Sunday 25 January 2015

Oasis Of The Living



Four years ago we were painting the city with our colours, he had his shawl masking his lower face, the black and white hatches contrasting his strong hazel eyes. I was hopping with the joy of a child who’s just exploring the world for the first time, to see our hearts, our words finally expressed on the walls of this city, changing the monotonous chill of cement into a reflection of the day’s spirit.

The Oasis of the living, watered by the rivers of freedom fighters both dead and alive. That graffiti on the wall was in memoriam of a brave young man who, among others, have given me the ability to deeply breathe with lungs full of air, perhaps for the first time in my short history.

In this city, we live inside a black cloud, you can barely see six feet ahead of your own step, we almost forgot what it was like to gaze upon a horizon that isn’t raging with beige and brown. The seasons all fell under the clasp of poisonous turmoils as well, the autumns and springs were a biohazardous yellow that you can feel your veins hardening from the toxicity as you inhale, the winter was a gloomy grey that creeps and settles inside your bones, leaching itself to your marrow, and by the time of summer everyone was isolated in one of the most crowded cities of the world. Courtesy of modern industrialism.

Yet on that day, four years ago, I took my first real breath, cleansing me of the grey with sprays of black and red.

We saw the soldiers heading towards us, Hussein wrapped his shawl tighter around his nose as I squealed in unease. One of them looked towards our work and nodded in approval, he seemed impressed, and if he could see beyond my eyes perhaps he would’ve seen the shadow of a smile. The other three however, wanted to assert dominance, one of them came yelling insults from afar. How do we become the vandals when we’re the ones at war with ugliness?

Hussein took my hands and looked into my eyes purposefully, I assured him I was ready with a slight nod and we ran together through the inner alleys of Mohamed Mahmoud St., I will never know if that was necessary or not, neither of us trusted the uniforms but we laughed the entire time and perhaps ran for a longer time than was necessary.

When we finally settled down near one of the street coffee places, we were merely two college rebels beaming with hope and my soul was overwhelmed with love for his sharp mischievous eyes. I took the Palestinian shawl loose around his neck and wrapped it around mine, and he never asked for it back.

I look back at those days with nostalgic fondness now, even though not much time has passed since then, but now we seem to be stranded along in the dog days. Slowness and lethargy descended on everything again. The rivers of blood never dried up but people stopped kneeling and paying tribute, they forgot how freedom once expanded in their lungs, a promise under persistent oppressive pollution.

Cynicism and depression are like the ball and chain being dragged behind everyone’s ankles. And we’re no longer college students.

I remember the last time I saw him, it was in our haven, a room in which you can not swing a cat, where we used to meet with our friends and our comrades. Theorizing, arguing about ideologies. Sometimes we were the dreamers, shouting poetry at the top of our lungs, smoking and losing our souls to music and some other times, we were the intellectuals devouring a book after another to bring new ideas of change to the table, to have them torn apart to pieces, criticized and then put back together before they emerge as a better collective version.

The weakening fluorescent light falling over the dirty white walls always gave the room a dim olive green hue that I disliked. The only empty wall was decorated by pictures of Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Gandhi and Chomsky, opposite to it the worn out brown couch that I wouldn't exchange for millions and in the corner stood an inert ancient wooden TV, neglected for all purposes except pure irony.

There was but a small square-shaped window on one side of the room looking over a loud street, widely inhabited by workshops of woodmen and blacksmiths and many intermittent kiosks for snacks, and on the other side was a balcony collecting dust that we rarely cared to open in favor of our group’s discretion. On that particular day, none of our friends were there in our haven, Hussein sat on the edge of the couch and I laid my head on his lap, my thick curls covering his old jeans.

“Do you ever fear the blame anymore?” he said.

“Life is too short for that.” I said, “I imagine if they did, their ideas would have never survived this long.” I pointed at the face-decorated wall.

“All I want is to escape the farm,” he said, “I want to run free into the fields with you till the day I die.”

I looked up at him and smiled dreamily.

“We’re just foolish to assume that animals born in captivity have no desire to run away,” he said staring ahead, “we assume our artificial settings are all they know, our zoos, our labs, circuses and reserves, they know it will never be their home. It’s not natural, they will always yearn for the day they run free in the wild even if they had never spent a day in their life hunting for their own food before. The wilderness is inside them, it’s their destiny, and it’s ours too.”

I saw him no more, after we graduated the sirens of false patriotism echoed over our heads, threatening him with jail if he tries to escape his mandatory military service. Servitude at gunpoint masked under illusions of nobility and honor. I often thought about how he must feel so out of place, trying to tame his tongue that refuses to tolerate oppression and so called “superiors” and how he must absolutely loathe the military hierarchy. For the first time I prayed for the revolution that runs in his veins to boil a little quieter beneath the surface, and I waited for his calls with a patience that comes not from a place of capability but of helplessness and so I detested it intensely.

I carry his words in the scent of his shawl now, I carry them everywhere I go, walking down the street, in the subway and after I arrive home from the office and leave my handbag beside the door, feeling unclean and promising myself that I will not do it for much longer. The human body was not built for office cubes, we were built to feed off nature and for nature to feed off us afterwards and yet where I live, whenever I see a tree on the street, it seems like the alien being amidst all the concrete.

I’m fated for bigger things, broader worlds, borderless and free.

So I sit down to my laptop and my voices, the insertion cursor blinking away as I try to summon every particle of energy that still runs through me, begging it not to betray me as I try my best to ignore the weights pulling me down by the ankles.

You’re the writer. So write.

Everything is too heavy. My heart is despondent and congested with my own hypocrisy. But I need to survive, I tell myself, and the voice in the back of my head nags me to be alive instead.

The only light seeping through the window was that of a purple-tinted blond sunset, suddenly all reminders of time became painful, so I drew the drapes and drenched everything in darkness. A hundred days and counting.

It is true what Physicists say, anything that is repetitive can be used as a clock. The uniform taps of my fingers, the oscillations of a quartz crystal, or even the movements of particles inside a single atom. Anything that tics and tocs, can measure the forward vector of time. And right here, right in this very moment, there’s a big clock hanging constantly above all our heads, clad in black, with a sickle in hand. I closed my eyes to receive my share of the blame.

One, Two, Three souls reaped, and then a thousand more.

They roll above me and under my feet, names on a cold list, green bones neatly stacked in fresh graves that newly open every single day. The ticking of the clock is replaced by the bangs of firearms, and as the bullets drop to the floor and the tanks stroll down the streets, maybe time will take me through another moment and another, till the long wait ends and I open my eyes to the egalitarian world we all deserve.

When he comes back, we will raise hell until our voices are heard, we will not fear the ravens in their black with their machine guns and their loud insulting cries, the masses that are now subdued will rise again and demand that the kleptocracy ends this very instant. When he comes back, he might be a changed man, and I might be a changed woman as well, and if I didn’t know better I would resent my own femininity for excusing me from sharing the burden of so-called service with him till we both emerge free to dance our way around the Square once more, but I do know better than to place blame where blame isn’t due. This is not his doing nor mine, he did not choose to be sent to Sinai, to protect a man-made border, and I did not choose the mortifying serpentine patience.

The sun had already set when my brother came back, in panic. He came in, wide eyed and panting with lips so pale they were almost blue, “George,” I fetched him a glass of water as he collapsed on the couch, “What happened? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

“Worse,” he gasped between breaths, “Two ravens, I was being followed, but I think I lost them.”

“Oh, dear God.”

“Three of my friends are dead, Sara.” He said, “I can’t let that be in vain. Tell me you understand.”

I nodded as I knew he was right.

I looked into his eyes and saw his pain, I saw his own clock ticking above his head. He wouldn’t wait, fear was exerting its full power over me, but it wouldn’t even dare reach out to him.

“Do what you will,” I finally said, “But, just be careful, Georgie, tune it down for a while.”

That’s when it came, three knocks and then harsh bangs on our thick wooden door, the stomping of their feet, the loudness of their voice, it was all a terrorizing tornado of anger promising to swallow us whole. George begged me to hide, there’s no telling what they might do to me if they found me, he said, but I wouldn’t. And before we could even take control of our nerves they were barging in. Three of them paraded into the place, tearing it apart, confiscating anything of value they can find their way.

I was yelling words I can not remember now, the whole universe was a haze, as they dragged George outside the house. “He’s just a college boy.” I yelled and yelled, but one of them promised me I will never see him again, and when I tried to get in the way, I was pushed aside repeatedly till they were far ahead of me down the stairs.

I left the door open but grabbed Hussein’s shawl as I followed them down and by the time I reached the bottom of the stairs, they were already taking him in their car and driving off. People gathered around on the street to watch, and as the car drove away their focus turned towards me, standing in my pajamas on the sidewalk. It was as if the entire city just fell silent, as if it became an empty shell of light and background noise. I looked around me and wondered why none of them did anything as they took away my brother, those armed gangs that ruin our lives in the name of our country, why was I the only one kicking and screaming?

Then, from the crowd emerged two of my friends and Hussein’s who lived nearby, I was utterly surprised to see them, “What are you doing here?” I asked.

“We were just here to take you to Haven. We need to talk to you, Sara.” one of them said, “Come on, let’s take you up to change.”  said the other.

I shook myself away from their grasp, their presence raised my suspicions, I wasn’t ready to move a single muscle, it felt like any kind of movement, any wrong step or even just a flicker would shatter me into a million pieces. My congested heart was finally ready to paint the walls red.

“Say what you need to say right here.” I said, barely able to stand, “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Sara, there’s been an explosion, a terrorist attack, on the border.”

*************************************

I walked all night, holding the shawl in my fists near my racing heart, ready to detonate, my harsh exhales in the dark bluish December a countdown to salvation, towards a meeting point. Who would’ve known that waiting would become my life. I walked and walked, averting whichever eyes that fell upon me, a girl who’s finally lost her mind, crossing streets like a little lost girl in her silly pajamas looking for home, but home is empty, and home is dead. And home lies somewhere outside actuality, inside my blinding dreams.

I finally reached my little Oasis where we both live inside the lines of the graffiti, where I took my first breath and looked at the strokes of his paint and the splashes of spray that outlasted him, and his hazel eyes piercing through reality to puncture my lung so I couldn’t inhale anymore. I sat on the floor and let my tears drown me so completely.

Tonight I fear everything outside of this place. Tomorrow, I fight my way to the other side if I have to and if I ever fear the blame, then I die a shameful docile death. Tomorrow, I will do what I do best.

I’m a writer. So I’ll write.