Baladko eh?


Some untranslatable charm from the Middle East that’s never lost in my heart is in expressions I've learned since… ever.
Here are some I remember:
Noor 3ayneh – 7ayeteh – roo7 2albi – to2borneh – metl el fel – yee 3layeh (ana could be added for emphasis) – misk we 3anbar (old school) – alla ykhalik – yerda 3laik – khalisneh ba2a (ba2a is optional, when added you'd better... let them be ) – wlo, wlik, wleh (and any variation thereof) – 2abl el daw (tiz el sobo7 in a more casual setting) – khayy (favorite, used to express… pleasance) – malla model (when used with indignation) – gheir shikil (... a good thing).
More complex ones (could be considered proverbs, but who knows):
3a sooss w ne2tah (she7tah could substitute ne2tah depending on where you’re from) – matra7 ma khereh shana2oo (which I never understood what it means) – she7adeh we bentah (don’t remember what it means, but I guess it has to do with something being very early in the day)

PS: I wanted to have them categorized but found out that most are multivalent, for instance “3ayneh” could be used to express endearment, anger, or even hard-bitten cynicism…


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Message in a bottle…


Your eyes…
My eyes? N’ont jamais vu la couleur de ta peau.
Your lips…
My lips? N’ont jamais touché le bout de tes doigts.
All I have is a bottle washed ashore…
message que quelqu’un ailleurs une fois de plus a pensé à moi…
et je me souviens qu’avec le temps…
“va tout s’en va… on oublie le visage… et l’on oublie la voix… le cœur quand ça bat plus… c'est pas la peine d'aller chercher plus loin… faut laisser faire, c'est très bien…”

One moment's life


- This is what I want you to do: tell me everything you know about one moment in your day, or in your life at that…

- You mean to describe a moment.

- Yes. precisely. From the elements that create the moment, to the effects of each, to the general color of it…

- Like a day-to-day tragedy.

- No. not tragedy. nothing emotionally charged. nothing about departures, break ups… or any heart wrenching moments. None of this she-gazed-across-the-garden-at-him kind of business… Tell me about a simple uncomplicated moment. You see, here lays the challenge: to always be able to find something, even in the ordinary. Kundera wrote a novel once based on a single gesture, a coquettish gesture of an old woman by the pool…

- I see. Well, maybe this moment right now. your gesture. your voice. the harsh clatter of your Arabian bracelets while swinging your arm. your soft gaze from behind your…

- No. stop. don’t describe what your eyes can see. I have eyes and ears and could see all you’re talking about. You should bring me inside your head for a moment. I want to read you and be able to be you for a second. It’s important to be attentive, yes, but what’s more important is to convey the color of the moment. No sweet words, no love and softness… do you really use the word ‘gaze’ in your head when thinking?

- No.

- Exactly. So start again.

- OK. This moment, now… here: we’re having coffee in the afternoon. I’m talking to you. your plants. I feel you’re a little patronizing. It’s slightly turning me on, only slightly though for I still feel comfortable, confident and in control – maybe the attraction is a deviation from being offended – up to a certain point where I still don’t feel the need to seduce… the color of the moment would be excitement, a little sexual, but not smugness… also I am not taking you totally seriously, yet I find this conversation interesting. your draping silk gown. The clatter of your bracelets caught my attention. It’s captivating. so oriental. So.. you. the color of the moment is very oriental… because you are in it. yet I don’t feel foreign, I easily belong in it. because your body language is welcoming. You freely touch my thigh while talking. Your womanhood is very… uninhibited now. you feel like your talking to your child. This gives the moment a touch of tenderness, you’re not covering your language with any niceties, and this colors the moment with authenticity, you’re not wearing a mask, as if you are sharing your inner self with me, and you want me to share mine with you, hence your request… the Turkish coffee and the brown furniture add an earthly feeling, yet the color is still very spiritual. I feel more connected to Earth around you, right now…

- Good… Finish your coffee now and then leave. I have an appointment shortly.

“One minute in the life of the world is going by. Paint it as it is” – Cézanne.
Pic: Paul Cézanne. Maison au Toit Rouge (1885-1886).

Laughter is contagious.


During the ‘80s, she had a small recording machine, on which she had her last husband’s laughter, right before he left her… it was one of those gadgets shaped into parted lips, which start playing hysterical laughter when pushed together… she used to listen to it, sometimes compulsively, as if capturing some lost memory, maybe holding on to the past, and used to laugh… later on, the more the war ravaged through her city, the more she felt detached… when survival becomes the first thing on mind, memories become irrelevant.
Years later, among other things the laughs were passed on to me…
I listen to those old laughs now. Laughs from happier times, aged, faded, like old pictures yellowed by two decades, the clothes are out of style, the names are barely mentioned… but the laughs are still as contagious as ever…

Romance sans paroles…


Do you remember when you used to be scared of ghosts? You used to crawl under my sheets in the middle of the night… I sometimes used to wake up and hear you praying for both of us to make it through the night.

What’s more passionate than someone praying for you? Two innocent hearts unsullied by life. Praying for each other in each other’s arms… it’s not the praying part, it’s this genuine desire for the other to be safe and happy… to ask the highest reference in your psyche for that… it’s more than romantic… it’s pious. I am speaking theoretically of course, I was just praying that may and madiha wouldn’t possess you during the night so I wouldn’t wake up with a poltergeist next to me in bed…

I know… even though I am an atheist, I still believe in what you said… someone to place you between himself and god… it’s so unconditional, so private a feeling… like when they say we remembered you in our prayers, it’s so fulfilling to be remembered at such time when the soul is naked and nothing is… contrived.

I pray for both of us to make it through these times…

Thank you.

A dream I had last time…


I stood with my friend at the side of the building… at the side of a building, for it wasn’t somewhere I’ve known in my memory, it was somewhere I knew in my heart. The road was of red sand and dust, a desert. The sun was blazing. Hot. Humid. No one to be seen in miles. Just a desert of red sand. I couldn’t help but admire who constructed such a building on the outskirts of a desert… of a memory.
The roaring of a car was heard in the distance, and then a dark blue Mercedes appeared, going up the road in a cloud of red dust. I approached the car while my friend waited by the building leaning against the wall, protect from the sun by some tattered awning of an abandoned store.
When I approached the car she opened the window and pocked her head out. It was she. Mixed feelings of passionate longing and reserved greetings overwhelmed me. I wanted to… she gave me an air kiss, and told me that she’s going to park at the end of the road, and come back. I saw her son sitting on the passenger seat. He’s supposed to be a grown up now, but I still only see the child in him. He grinned. I waved.
I walked back to my friend to wait for her there. I told him it was she. He blabbered something about how sexy she used to be and how he sometimes fantasized about her. I dismissed this conversation with a stern look. It always made me uncomfortable when anyone talked about her this way, justified by her provocative appearance … and thought that I am not going to partake in this. We’re not bonding over this. In any case, I was so engrossed in the idea of seeing her again. It has been what it felt more than a decade, or was it a decade… I felt nervous, and decided to walk down the road to meet her half way. I took my shoes off for some reason and decided to go barefoot on the hot sand. It relaxed me.
“what a surprise. I haven’t seen you in ten years” I said
“I know. You never came back to visit” she said with a beaming smile.
Guilt passed through me. She was someone memory safeguarded for years, there in my heart, with an unwavering feeling of… friendship. Guilt of not returning to see her again, guilt of not returning at all, guilt of moving on… I wondered if I did actually move on, or that it is my old life that simply abandoned me altogether. I tried to give in the usual rhetoric about being busy, and how life gets in the way, but I couldn’t…
“You’re son is a grown man now” was all I could muster.
“Yeah, he’s in college now,” the proud mother in her spontaneously replied.
“You look great,” I said.
“Yeah?” she answered with a little bit of surprise and a little bit of satisfaction.
“You look the same.” I added.
She lowered her eyes and said almost apologetically: “This weather… this humidity.. it makes me look 52.”
I looked at her and was lost at words…
“I colored my hair this morning,” she said coquettishly…
I was then overwhelmed by a feeling of loss. Because maybe she did look older. And maybe her words that it’s the weather that made her look older were to console me. That it’s just the weather. The same way we blame everything on the weather… And it was not because she got older, it’s because I was not there when it happened. Because I would have liked, when I saw my past again, that it would still look exactly the same. Not a day older. I felt selfish thinking that… because after I left, people went on with their lives… and I couldn’t help thinking about her life without me. Not that I was a significant part of her life. I was just a friend. A close friend. But still. At that moment, her whole life – at least from my perspective – flashed in front of me. Getting her medical degree in a different world… in a world I constructed in my mind from Kundera’s novels during the communist times… traveling across countries to settle in a country of war. To make a family, a career… some worked out some not… but I couldn’t help thinking that years were wasted in dead ends.. with her career, with a husband… a lot of idle years passed by… and then I realized that this is life, not just her life… but Life. No regrets. And all my pitiful looks transformed into admiration for her as a woman. An accomplished woman who had it all. Maybe not all, but who at least had a life, blissful, tragic, painful, dreadful… a life.
And I couldn’t help thinking about how some of us perceive life… we think we should take all the chances, play all our cards at once… go after the unattainable.. and I remembered Brel singing at the Olympia, wearily like a tired traveler “Rêver un impossible rêve… tenter, sans force et sans armure, d'atteindre l'inaccessible étoile… telle est ma quête”
And I felt tired myself…
And I felt silly…
And I woke up.

When feelings die and… tea


Her hair open to the wind. She stands on the top of the stairs. Strands of gold cover her face. She pushes them away. She looks into the night settling down in the neighboring gardens. The moon caught in her eyes, they sparkle. She feels ridiculous in her big dress, stranded; stranded from running wildly in the night. A tigress caught up in a swan. She is aware of her splendor though. She looks magnificent. And it’s not just me thinking that, everyone at the party did. She touches the pearls around her neck. She let slip the slightest of smiles, then promptly regains her countenance. She gathers the folds of her dress, and slowly makes her way down the stairs. Behind she left a dinner. A party. Music. Laughter. Chatter. Life?

Behind, she left life.


She crosses the garden to the gazebo. She holds her head high, wipes her cheek with the back of her gloved hand, and asks me if I minded her joining me for some tea. I nod. She sits down. She holds my hand, leans her head on my shoulder, and sighs. With her sigh, the evening dissolves away. The guests. The glamour. The music. The laughter. The valse seeps through the garden like foreign notes suspended in the air. She pulls her shawl tighter around her shoulders. I slide my hand behind her back and pull her closer to my heart. She sobs silently in the dark. I wipe her tears. She looks up at me and says:

“Wouldn’t you take me home now?”


My parents died last summer… and all I have is her weary voice pleading to return, an immeasurable feeling of freedom, and my hand pulling away. Once again I drift toward a new life with dead excitement but alert eyes eager to devour pleasures… and life.

… and life?


She, who once was running fields barefoot, who once told me that life is never to be eaten slowly, once again leaves a single shoe at another party… an immigrant Cinderella… trailing shoes all around.

… and no one finds them… here.

Dies slowly

Pablo Neruda

Dies slowly he who transforms himself in slave of habit,
repeating every day the same itineraries,
who does not change brand,
does not risk to wear a new color and doesn't talk to whom doesn't know.

Dies slowly he who makes of television his guru.

Dies slowly he who avoids a passion,
who prefers black to white
and the dots on the "i" to a whirlpool of emotions,
just those ones that recover the gleam from the eyes,
smiles from the yawns,
hearts from the stumbling and feelings.

Dies slowly he who does not overthrow the table when is unhappy at work,
who does not risk the certain for the uncertain
to go toward that dream that is keeping him awake.

Who does not allow, at least one time in life, to flee from sensate advises.

Dies slowly he who does not travel, does not read,
does not listen to music, who does not find grace in himself.

Dies slowly he who destroys his self love,
who does not accept somebody's help.

Dies slowly he who passes his days complaining of his bad luck or the incessant rain.

Dies slowly he who abandons a project before starting it,
who does not ask over a subject that does not know
or who does not answer when being asked about something he knows.

Dies slowly he who does not share his emotions, joys and sadness,
who does not trust, who does not even try.

Dies slowly he who does not relive his memories
and continues getting emotional as if living them at that moment.

Dies slowly he who does not intent excelling,
who does not learn from the stones of the road of life,
who does not love and let somebody love.

Let's avoid death in soft quotes,
remembering always that to be alive demands an effort much bigger
that the simple fact of breathing.

What would you do if I sang out of tune?
Would you stand up and walk out on me...


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