The year spent on an island

I loved the year I spent on an island.

I was anonymous on that island. I was not going to be remembered for who I was, but for what I did. And that freedom of anonymity crushed and liberated me in ways I never could have imagined.

Sometimes, when anonymity got too hard to bear, I got on my bike. It was always a good day when I had the strength to fight the road’s indifference with destinations to distract me: somewhere to work, somewhere to eat, somewhere to break the sweat on my back, away from my moldy bed.

Sometimes, when it got late and I had reached the edge of the island on my bike, densely populated with catastrophic ghosts, I didn’t mind going to bed anymore. It was one of the good things about living there. That biking was enough to make comfy the bed at home.

I had a boyfriend then, but I was too numb or detached to realize that he was not meant to be. I might have felt it, but couldn’t understand why I ached for him even when he was attending me. And he attended me with indulgent kindness and, years later, that is how I remembered him.

On August 13, 17:14, I was home when I could not fight it anymore. Feelings, in every name and size, washed over me in spasmodic waves. I wept until my knees gave. I hiccupped through the text I sent him. I sobbed when I tried to tell him that I wasn't hurt and I was safe.

My clothes were soaked when he banged on my door, and his shirt and brow and eyes too were damp, and he pressed himself onto me, bearing with me the weight of everything that demanded its rightful name.

I loved the year I spent on that island. I was lonely and don’t want to remember anymore. But I do remember how his ashen face calmed me. I remember how he redressed and coaxed me out of the house for a drive. I remember that we stopped for food, and we  broke bread and we talked and we tried to understand the things we couldn’t name.

And even when we couldn't understand, we had a bed that we slept in till morning.

And I had the strength to get on my bike again, that morning.

ITA VITA*

On the road to my master's home, there is an old man who sits on his porch every afternoon. This old man has the most vacant look on his face. And every time, every afternoon we pass by his house, he's always there with that vacant look on his face, staring at a world that looks back at him with indifferent dismissal.

And I wondered out loud, "How could he do that every day?"

The Timekeeper, who is never idle and whose mind is never vacant even in his sleep, said, "With a lot of practice."

And the Timekeeper, through fractal images in Spartan but loaded sentences told me of the old man's life story. "His wife was the breadwinner. He was a creditor. He never really worked. He never did anything in his life."

If I ever had a TV show, I'd like to s̶t̶r̶a̶n̶g̶l̶e̶ ̶h̶i̶m̶ ̶b̶y̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶n̶e̶c̶k interview him. "What has he done with himself? How could he?! How dare he?! When so many of our best and most passionate mates have fought and lost so hard a battle to Live and Express and Become."

I'm too j̶u̶d̶g̶m̶e̶n̶t̶a̶l̶ shy to be on TV.

Though I refuse to let that vacant old man pass through my life unmarked, and demand to learn something from him, if only to soothe my own existential fears, in my defensive "I would have", in a story retold.**

---

* Latin: Thus (passes) Life

** Originally posted here.

The Bread We Break

If you listen closely, you might hear why I’m comfortable living in the Republic of Hermitdom.

A capella in My head

Naturally, the first time I heard my own voice in That Bloggeratti Episode on Nessie’s Podcast, it filled me with narcissistic pleasure.

Then morning came, and it started ringing in my head. Not in the patient, soberly tone that Qusay's voice sounds.

It rang in my own unintelligible, repetitive, and snobby voice, “Who are you to claim expertise on blogging or writing? Who are you to think that you deserve sharing the same platform with the people you idolize? Who are you…”

It went on and on. And that was a whole week spent on recuperating before I mustered the courage to face the demons and write this. 

Camouflaging Honesty

If everything I said was honest-to-God gushing, then why am I left with is this bitter taste of an overly-inflated-to-the-point-of-narcissistic-explosion toad?

This is probably why people put layers on their feelings. Why they sublimate love into flowers and chocolates and lace. Why emotional gushing, in polite societies, is tacky and cheapens the white heat of our personal revelations.

Who would have thought that there is so much self-reevaluation to take just from one podcast? I can’t imagine what it’s like for Nessie.

Labor Omnia Vincit

I can guarantee that none of us on that table was intentionally a presumptuous ass.

Saad had such a huge heart that it covered our need for gratitude. The Qusay who came was exactly the same Qusay who had been influencing the tone my writing voice. And Nessie and Souma, man, they’re the people I would go to if I ever killed anybody and needed someone to help me bury the evidence.

I can’t tell you all that without denting the truth with naiveté. I can show you, instead, how their work convinced me into trusting them. I can tell you that, someone who has the ability to pledge faith in anything as elusive as the satisfaction of posting, deserves a second evaluative look and respect.

For, it takes a colossal amount of courage and humility to do anything persistently for more than 30 months. And that courage and humility, if it was not fueled by something as colossally powerful and good, would have quickly lost footing and sunk in a cold sea of silent embarrassment.

A Posteriori

Hail to bloggers and podcasters and readers; for their solidarity and companionship to one another. Hail to the people who bothered to float their craft, even when it’s lonesome and scary. Like Ethar and Wafa and Dentographer. Like the voices I finally shared table with, on that Thursday afternoon in Jeddah, after so many years of living in each others’ heads.

Hail to everything that made it more painful to remain tight inside the bud than to risk posting blossoming.

Pentecost

In all fairness, she didn't ask them to come and hold a cryfest with her.

Actually, Abu Bakr and Umar visited Umm Ayman to relieve their own grief and longing for the Prophet, following something that he used to do.

Repetition of habit is a way of remembrance, isn't it?

So when she started weeping, the companions reminded her that the prophet was in a better place.

She nodded between sobs, muttering "I know, I know. That knowledge brings me greater relief than anything else in my loss." Then shook her head, " It's the end of the revelations, the voice of God through the Prophet that made my grief linger."

It was that, the sense of irrevocable endings, that made the two companions weep with the Prophet’s old nurse.

***

Then they heard it.

Shy at first, barely nudging its presence between their sobs, but they heard it, nevertheless. Its clarity and calm decisiveness contrasted their emotional shambles, and brought them upright with urgent attention.

“You have work to do.”

Suddenly the room was crowded with generations of future and past ghosts. The ghosts of the people who have died to uphold their practice. The ghosts of fore-children who were going to miss out on the Prophet’s teachings had it not been grounded into the living. Today.

If most of the ummah remembered how it felt to have a prophet amongst them, how, then, would the unborn remember? 

If it was bothering the woman who knew the Prophet the longest, it surely would have bothered the rest of the ummah. 

And they each only had a life time to spend. And it was going to be one worth spending; because they knew how it felt to be at loss, to grieve. To swing between love and hate, darkness and light.

***

On taking leave from Umm Ayman, they wondered between them, “Did you hear it?”

“In the pause between sobs? Yes, indeed.”

“What do you think it was?”

“The same voice that guides the bees and mountains and stars. The same voice that our Prophet sought in his nights of solitude and devotion. The same voice that, we might as well hope, would guide us and our children through the darkness.”

Umar’s voice deepened, “The weak might confuse other voices with…”

“That’s what we need to work on, isn’t it? Straighten the lines and set the foundations. As long as the ummah sticks to those, we can hope for the best in the voices that they will hear, when they find themselves in moments of calm respite. That is all that any teacher can hope for from the unknown.”

Inspiration

It was one of his better days. The house was turned inside out in preparation for festivity. Someone was getting married. The air was crisp and friendly. And the Master had actually allowed more than a crack of smile to pass his lips.

It was definitely a good day. The girls felt it. The servants too. The Master's delight touched everyone. He had been down under for too long, ever since the revelations went on hiatus. And for today at least, the veil of despair thinned and the household bustled with relief.

She took courage in these promising signs. Might that crack of smile widen into laughter? Or last a while after? Why can't it reach and reverberate to his heart? Albeit its thinness and brevity, might it not hold him with hope until the rest of him follows afloat?

When the domestic rush lulled and they found each other alone, she approached him. The hush was so sudden that he could have heard her thoughts. He felt it too, that slight lift of air in his surrounding. The kind that settles deliberately to let a woman ask her man what she had already known but needed to hear again.

"What are you thinking?"

And he held her in his gaze a while, feeling the weight of a fine-hammered woe hang between them with calm despair.

"How lucky, how happy we have been, Madam."

She tilted her head slightly, listening into what he was not saying. He dropped his gaze, blushing at her attentiveness.

"I mean, look at us, and at all that we have. The past messengers - their messages carried an air of urgency. There was a desperate necessity in their work. Moses had to save the Israelites. Jesus was the epitome of miracles. David, Solomon, Lot, Jonah, Job...they all had an important message to pass on. What business do I have with messages? A poor, illiterate orphan, who just got unbelievably lucky by marrying you."

He paused to indulge in a husband's pride, drinking in her feminine reaction to his words. The intimacy did not last; it quickly soaked with guilt. And despair clouded his eyes again.

"Do I really have anything to say to the people, Madam? What, the few nursery verses would do the job, you think? It has been so long since the last time I felt that Presence, I might not even recognize its arrival again.” His voice rose a pitch, “Maybe there isn't anything left to say or do and we should all just be happy!”

The mistress did not answer. Her gaze broke and drifted towards the house. The servants sweeping out the dust. The morning light breaking forenoon. And she heard him sigh.

“Why can't we just not care?”

"Because you knew how it felt like," she said. "Because you knew exactly how it felt to be poor and orphaned and lost. You would not let it pass under your watch as long as you can help it. You would have adopted every orphan, given every traveler a hint of direction, and fed every mouth from your own plate. Because you know how it feels to be forsaken."

He shook his head and shifted uneasily on his feet. He was about to go under again. She chased his despair.

“And if that is all that you can do,” she said, “then do it. Do it every day. Maybe that is your message and what you’re supposed to convey. If God and the angels and every man on earth forsook you, then you don't forsake your own calling.”

And that was how the long pause in the revelations ceased. How the Forenoon was inspired. How the work revealed itself over and over again. By being grateful about what is good in life, and helping where one can.

Every forenoon, ‘till Kingdom come.

Ecstasy

"Cover me, Madam. Cover me. Cover me."

His wife spread her blanket and her arms around him. And held him. Tight into her bosom. No questions asked. Until his fever abated and his words flowed.

Then he told her that he might have seen a demon. But it was not a common demon, he would have known that by now. This Being had an uncommon, eternal grace. And that it held and spoke to him in words that jolted his sanity.

"You told him that?" She smiled, amused that her husband, despite his fears, managed to reply thrice that he could not read.

"It's the truth, isn't it? I can count, ride a camel and sell at profit. I can do a lot of things, but I can't read. Why should I admit otherwise?"

Her smile broadened, "What else?"

Then, he said, the being held and filled him with endlessness. Like something inside him, his very soul was torn and whitewashed with infinity. He thought that it was never going to end, or that it was only for a minute. And that he was losing his mind.

And she laughed. And he thought she was mocking him, but her laughter rang with kindness.

"Darling, if it's any news to you, then it is that you would be the last of all people to be cursed with insanity. Come, let's ask for counsel. I don't think that you would take my word for it, but I'd rather take this as good omen."

*

One the way back from the counselor, he asked her and his voice heavy with grief. "Do you still think it's a good omen?"

And she offered him her brightest smiles yet, "What, that you have got your life's purpose defined for you? You realize that men your age are usually struggling with middle-age crises, while you just got promoted. What's not good about that?"

He halted, and tightened his hold on her hand and searched her eyes. The longing crushed them both. "It will cost us everything we have ever had and known. Every. Thing."

"Then,” said the good wife, “It's a good thing that we do have that much to give."

The Queen's Mirror

Day by day, the answer never changed.

When she asked, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest one of all?"

"You are, my love," said the magic mirror. "You are the fairest one of all that has ever reflected upon this ancient glass of thine."

That was all that the mirror said. Day by day, and through the years, it repeated the same assurance. As long as the queen asked, and she asked it often, it repeated the same old answer.

"You are. You are, my queen, my love and fairest one of all."

The mirror's answer did not change when she needed solace in her childhood. Or when the insecurities of adolescence washed her with shame. Or when she donned her wedding gown, when she mourned her husband's passing, or when they crowned her as queen regent, on behalf of the crown princess, Snowdrops.

Every time she asked, she meditated on its answers. There was a patch of silence in her days reserved to process what the mirror had to say about her behavior and outward appearance. She might have known the answer, but it made it all the better to hear it in the clarity of engulfing silence.

Besides, it was easier, she noticed, to correct fresh mistakes, than old scars. So the queen made it a point to look into the mirror often. 

Ever the faithful and sincere and loving, the mirror said, "You are, my love, the fairest one of all."

But, lo, as ultimate ruler of the queendom, she allowed herself to be taken by the bustle of sovereignty. The affairs of the country are more demanding to her attention than mirror meditations, she argued.

And, for shame, the mirror went deeper into the realms of forgetfulness; right when its master needed its advice the most against the ultimate temptress. The queen forgot that power does not corrupt suddenly, with thunder and clamor. It gnaws its corrosive grip upon the soul gently, seductively; catching its targets unawares with countless unnoticeable small decisions.

"How many are invited to the banquet? What, only 1000? What will the noble kinsfolk say? Invite 10'000!"
"How much are you betting? Ha, I'll raise you twice that much."
"Who cares what the farmer thinks? Just bulldoze the damn house and build that summer palace."

Until one day, after years spent in the deepest part of the queen's wardrobe, on the event of clearing it to make more space for shoes, they found the magic mirror. Dusty and bitter with neglect, it spoke years of small bad decisions, far too many that it took a poisonous apple, a death, a long slumber and a forgiving kiss for all mistakes to be repaired.

Far too many that, when it was Snowdrop's turn to be queen, she made it a point to attend a daily audience with the reflective Silence, lest she be caught unawares of small mistakes that have would have gnawed too deep to be uprooted.