i read your words, i drank your words...
are you inside my mind? are you inside my spirit? are you inside my body?
have you read my story before i wrote it?
who are you? who am i?
if you and i can think so, who are we?
are we one?
how could you have possibly have known what i am thinking...
but you do know it is possible
we both know
... and then again, it could be that a bit more of prose is entering these pages.
i am feeling a certain discomfort these days. it is all so new, that is not almost overwhelming, it is overwhelming. i really do not know quite how to dance with it just yet. i look everywhere and then i get distracted by the tinniest little detail.
what is new is that i do not feel like screaming out loud and shouting... i feel like listening. i am starting to listen right here, and to me. sometimes i am not at all comfortable with what i hear, and i hear myself loud and clear. there is clarity, but i am not yet sure as to what i will do with this clarity.
i get irritated by the distractions that i allow into my life. i find myself listening to those around me in a totally different way, and like a child who has just learned to walk, i stumble and fall on occasions... but something has changed, and there is no going back.
i listened today to a friend of mine for a couple of hours, i could absorb every word of his and i had the distinct impression of knowing exactly what he was sharing with me. we talked about it, and i listened to myself. i paced around the room while i was talking with him, and i felt every word that i uttered. i listened to all of it, and i spoke while in the back of my mind there was this story that i am writing, and i kept on asking myself what does all of this, his life, my life, have to do with this bit that i am writing. it is a good question. the writing has not yet began to flow... and i have been writing, and it does not yet flow. i also do not know what will make it flow. i like the new thread, but i was not born with an ease or facility for story telling. we talked about this... my friend and i talked about his today. he has an incredible ability for story telling, he never looses the thread... and i am always fascinated by this, as this is something that i work on day in and day out. still, today i began to realize that the way that i tell a story, may just not be the way another tells a story, and what i am working on is exactly what this way of mine is.
in the past weeks i have surprised myself again and again as to what i have formulated right there and then on the spot, without prepared speeches, without effort. i listen to it, and it makes sense, i say... yes! that is it. i have no clue as to where it is coming from, but it is here. it could be that i have my own way of telling a story, and that is perhaps that that is truly mine, and it is something that i have laboured at.
i feel discomfort, oh i do.
there are times when some people simply manifest themselves in my world as a bore. when i find myself thinking of otherwise kind people as boring, i do wonder where my compassion has gone. perhaps i can just learn to live with it, and respect the fact that some people are to me not very interesting, and that i am plain human and on occasions, have no compassion.
remember, i wish that you were here, or that i was there, and i wonder how very distracting we could be for each other. i think of that tag-line from Pan Nalin's film samsara: what is more important satisfying one thousand desires or conquering just one...
to conquer, what does that really mean? why must one goal be more important than another? what are desires? what is satisfaction? where is this discomfort of mine coming from? is this discomfort of mine like other pain that i have felt, and all there is to do is to take a deep breath, breathe out, and let it be? can pain be satisfaction?
i am writing, i am reading, i am talking, i am negotiating... and i am wondering about the lessons learned, and what does not get out of my mind is the martial spirit. i know it is an art. art is both disciplined and effortless... and that may just be the nature of it, and it is totally irrelevant how much my humbled ego likes or does not like it.
yesterday i chilled, today i struggled.
oh my!
this is still the place of abstractions. you are the reader and you are the inspiration. this is for me, this is for you. you are a muse across the border, you are a loyal friend, you are dear to me, you are my family and you are my life. your face changes, our lives go on. some go and leave memories, other linger and share precious moments of just being here.
fluage remains the only active blog with the voice of cairo otaibi. i still need this one here while i am busy in the background furiously writing that story that has had me in its grips for a couple of years, and that has me now waking up at four in the morning just wanting to write. i still do not know if i can or if i will succeed, i just want to. i have no choice but to write it. prose is rare here on fluage, and when it is prose, it is very abstract, but then... that is the noise that i like producing, abstract noise. when i began writing fluage i knew that i had embraced a journey and that i would tunnel through to another side unknown to me; you all have been the midwives of this tunneling journey of mine. within the past four months my being got accelerated through the tunnel and all my resources were absorbed in the process. it started while i was in another european city, a city that in the past had spoiled and pampered me with both creature comforts and successes that i had yet to understand. when i returned there four months ago, i returned as "the poor artist" who slept on her cousin's home office floor and used public transportation for the first time in that grand place of glory and tradition. yet, the unexpected manifested itself. it was a good space to be, i was with family and i felt at home. there were a few questions on my mind, and i wanted clarity as to what the answers were. i started asking, and i started making some of you uncomfortable.
home, being at home has been a rare feeling with this creature inhabiting my body. i have rarely felt at home, and i have felt at home everywhere in the world when i am in touch with my own being. yet, before i could ever become conscient of it, that feeling has much too often drifted apart and i was left all over the place and no where, homeless and orphaned. this journey now has taken me to that place of being conscient of home and who i am. you all knew already who i am, i did not. i had hopes and i had dreams, and i have worked adamantly at getting here, and i was clueless and blind, deaf even.
one of you had a gentle boldness, and you were not about to drop the ball. you told me how you saw me, you repeated it, and you did not know that i did not know, but you were sure, and your words were those that i could barely discern from what i thought was noise. i have heard noise before, and i have learned to be weary of noise. while i could barely hear your words, it was the rest of your being that finally transmitted the message. the words just barely got through, but your being, that i fully got and i found myself at a place that i barely knew, it was home, it was me.
one of you! how can i dare write such generalities when you are so very precious? how can i dare? just last night i wrote to you and i told you a whole lot about me, all that you already knew. where was my concern for you? don't i know that you are there busy in the joy of your own dreams? i know, it does not even occur to me to question it. you are sharing your dreams, that i know.
freedom. my first poem ever published was about freedom, it was also my first publication and i was barely fourteen. i have long lost a copy of that poem and i do not remember the name of the publication, the byline read my original name and i was just another girl full of energy and life. i climbed trees and run for miles, swam in the ocean, and made a whole lot of people uneasy for girls are just not supposed to be that way. i built soap box cars with the boys at the seminary and i was not interested in kisses or boys for that matter. i had a dream, it was freedom.
somewhere between then and now something happened. they call it traumatic experience. i have suspected for years that one traumatic experience happened when i was fifteen, but its core and its pain have eluded me and most of therapy until just now. in a way it is as though it was only now that i was ready to deal with this part of my life, first there were earlier experiences that needed to be reprocessed and accepted. i have wondered very far from my self and my home, i have travelled far and wide outside the confines of my being to return now to that being and to find myself very humbled by the magnitude of my own existence. oh, what a ride indeed!
i am here. there is no distance between you and i, there never was. grateful i am.
you are so very close to me, you are in my heart, you are free.
i need the distance, now i do, i am here, close to you.
i looked at your daughter, i saw my son.
"i have a front row seat in the comedy of my life. sometimes i am the director, other times i have a small part and forget my lines, then again i feel like i got into the movies by mistake and Dracula is on the screen for no good reason. somedays i am the star, other days i am just an extra."
i reckoned that this day would come!
i hoped it would not.
what fault of mine is it that you did not live your life to its fullest?
what fault of mine was it that i was born?
what fault of mine is it?
i wanted you to die ignorant
i wanted you to not feel the pain
i wanted you to not know reality
i wanted you to believe your own illusion
and now i just want you to leave me alone.
let me be!
you gave me life, i am grateful for my life
you did not mean to give me life, did you?
i know that you did not.
but what am i to do?
i am here
i like being here
i love life
i love you
and
i do not like you.
i have this nagging feeling that my father is dying. i am at a loss. my parents have been on my mind a lot lately. i spoke with my mother yesterday and i could feel all her fear. i did not like one bit of it.
i also do not like it that i have this sense that my father is dying, if he did, it would however not surprise me the least bit. i think he has realized something about his life and the pain that this causes him may be more than he can bear. he was never a very strong man. as a matter of my own experience, he is one of the weakest men that i have ever come across, the total opposite of his father whom he has always been so fond of criticizing and moralizing over. i always identified with my grandfather and our biographies do run a few parallels, for that reason any criticism from his son, my father, towards him is something that i always took personally.
i do not like this at all!
you asked out loud what would it be like if you had what you wished for...
you asked... i listened. i asked myself, what if...
then, just a few days ago it was my own ego that lay shattered on the floor and i was much too busy consoling its disgrace to notice that i had been acknowledged. i am who i am and that that is just grand. it is ecstasy, and somehow it met me unprepared, somehow like the rest of my life.
damn you! how did you know?
i know that i was not the inspiration
she left, she parted
you remained, you love
you will always love, you do.
i read your words and look for solace in their very existence
trouble me, do!
your words, my words
words. trust.
yes, solace...
i needed that today when i caught my mind racing so fast and totally loosing the plot because i realize that there are so very few hours to do all that i want to do. just yesterday, all turned so differently. i was immersed, i was searching, i was creating. was i thinking?
then i saw something or other, a trace of your existence, and i went through all the colours of the alphabet, and all the motions of existence. could you possibly be telling me something that i am not able to understand?
then i felt the anxiety. it is my anxiety. it is my fear. i have been fighting this fear. i am tired of this fear and this fear is tired of me, it is time that this fear and i embrace each other, and trust. trust life, trust us, trust you, trust me.
it is the morning hours and i wake up before my alarm. on good days this is how it starts. i have this deep love and affection for the tender morning hours regardless from which side of sleep i do approach them.
last night i finished writing and mailed a long long love letter. writing love letters is nothing new to me, all that i write are love letters. i have fallen in love with life, and that is all that i ever write about. i write about life and sharing life. even my most complex stories are about life, life and death, and that illusory four letter word that we call love, and that has us spellbound and helpless, for all it ever wanted to represent is life itself.
i love you. i am cairo. i am life.
who am i? who sits here?
i am nobody. no-body.
freedom.
life, what is it really?
i thought that my life was borrowed. it is not, it is mine.