But they never tell you what happens when you replay the truth.
I repeated it until all the real elements faded away,
and stripped of all truth it can no longer harm me.
You can no longer harm me
and I no longer want to harm you.
We are nowhere, and it's now
I like the spaces in between.
The not knowing. The blending of facts and fiction.
I spend my time dreaming, planning, reminiscing, rather than in the sharp light of now.
Occasionally, I enjoy imagining what might become of me.
But not now.
All this time: milestones of achievements, plans and change of direction.
I postponed the present for the future.
For what was coming. What I was becoming.
Not knowing what it was, but surely it would be spectacular.
Expecting the spectacular can get a little tiresome...
What about now?
I am mid-jump, and dare not land just yet.
Alanis Morissette- Guardian
(This is not a) Diatribe
And so, the day came when I heard the songs, but felt nothing.
I remembered without being destroyed.
There was no sadness, no anger or loss.
Not even the violent indifference that I have been cultivating for so long.
There was a void where my feelings once were, and it was not fabricated.
It felt like nothing, but without the weight it sometimes carries.
After years on my knees, on the ground, in the gravel
I realize that I was the one keeping me there,
letting gravity push me further down,
- maybe I liked it that way?
Now, this is not freedom. Freedom exiles.
This is absence of dependence.
Independence, if you will.
neither friend nor foe.
Where do we go from here?
Everything is on the verge of changing,
but is that not always true?
It is not fate, lucky coincidence or a once in a life-time opportunity offered on a silver platter.
This is what comes after every choice I ever made,
all the work, and the dreams; after doing everything, always, all the time,
to come just a little bit closer to this place.
Because this place is right before Something happens,
Something big.
I read somewhere that the one who renounces seems weak to the one incapable of renounciation.
Perhaps I am renouncing. Rejecting, retracting..
from parts I do not see fit for the kind of life I am now leading.
At times it is security and stability. Often it is familiarity.
Sometimes it is love.
At times these are choices that I make. Often they are conscious decisions.
Sometimes they are the consequences of my Wanderlust, Weltscherz and the Will to succeed.
/ Written to the sound of/ EVITA: The Motion Picture Soundtrack- You must love me.
Trust me.
The late Senegalese film director Ousmane Sembene once said that
-We tell stories not for revenge, but to find our place in the world.
Although the popular proverb tells us that a picture is worth more than a thousand words,
the power of a good story lies in its ability to conjure a thousand pictures.
We have all the tools to tell our stories, the real stories, all of them.
(Not the photoshopped versions we post on facebook and instagram).
But there is something off. I suspect it is the balance.
There's too much happiness in social media, they say.
Too much optimism, excessive pride.
Faux love. Phony affection.
Is it not strange that we struggle with the deficit of all those things,
offline?
Must we squeeze all these warm sentiments into a few lines on a screen,
rather than living them out in the open?
Is there no place for these stories in our everyday life?
It is time we start finding our place in this world.
A dream without resources is a hallucination,
but words, phrases, context can make any dream come true.
- True?
I'm sorry.
Words can make anything happen.
Quid pro quo
A snapshot from the past.
an exceptionally beautiful summer morning,
the kind that rarely occurs here.
A brief encounter between two recent friends; a polite exchange of pleasantries
A stranger halts in front of us, eyeing us closely.
Judging or measuring- is he lost?
He opens his mouth to speak.
- The two of you have taken something from each other, he says.
You must give it back.
Before it started it is over, leaving us standing there, clueless.
In a more tropical country we would have ridden it off as a heat-induced hallucination.
I like to imagine that the mere sight of us told this stranger something about us.
Something that we remain ignorant of.
What did I take from him?
How can I regain something that I do not know that I have lost?
A cliché says 'the meaning of life is to find the question to which you are the answer.'
Most of the time we are just fumbling in the dark.
Not knowing what we are searching for, and much less where to look for it.
So, it is comforting to sometimes imagine myself leaning back against the strong shoulder of destiny.
Trusting serendipity instead of zemblanity, even though I know better.
To believe that the universe has a plan for me,
that I have to find a way to give back to him what I took.
Because that is all I can do.
Or can I?
