Curls

Damascus, 26/6/2010 I leave the home that housed our sorrow for twenty five years I walk the streets that never gathered our shards I buy vegetables that never warded off carcinogens we inhabit this celebration of death around, lives limp trudging cheap like my shopping list in Arabic hummus and cherries I will later devour that plastic mop I seek to buy for my fathers ancient home. Who could clean away twenty five years of sadness? Who could bring back a country with polish, even if you rubbed hands septic, raw, tattered but still writing. Who could wipe away Falastine? Yasmine? I walk. None of the men know me. Here is the hairdresser who still runs his business, in me forever transactions committed in the name of honor. Now they have weddings, Thursday night evenings of mirth, that flirting with luster, poor Damascus girls out, flitting smiling from hidden lives at the tossed curls and fringes the boys ache in capture. Girls that hide the new peroxide do under the same veil their mother inherited. Girls that preen on balconies for the first brown eyed suitor to bring life to these dusty streets. My feet trudge. Here it is. Here is the hairdresser. His name is Omar. He probably has grey hair now where I once saw youth, where I remember a black beard. I remember. A room. A bedroom. A kind man with blades that shear. Its going to fall off anyway, might as well take it all off in one go. Brave brave Palestinian woman who saw beauty beyond eye shadow shades and hair curlers, beyond even breasts and ovaries, beyond even the memory of a uterus all that bleeding she bequeathed. Yasmine, your beauty remains beyond the gnawing at your skin. Beyond all the disrepair of me and your curls in tears. Its going to fall off anyway, you repeated as we saw -chop chop chop the future slicedmight as well take it all off in one go.

Omar visits, my mothers hair is on the floor, her green pool eyes are dense and quiet and filled with underwater matter we could never since unearth could never kiss clean. My mothers hair is on the floor, I must remember how kind he was to come to our home and witness a sacred rite no one else should see. I walk past this beauty parlor of fears. Inside women chew gum, discuss new nail polish colors they must try, how to keep hair supple and soft under hot dryers, how to soothe the stricken face, their grandmothers secret recipe for whiter skin whiter teeth, blonder hair bigger breasts, and on and on the pageant rampages, until I am one day toothless and worn and barren and bare. Until the memory of my mothers wild hair shorn, is also dust in these streets. I walk, the door of the hairdresser is closed. I do not open it. I will never open it. Behind it, Damascus women hide and cackle and smoke and drink Turkish coffee as they inhale hair dye and eyes blotted, discuss the distance of their husbands. Sighing, blow drying finger nails that yearn to clutch. I walk, Omars hands gently clip off another layer of my mother happy. I walk, and I buy that mop buy some cherries stain red of all that once was. For eternity, barber scissors bear witness to sorrow harvested decades bottled deep and safe in cellars of all that is too late the crevices of old homes and alleys the dust billowing in unwelcoming spaces the small things heralding loss looming, the closed door frames that still usher death in. Your curls adorn the wind, the edges of all light, may the angels write you poems of love.

The ineptitude of my education in dealing with loss.

Dubai, 30/03/2011 I was never good at math. You did this, then I did that, then you did this, then equations of differentiation, inert. How all this addition of time and hands that clenched is summed up in a hole, abyss. Subtraction. I was never good at science. You touched me, and cells awakened, and I touched you, and the earth still moved. How all this physical matter resulted in combustion, leaving pulverized steam I once loved to lick off your skin, now a world away. I was never good I was never good at business, you gave this, and then I gave that, and you took again, and again and kept the fists open for gifts I never knew were precious. How all this benediction left us bereft, my waist a hollow sphere of a foreign bank notes, useless. But I was always good with words. And you, never with listening. How the letters of our language fell dead on this gravesite of knowledge a dictionary once termed love.