and then our exile

It's been an hour since I lived my life, I wrote yesterday, and already the pieces are slipping from me. To forget is to come undone, is to lose--and so to patch together, to retrieve. It was a day, 'except for the usual things, which have grown into me and become my second skin, I am quite happy'. Morning daydreams and homework, but then class with Shaikh Anas, and then dhohr at MuhyidDin, and fiqh with W and A. 'The things that are easy for you are not your real tests,' W told us, 'the real tests are what you find difficult.' This blew open into me later on, with more to describe, at the Kattani dhikr session. The sound quality of my recording is the tragedy, because my recorder is the old-fashioned kind that goes onto cassette tapes, and it was running out of batteries. The beginning is not too bad, but once the hadara starts there's tremendous static that it is pain to listen to. Abu Sa'eed kissed my cheeks again, the grizzled stubble on his face. The bus to Darya, where friendly people pointed out where I needed to get off, and walking around, exploring. There is a quality to the smaller towns of Syria that is missing from most areas of the cities. How to capture this feeling, a day later, reconstructing from residue? A doctor's sign disappearing down an alley, knock on the green door and a low 'tafaddal' from within, and then sitting writing in an ophthalmologist's clinic, where the receptionistess studies and teaches French and the doctor showed me the med texts he translated. 'Isha then, the boy next to me looking up at me with a solemn expression as we shook hands, and a strawberry milkshake from a man exuding the pride he took in his work. He wants to go into shari'ah, he told me, if everything works out. 'The Arabs are like cattle, caught up in their meat and drink--in Pakistan, Afghanistan, though, those are rijal in the fullest meaning of the word.' Generalizations, but don't we all? We sat on white plastic chairs next to his shop looking out onto the street. Then I went to pick up my schorma, and on my way back he forced the 25liras I had given him for the milkshake, back at me. This is Syria, and despite my own complaints and E's good-natured griping at what he calls syria-lanka and the 'thirty-third world', I grow sentimental in my old age. Choosing glasses frames, which is a real issue--over the months I have moved away enough from the inability to make small decisions to the point where I can buy tomatoes and apricots, but this is something else entirely. Far too much choice--I left the glasses shop as soon as I could, with the feeling i had chosen the coolest glasses in the world, only I can't remember what they look like, so tomorrow when I pick them up will be interesting. I doubt I have khiyar ar-ru'yah at that point, what with choosing them myself and all. The bus home, and 'you drive miekros the whole day through?' 'the whole day through.' 'how do you find it?' By way of answer his voice turned a little bitter and he clenched his fist, 'may God provide for me', 'amen.' 'and for you.' 'amen.', but then his smile returned. Another issue, in that when you say you speak a 'little' Arabic, you need to specify who you are relativizing to. The child on the bus across from me was exhausted, leaning into the window. His father's face lined deeply into a perpetual frown, his heavy moustache only accentuating this, but he talked to his son with obvious love. The night wind of the city brushing the palm fronds lining the boulevard. Up the mountain, and i nearly made it to bed before 1am.

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The above is because people ask what my days are like, what i do, and that i should take a break from writing random things and have some sort of narrative.

A few days ago i nearly broke some record for doing stupid things: talking to ph-r-d on skype, i said the word ikhwani out loud a couple of times, and then realized i was in syria.

I was going to write something about tom hurndall, but read [this] instead. There was a time, a year or two ago, when something I was definitively going to do was participate in an ISM Freedom Summer. I explained it in the sense of being overcome by survivor guilt, a western bleeding heart reaching to the poor.

Z has [six days left].