Memory Foam
April 12, 2025 | Pets
I always say that I hate nature, but the more I think about it, I find that I hate nature in the “american midwest” where nature is mostly grass and useless trees.
My father was, above all else, a farmer. He hated planting useless trees; he only planted trees that produced something we could smell, savor, and be.
He often argued with my mother over yard space for his trees. My mother wanted to grow flowers and decorative plants, which he didn’t appreciate, but he kept buying her seedlings and rosebushes.
My parents bonded the most in our yard—planting, watering, and caring for basil, mint, sage, jasmine, and coleus. They smelled of them, and we, their children, became of them and many other useful trees.
We had one guava tree. We used to hang a swing under it and play. All my brothers climbed it, except me, because I was always that pitiful.
We had two mango trees. My father gave one to his brother years before they both died one week apart. The mango tree was my window. I mean, all that I could see from my window.
We had lemon, orange, fig, olive, loquat, and palm trees. Each one had its own season. Some were more giving than others, and some got sick and depressed over the years. My father taught us to plant the seeds we got from them.
These trees were like our pets. We knew them, and they knew us. We became each other. What becomes of us when these trees are all under the rubble now? They tasted the best of their kind. I can’t taste the world without them.
Trees are always home. They can never be refugees. Their lingering smell and taste cut our souls like a knife when we are apart from them.
A couple of days ago, I wanted to take the train to a college in Los Angeles. I had a reading hosted by a wonderful group of pro-Palestinian students. I don’t think I advertised the event on my socials because I wasn’t sure how things might go in an unfamiliar environment.
The train I intended to take left as I was walking to the tracks. The next one was canceled. So, I had to spend a good hour at the train station before surrendering to Uber. During that hour, I discovered that different types of trees surrounded the train station! There was a jasmine tree and a loquat tree. Of all the trees a train station in this godforsaken town could have, it had two that took me home on a train that I missed, a train that was canceled.
The reading went well; I had enough energy to read poetry for long enough. At the end, someone approached me with a bouquet of red roses. It was the first time I got roses for my poetry. It was a great consolation for my words that made some people sob, I was told, which is bittersweet—you survive your words, but your own words don’t survive, they drown in people’s eyes. Could wet words help anyone?
January 4, 2025 | Touch
I feel so lonely and lost between these four walls. But I feel like an orphan whenever I step outside. It’s been 455 days like that.
Every time I see a dog, I can’t help but think there are hungry dogs in Gaza that devoured our bodies alive and murdered. Every time I hear an airplane touring the sky, I struggle to convince myself that it won’t drop a bomb on a building around me. Fully functioning buildings, too, break my thin heart. I can’t believe there are entire cities in the world that are untouched and forgotten.
How can people go about their day in these buildings without being slightly worried that a building might crumble at any moment? How can people leave their homes to go to work, leave their partners, their kids, their friends, not worried that they might never see them again? How can I enjoy rain and cold weather, wear heavy clothes, knowing there are people back home freezing to death?
I’ve also never hated waiting more, waiting for food, waiting for someone, waiting for something. I always want to scream at someone or cry to someone, but it hits me that the world doesn’t even deserve my sweat and tears.
Every time I buy a book, a piece of clothing, a souvenir, any type of food, it pierces my heart to remember the books, clothes, souvenirs, and dishes I had back home and now gone. The photos of my destroyed house haunt me.
It hurts to listen to a song, watch a movie, read a book, get lost in an artwork, learn or teach something without thinking of the murdered artists, authors, and professors in Gaza, without thinking how emotionally blind most artists, authors, and professors in the world have been about Gaza.
It’s been hard to settle into any part of my own identity. None of them help: speaking a language, practicing a religion, enjoying a culture, empathizing with a river or a mountain, and things I just have to believe will never get settled or accepted.
It’s overwhelming that I still breathe, and my heart still beats. There’s no meaning to anything. It’s overwhelming to physically and emotionally exist in two different places simultaneously, one of which is being erased. It’s overwhelming to feel someone’s touch over a body that technically belongs to me, a body that’s not dismembered, decomposed, or evaporated.
There simply shouldn’t be a life or a world allowed to live after Gaza. Simply.
At least, I shouldn’t be allowed to live. But I’m only grateful that I’m in a place that sees me as an alien of some color, a place that is ready to shoot me or lock me up for the simplest of reasons. What a relief to be an orphan.
November 17, 2024 | Nectar
Grief is everywhere; I can spot it at every corner. But I keep it to myself most of the time so I don’t ruin someone else’s day. But when I’m alone, I break it between my fingers, spill it on the floor, and feel it hiding in my throat.
“بيعز علي غني يا حبيبي، لأول مرة ما منكون سوا”
“It’s hard for me to sing, my love—for the first time, we’re not together.”
Fairouz sings at a restaurant in the middle of nowhere in California, and the next night, she comes back and sings the same song at a random college event. It’s never good news when Fairouz shows up in exile.
“غمضت عيوني، خوفي للناس يشوفوك مخبى بعيوني”
“I closed my eyes, afraid people might see you hidden in them.”
Fairouz stirs up my grief while she sings a love song. My eyes are always wide open, but no one acknowledges that my eyes have been wearing grief.
I remember my last two nightmares over the previous two nights, so I decide it is finally time to buy groceries. I walk to the store, wearing a light jacket and looking like a camel. The first thing I notice my eyes looking at is a bag of pine nuts.
Fairouz tastes like pine nuts, I think, but Fairouz and pine nuts take me back to my rich grandpa—his Friday meals at his house and Friday evenings in his yard. I can still smell his jasmine tree. I can taste its nectar. I can still taste his ice-cream cones and his sweet watermelon slices.
A grief that feels forgotten hits me, an old grief that had to go because I had to fit the grief of an entire city in my soul—Gaza. That old grief is my first grief. I was nine years old, and I had just lost my grandpa.
I didn’t cry the first day, but I burst into tears the next day when my mother finally came back from his house. Tears burst in my mother’s hug. Twelve years later, tears burst in my best friend’s hug the day after I lost my father.
I walk back to my place, carrying three bags of grief; Fairouz walks with me. She goes in with me and starts singing louder. I break my grief and spill it on the floor, and I drown in it. It fills my body, especially my legs. I reach my bed, and it fills me with shame that I have a bed and a roof over my head.
I deserve my nightmares, I think, as I prepare my naked body to feed them.
