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.
