Goodnight My Heart, Goodbye

My mother was visiting this weekend, and when she read one of my posts, she asked, “What is the difference between blogging and journaling?”

(I do both.)

Temporarily at a loss for words, I said, “Blogging is public.” This being the most general distinction I could think of.

Incidentally, I also saw Julie & Julia this weekend, a movie about another blogger who also went to Amherst College (who got a book deal from her blog at the tender age of 30. Take that, ego!). This particular blogger, Julie, has a conversation partway through her blogging project with her husband in which he accuses her of acting narcissistic. “What is blogging,” she answers, “But me, me, me?”

I’m not sure if that was my intention, writing this, writing here. Maybe this is just a soapbox I couldn’t give myself any other way. I believe that when I set out I had something to say; I also believe that I wasn’t quite sure what that was. And sure – I’ve found myself in these posts. It may be that was the only point. I do hope, however, that it was interesting, or reassuring, or entertaining, to someone, somewhere. And not just because I was in your life to begin with. But that’s my fantasy – it doesn’t have to come true.

And now we confront the matter at hand. I’m not very good with goodbyes. I often wonder at this – why I don’t let people and things float in and out of my like so many dandelion seeds on a warm breeze. I hate it; it feels tragic, sad. And there are all different kinds of goodbyes. Temporary, permanent, cordial, warm, loving, icy. And – there is death. And this one – this one I am not used to.

I have – I had – a cat. Short sentence, right? It’s not a big word, like “daughter,” or “brother.” Just a small word. Cat. She died exactly one week ago – just this time of night, actually. It was a bizarre, fast accident. I took her to a friend’s apartment; the newness of it scared her; she became so frightened that her heart stopped beating. And like that, laying on one of my towels, with both of my hands in her fur, with my voice in her ear, she died. I had no idea that such a thing was possible until it had already happened and I was listening to my syncopated sobs in the car as we rushed to the vet. She was four, her name was Nutmeg, and she picked me – not the other way around.

She was black, striped with brown, and smaller than a can of soup when we met. She looked up at me, bit the end of my finger in what felt like a kiss, and we’ve been together ever since. Except now, of course.

Someone told me recently that love is letting someone take care of you. I didn’t think about it much at the time. But in the days after her death, I looked at all her things – her bed (which she loved, even though she had long outgrown it), her brush, her food, her bowls, her collar, her toys, everything – piled forlornly there. These were all things I bought for her out of the little money I had – with which I thought I was taking care of her. Sometimes, in this 95 degree weather, I thought love could be measured by four-pound bags of cat food and ten-pound bags of litter carried home. And Nutmeg never carried my food home. She never cooked me breakfast, fed me at three in the morning, brushed my hair, or cleaned up after my mess, all of which I frequently did for her. I thought I was the caretaker – but watching myself this past week, I’m not so sure.

Because this is me without her: I can’t walk into my apartment without bursting into tears. When I hear a sound, I turn around and expect to see her there. When she isn’t, I weep. I hate the quiet. I hate that I can write this post without having to look over a tail that is trying to get my attention.

I live alone. Alone alone, Jerry Maguire alone – but I didn’t feel like that until today. I never planned to live alone alone, and I don’t want to – yet here I am, in the quiet. It turns out that there is a huge difference between living alone with a cat and living alone with plants. Then again, it could be just me. If you’ve been reading, you’ve probably realized that there is almost nothing – nothing – that has not changed about my life in the past four years. There was only one constant: Nutmeg. I took her home from the pound about a month after graduating from college. We drove across the country together. We have lived together all the time that I have not been abroad. I do not live with a sibling or a parent or a husband or a child. My roommates have changed. My city has changed. My profession has changed. My religion has changed. And through all of that, she was the one line I could draw without picking up my pen. She, well, stuck by me. Nutmeg was my person. She was my someone. My life changed, but our relationship never did. She missed me when I wasn’t home, and every time my key went in the door she ran to me, mewling like I’d left her for a hundred years. Then she would trot back into the apartment and collapse dramatically on her favorite spot on the rug, and yowl until I dropped everything in my hands, knelt down, and hugged and kissed her.

There is something meaningful about a life witnessed and cared about. Something sweet, something mundanely astonishing. And pets do this. They make us feel like it matters whether or not we come home at night. They make us feel loved unconditionally. They make us feel that there is nothing we could do to make them stop loving us so desperately. (Not that we would. Just look at them.) They make us feel special and irreplaceable – our taste, our smell, is the wind in their sails – and it never gets old. They make us feel as though we complete a world – as though without us, the magic would drain out of  their lives. And for this, they receive our unbreakable love – a thing we bestow cautiously. They are, in a word, family. The best kind: loyal, cherished. They are not human, no – but to a person who truly loves her pet, this does not diminish the relationship at all.

So what does a poor human do when she is left by such a companion – not by choice, but by fate? As far as I can tell, there isn’t much of a salve for this sort of wound. It heals, eventually – sort of. It’s not like life is better this way, ever – just that the missing part starts to feel normal. And in the meantime, I guess, you walk a fine line. Yes, it hurts – it kills – to look up from your keyboard and see the lint roller covered in her hair, and to know that one of these days, you’re going to have to use it, and then you’ll never see the lint roller covered in black hair again.. Or to look at your rug and think this needs to be vacuumed, but then decide to put it off for another day, because once you vacuum it, the spot where she used to lie will be clean forever, and she will be that much more gone from your life. Or to find her toy that she chased into the corner by the laundry, pick it up, stare at it, and stuff it deep in the pile because you can neither look at it, nor throw it away. Or to think of how it felt when she rubbed her cheek on your cheek, and to know that the specificity of that memory, like the shape of her face and the silky rubber texture of her paws, will fade, and in time she will be more of a feeling than a set of particular images or sounds. But you think of these things, even though they hurt – because you have them. You still have them. And for the moment, having them, so vividly, so clearly, and so painfully that you know your life has had some little magic in it, is more important than being able to finish the dishes without crying.

Habiba.

New girl

So I haven’t really been writing. I know. There are reasons. Maybe good, maybe nonexistent. Please see post below.

There is much self-censoring that goes into being the new girl, if you are (charmingly?) neurotic like me. You’re in a new city doing new things and having new experiences with new people, so yeah – there’s a lot to say. But it’s not that simple. Maybe I’ll say the wrong thing about a new place. Maybe my gripes are petty. Maybe my observations are baseless. And so on. I have a whole mental file cabinet overflowing with reasons to not say whatever it was that seemed important until I sat down to write. So I have waited, and waited, and waited for something both interesting and wildly general to post. There is no such statement.

It occurred to me while riding the subway home this evening that, after a fashion, I write best, and most, about loneliness. I suppose that this comes as no surprise. A girl who grows up with three siblings and a gaggle of parent/grandparent-type figures isn’t built for single life, convert life, twentysomething life, life in a new city, or any combination of the aforementioned afflictions.

So yes, I admit it: life is somewhat lonely here. I feel oddly guilty about not having greater, or more, adventures on my own (and furthermore, admitting as much to you, whoever you are), but that was never really my style. I’m a friend person. A girlfriend-type. Whatever way you choose to put it, my best adventures are had with my near and dear. On my own, I mostly read and write. This keeps me perfectly happy, but it’s not very tempting fodder for my facebook friends.

And I guess this is what gets me about my newness. It’s not that there’s nothing happening; there is. There is lots happening. But it’s not very exciting, most of the time. I’m not romping around the most exquisite scenery having my mind blown by every single new acquaintance I have. Mostly, I slink into the backdrop of scene-y sheesha joints while other people tell each other fantastic stories, discuss common friends, or talk about business. Not having ever worked for a for-profit company, not knowing the right people, and not having adventured lately in South America or the subcontinent, I’m conversationally impaired.

My square-peg-round-hole problem isn’t unfamiliar. It’s the lot of the new girl, unless she is one of those rarely gifted people who makes friends out of anyone and everyone in five minutes. I am not this girl. I am the girl who hogs the sheesha even while she hates herself, because while she is smoking, there is no obligation to make conversation with her neighbors. I am the girl who looks pretty enough to exclaim over, but is a little too hippie-hijabi-student chic to be adopted by any of the female elders of the tribe. Worst of all, I am the girl who pays so much attention to her own misfittedness that she doesn’t pay a writer’s attention to the scene around her (that would require looking up, you understand). I am the girl who waits to be spoken to, waits to make friends, waits for school to start. Surely, this will solve all of my problems – because being (probably) the only hijabi (and almost certainly the only white one) in a class of 750 will make me feel right at home. No. Sweat.

Now I feel all kinds of better.

Still, as much as it is true that I am often the only white Muslim in a group, or the only Muslim in a group, it is not the sum of my demographics alone that makes me, well, different. There are other white Muslims (I’m related to one of them). And there are other hijabis and other law students and other everythings. I can’t just be stuck in a room with another convert and become besties with that person in an afternoon. It’s not that simple – thank God. There is a personal chemistry that makes relationships special and unique – and often renders whatever it was that made us feel out of place a moment ago irrelevant. Of course, the more worlds you place between two people, the harder it is to spin solace in the space between them. But it’s possible to grow up in the same house as someone and end up as strangers – common background doesn’t always translate to common ground.

Maybe that’s the confusing part. There isn’t exactly a predictive pattern to this. What has bonded me to those I have loved best is some constellation of shared ideas, shared experiences, care, respect, compassion, and admiration. Sometimes it is almost all shared ideas and almost no compassion. Sometimes it is lots of respect and no shared experience. But whatever the case is, it’s not something that any one outward thing predicts. Yes, I occasionally feel out of place when I notice that I’m the only white person in sight – but only if I’m not with friends. More often, I feel sore-thumbish in a throng of white people.

I have a love-hate relationship with the mystery of bonding, to tell you the truth. On the one hand, it makes my world a far more beautiful and varied place; I may love someone dearly, fiercely, and yet still be surprised by his/her differentness after five or more years. The inability to discover everything about my friends who have been raised in different countries, or in vastly different cultures than my own, is sweet – not bitter. But it does make finding these people difficult. How am I to know what to look for? I’m not even sure I know precisely what it was that made me me. Does every experience contribute equally? Does my year in Egypt weigh more or less than other years? And what about being a convert? Does the significance of this fade with time, or is it a constant – some part of my identity that is immutably important? I haven’t picked myself apart enough to know.

This time around I find myself lacking in pearls of wisdom. The only thing I know for sure is that I’m not particularly adept at being new – if there is such a skill. I tell myself that the trick is not to lose faith in the face of difficulty. Part of preciousness is rarity. Just because every place and person isn’t as magical as the last, doesn’t mean that I’m a social leper or anything. No one fits the same everywhere. And it is often what is difficult that shapes us into something we weren’t sure we could become.

Hi Boys

That peace sign is more than enough salaam, thanks...

Dear Boys:

Please I would appreciate it greatly if you would not hit on me. Please. I realize that it is possible that my loud eye-makeuped, skinny-jeaned, laugh-out-loud-while-texting, nail-biting-while-reading-Howard-Zinn, boom-swagger-swagger, big-earinged, bescarfed person is some variety of charming, or mysterious. Or even tempting. That’s even kind of on purpose, I won’t lie to you.

Nevertheless, I am taking this opportunity to ask you – tell you – to please ignore the fact. Once upon a time I was a dowdy, buck-toothed, frizzy-haired twelve-year-old in overalls. Just pretend that’s still true.

If you happen to see me laughing while on the phone with a friend walking down the street, or reading a book of philosophy next to you in a cafe, or strolling with my parents, for God’s sake don’t mention how cute I am doing any of those things. Or whatever adjective happens to come to mind. It would be nice if you just kept that to yourself.

And if you have half a care, definitely don’t ask if I want more coffee.

You should pay all of these little advices – entreatments – a great deal more mind if you happen to be charming. Or good-looking. Or a little bit hipster. Or nerdy. Or vegetarian. Or you ride a bike. Or you have some kind of interesting career. Or a nice low beard. Or – God forbid – all of the above. Just keep a nice, generous distance. Over there behind the bushes where I’m unlikely to notice that you exist. I appreciate your effort.

The problem with you not following any of this (or all of this) advice is that, well, I like you. I’ve liked you for a long time. In fact, I don’t think I remember a time when I didn’t like boys. I’m a big, devoted fan.

Nevertheless:  It stops right here.

Look, fine, okay, I get it, you like me back. We’ve established that. And, really, it’s flattering. And look, if things were different, your efforts would probably pay off a lot more. But things being as they are, this good, bescarfed, laughing girl is trying to stay just that: good. Y’hear? And you all don’t make it easy, with all your beards and t-shirts and eyeing me all the time. I can’t handle it, dig? A girl can only take so much.

I’ve given you your chance. I think if you examine the record you will find that I have been more than fair. I’ve spent years looking all kinds of cute, letting you hit on me in whatever venue you choose, and I’ve been responsive, Lord knows. So don’t tell me that you haven’t had your day in the sun. But it ends here.

I have my reasons. It’s not really personal. Actually it’s not personal at all. I just need some me time. Kinda like Fergie.

Look. I don’t know if it’s the way I was raised, or if it was my extremely dysfunctional first boyfriend, or any other of the plethora of things that could have mussed up a nice girl’s psyche coming of age in the late 90’s and early 00’s, but – I don’t insist on enough. And I like you. Too much.

The problem with me and you, frankly, is that I’m very good at you. On average, you are less adept at me. Meaning…meaning what. Meaning some girls are the girls that give girls a bad name. Some girls are crazy and high-maintenance and nagging and picky and helpless…except when you can’t find a parking spot, and they suddenly turn into Parking Space Backseat Hawks. Then there are the nice girls. You have nothing bad to say about them. Nobody has anything bad to say about them. They’re kind of girls you take home to meet your mother. And there is the third type. Rarer than the first two by far; this small, magical sisterhood manages to redeem the word “girl” for the masses, never to be lost to the ranks of insult. Purely because we are fascinating, you crave our company, and you always will. I am of this third category. You laugh; it is no small feat, let me tell you. There’s a reason most of us don’t turn out like that.

So before we sit back and celebrate, or admire, just how rare and alluring a flower I really am, let’s talk about you for a second. Or rather, me and you. Me with you.

One of the setbacks of engineering with this whole extraordinary-and-rare-woman system is that we are, by nature, low-maintenance. And usually optimistic. So you say something; we believe your word. Whatever world you spin up for us the first chance you get, we believe wholeheartedly that it is real. It takes a lot of reality not being that way for us to realize that we may have been a bit rash.

So you see, we have a problem. I believe you. You come all kinds of charming and tell me how sweet I look laughing or you earnestly want to know if I’ve discovered the secret to life in that book I’m buried in…you know what? I don’t have much armor to defend myself from these attacks. I was so busy all this time paying attention to myself and whether or not I was reasonable, or patient, or kind, or friendly, or whatever – I forget to pay attention to your end of things. And of course you’ve mastered charming. Who hasn’t? You know how to say a lot of pretty things. And I’m pretty, so I make it extra super easy for you.

But I’ve wised up, and I’m here to tell you so. It’s not that you’re not good guys. I’m sure you are, down to the very last one. But I have things to take care of. I’ve got to move, and get ready for law school, and then I’ve got to kick a lot of butt while I’m there. And I have to be writing the whole time. I don’t have time to be messing around wondering whether or not you are objectively worthy of one of the most extra special varieties of woman postmodernity has cooked up. That takes a lot of mental gymnastics. And, let’s be real, you had your chance. I’ve been an un-law student for many a year now. And…my defenses are, quite frankly, down.

So you just stop before you utter a single word, and look away, and find some other super woman to be your girlfriend. I hereby drop out of the running. And hey – thanks.

Ever not-yours,

Muppie

‘Tween time

Tick. Tock.

Readers, welcome to May. Erm, almost-May. Almost-finals, almost-graduation, almost-summer. Almost life. Welcome to your almost-life, shining like a thousand diamonds just on the horizon. Trying to take your eyes away to tend to the task at hand? Good luck with that.

Here’s the issue with fantasies, plans, and the future: they loom there, teasing you, like a finger in your ear while you’re trying to sleep. It’s impossible. While the time ticks and ticks and ticks away, and whatever it is that you’re supposed to be doing, or were supposed to finish by last Tuesday, is sitting there gathering dust on your desktop, you are gazing off into the distance like a second-semester senior in American History. It’s bad. Life is happening without you.

Here’s the academic term: termination. Other names include senior slack, senioritis, slacking, lackadaisical sitting, time suckage, apathy.

Here’s what’s really happening: as a part of grieving, or processing the end (at least, perhaps we don’t really grieve things like the end of high school or leaving a job we hate…) of your current situation, you are carrying out iterations of The End in your head. This usually coincides with The Beginning of something else – possibly something more interesting, more exciting, more pleasing, or hopefully all three. So instead of thinking about all the things you might miss, you’re constructing, or dwelling on, things to look forward to.

We’ll take me for the moment. I could sit here, during my last 10.2 days of work, thinking about how much I’m going to miss my “Converts Rock” sign that hangs above my desk, or weeping over the pictures that the little girls at the mosque have drawn for me, or waving wistfully to Mr Bojangles (the mouse, shhhhh don’t tell the locals) every time he skitters by hoping to snatch a bit of my food. I could come teary-eyed to staff meetings and shed a single tear at every one of my remaining meetings and speaking engagements. I could bake for everyone. I could stay late soaking in the books at my desk. I mean, I could. In theory.

Here’s what I do instead: I Craigslist apartments in Washington, DC, and spend more time on gchat than any sane human should under normal circumstances. I drink too much coffee and probably don’t eat enough – or at least eat all of the wrong things. I don’t cook. I clean – perhaps out of a desire to have a somewhat ordered life to pack up – I let myself come into work at 11:30 and leave at 3. I daydream about tulips in DC, about the green, green summer, about having all the free time in the world, about all of the things that I want to do and have never done. I mentally catalog the people I want to spend my summer with and how I can make that happen, and the mellowest way of living at home at 27 and driving neither my parents nor myself insane. I try to calculate how many new shelves I will have to purchase in order to negotiate law school materials, and I wonder what proportion of my wardrobe can be carried over into the law classroom, the office, the court. I wonder about whether to keep my tiny, creaky bed or buy a newer, softer, bigger one. I try to put the novels I plan on reading this summer into some sort of order. I’m making a list of cities to visit, shows to see. I think of everything I could ever want a new city and a new life to provide; all the things I plan on leaving looooooooong behind in Boston; every work situation I will hope to avoid after leaving this desk. There is no end to these dreams. I dream them at work, in the car, walking, at night. Fantasy is creeping up on my reality, and slowly but surely, it is taking over.

This is what the inside of my mind looks like right now. I know, I wish I lived here too.

There are upsides. A lot of upsides. The chance to reinvent oneself – or at the very least, one’s life – doesn’t come every day. Life changes, these shifts – changes of job, location, a new school, a new path – these are precious things to be seized. How many people float through life never given a choice – never taking stock of what they have, and how it measures up against what they wanted, or what they want, what they dream about? There are a million chances to give up, to give in to stagnation, to let the tiny compromises of every single day eat up whatever it was we would have grabbed at instantly, at another time, another age, under slightly different circumstances.

Like, hmmm. Like what. Ok, like this shift that I’m negotiating for the next few months – that is, job-in-Boston-to-no-job-chilling-at-home-with-Mom&Dad-to-law-school-probably-but-not-definitely-in-DC. It’s all of a sudden real: I can cocoon myself in rural Massachusetts for the next few months and emerge the person I’ve wanted to be all along. Or I can squandor this time, oblivious to the future, throwing it to the wind, come what may. I can not think very hard about what I’m doing next and whether or not it will get me what I want in 5, 10, 15, 20 years – or I can remain very cognisant of the path ahead as I carve this smaller, more myopic one. I get to leave behind as much as I want – I get to completely reinvent myself, if I want to. It happens that I don’t want to. Not completely. But it’s nice to know that I could, and no one (well, maybe one person) in Washington would know that I haven’t been this way all along. I have what everyone in a mid-life crisis wants: Walk Away Insurance.

This is the most extreme, most expensive liability coverage one can purchase for a rental car. I have a lawyer-friend who made this up. It’s for extreme situations. Extreme needing-to-change-things situations. Basically you can leave the rental care behind you in an enormous ball of flames, walk away, and pay zero. You can walk away from everything and not look back. It’s cushy, that Walk Away Insurance. And I have it. And I’m trying to decide what to do with it.

Instead of working. Of course, it is 4:15 on a Friday afternoon, and it’s by far the most beautiful day of 2009 Boston has seen to date. So you know. Big thoughts. I can’t be confined to this office.

A good day to walk away.

So here’s to new beginnings, peeps. They’re worth a good toast and a daydream besides.

RIP Kurt Cobain

Hmmm, this is interesting. I am now the same age that Kurt Cobain was when he died, meaning, to my seventh-grade self, that I am now A Grown Up. He was married and had a kid called Frances and a wildly successful band and a talent for grunge and hanging from chandeliers, so, you know, he was way ahead of me in a lot of ways. I remember thinking that he was young and charming in that depressive, angsty, poetical way (so I have a thing). But I also remember thinking that he had an adult life and an adult existence – however muddled by riches, fame, a rockstar lifestyle and an ample supply of intoxicants. Still.

I am also the same age that Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin were when they died. Janis had, like, a gravelly voice. A grown-up voice. A weathered voice. Again, I don’t think of either of them as old – these tragedies are particulary poignant because it seems that all of these people bid the world farewell at the height of their beauty, creativity, youth, and potential. But they were at the beginning of something, and that something was a proper adult life, a career, a long string of a story.

This is the beginning of my story: in our nation’s capital, the tulips and magnolias are blooming. I’m a few blocks from Capitol Hill, stealing Kevin’s seat next to Jane in Crim Law. I’m walking through a throng of Grateful Dead fans in Chinatown and watching my most favorite president drive by Jane’s apartment building with his entourage of guards. I’m drinking coffee in a cushy armchair at Tryst and learning where the good farmer’s markets are. I’m meeting Con Law professors who say things like, “You should come. We’ll, like, hang out and stuff.” I’m getting my drinks paid for and being stared at like a woman (instead of a zoo specimen). I’m being told that students interested in research and writing are sought after by their professors. And I can make it to Friday prayers at Capitol Hill.

But adults don’t make decisions based on stuff like that. They are rational. Whatever that means.

This is the first thing that happened: I walked into the building that houses the admissions office to go say hello and get the pitch (only fair to get all the pitches; a girl has to compare apples with apples). So I walk into the atrium and I’m looking for the elevator and my eyes happen – just happen – to fall upon a boy in skinny jeans, Chuck Taylors, and pretty magnificent chops. And all I think is: I belong here.

But that is not how adults make decisions.

So I go up to admissions and meet the director and blah blah she’s telling me about the curriculum. She has a surprisingly weak pitch for someone supposed to woo, but no matter. I have already been wooed by Biker Boy downstairs. I call Jane.

[Jane and I lived roughly five doors apart our freshman year of college. We came to DC together to protest Bush's inauguration (last time I was here, actually...). We did a lot of theater together, and worked on building the college's chapter of Students for Tibet. I drank my first mojito with Jane.]

She walks over to where I’m sitting. Her hair is slightly longer; there is a handful of grey strands I can spot when I hug her. She is thinner than she was freshman year (aren’t we all). She’s in a grey sweater dress, black stockings, and exactly the kind of slouchy black boots i like. A colorful scarf is wound around her neck. Other than the five grey hairs and her sveltitude, she looks exactly the same. I’m amazed. I can’t help but wonder: will my reaction be the same if I see her in another ten years?

She is warm, totally open, as though I’m not wearing a scarf over my hair. Or I was wearing one the last time she saw me, instead of short hair and two piercings on my face. Or like there’s no difference. It doesn’t really matter – in any case, it’s nice to meet an old friend who doesn’t look, just for a second, like I’ve caught Plague. Her friends are similarly unwary and unphased, at least apparently. I feel like I can breathe, like I am taken for granted – or it is taken for granted that I belong here just as much as everyone else. I don’t feel like I need to defend myself at all. I don’t feel prickly. People feed me candy and eat my cake without asking. It’s fantastic, like finding childhood friends you never knew you had.

In the midst of a Crim Law lecture I receive an email from my dream, my first choice, my long shot: denied. Ah well. It still hurts a little, of course, some register somewhere that I am not, after all, a person who commands the admissions process; I am a person at its mercy. It could mean that I’m not as together or as smart or as accomplished as I’d like or as other people are, or it could mean none of these things. It just sucks not to be wanted – even when I’m not wanting back.

But adults take this in stride. They take a deep breath and listen to the fallout of Miranda, because they are here to learn, not to nurse a bruised ego.

And like an adult, like the older student I will be, God willing, I venture out from campus and seek out the cooler places in the city. In one of these I meet a man one of my best friends once wanted to set me up with, only to realize that he would, in fact, be a total disaster. Not because he’s bad. Just because he’s an F-sharp to my G. We don’t sound good together, we’re awkward to touch at the same time, it’s just bad all over. This too rolls off my back like so many drops of water, which feels good; it’s not some reawakened-and-lost dream, it’s just guy #3,287,394 I’m not that into. Who could be a friend.

All in all, it feels like I’m stepping out of a cage I didn’t even know I was in. Thank God.

I get back on a plane to a life that barely still exists. Destiny awaits, taking hold of my heart, pointing it south. I want to ask Kurt if this is a legitimate way of choosing a life: observing my heart’s compass, and setting out.

Black swan

You know that you are a black swan and not an ugly duckling for a few reasons:

1. You’re older than most of the other ducklings, so it’s unlikely that your feathers are still downy.

2. You don’t look like anybody else.

3. You are looked at, but not necessarily with disdain. Interest, primarily.

4. Nobody talks to you.

The lovely, graceful, original misfit.

It’s an old-new feeling. This is a new kind of minority, or you are experiencing your otherness to a greater degree. You are a minority with an explanation point. It’s not a bad thing, really. Just different.

Everyone else seems to have made friends with each other and made a final decision, but you are not so bold – or maybe you forgot to drink the kool-aid. Or maybe they didn’t give it to you because you are, after all, too ridiculously out of place. A sore thumb is only one of ten; you’re one of hundreds. Even the admissions office didn’t realize you were actually coming until you stood before them, in flesh and hijab, hoping for a t-shirt like the rest of the pre-Ls.

It’s not so bad. More than ever, you realize that you are school-bound to study, and you will need to study more than you ever have before. If you continue to be The Visible Invisible Woman to your classmates, it’ll only be that much easier to spend you life in the library – which looks like Hogwarts, so that shouldn’t be so bad. You envision yourself the Hermione of the incoming class – nerdy, ambitious, a little over-eager – the only difference will be that instead of a frizzy mop of hair, yours is ensconced neatly under a pretty scarf. Either way, you’ve missed an important social cue.

You try. During a faculty panel, you raise your hand and call yourself an “aspiring con law superdork,” and they all laugh. That’s a good start. If you’re going to be strange, you might as well be strange and funny; they may still hold you at arm’s length, but at least they’ll be tepidly fond of your presence. You’re good at this, you tell yourself. A year of public speaking experience won’t go to waste. This is what you do: you win people over despite themselves. You’ve just never had to live-work-breathe-study with your audience before.

Two potential classmates introduce themselves. One needs to look at your schedule; the other has spent two years living in the Middle East, so you’re a familiar sight. Around you, they take each other to coffee and compare grades from junior year, or maybe biceps. They have matching jeans and shoes and probably the same hairdryer. Many of them have that Midwest accent you’re starting to hear: their a’s have more i in them. This is not to say that they are cookie-cutters of each other. They are individuals too; they just have identifiable things that can be shared over the course of a weekend. They feel familiar to each other. You’re a purple peacock in comparison: something that is not found in their natural habitat, though not inconceivable given the subtleties of postmodern identity. You miss the East Coast.

(Where are the men in beards? The girls with skinny jeans and messenger bags? Is there a divey cafe anywhere? Bueller? Bueller?)

So you finish your novel, you chat with the faculty, and long neverendingly for a cigarette. It’s the beginning of a new beginning, one you have longed for, one from which you cannot, will not, be dissuaded. Maybe you’re just different. Maybe you’re blowing everything out of proportion. Maybe you’re even special. Maybe in 20 years there will be a hundred future yous parading through your office, drinking in the solace of the path you’ve trailblazed for them…that would be a nice ending to this story.

In any case, you’re sitting alone in an airport in Philly with a dead phone and nothing but your black swan blog to shore you up for the long days that lay between you and the promising future. Curtain up…

Lucyloo

I am not prepared for this. I walk in thinking that I will perform the mandatory coo and then walk out, serenely immutable. Life has other plans for me, as it usually does.

I’m an obvious baby-greeter: card, flowers for Mom; wrapped gift for Big Sis, and an unwrapped teddy bear for Baby are all somehow balanced in my arms as I ask for Maternity. I’m pointed down the hall: fourth floor.

And I open the door and there they are: my beautiful sister, alone again in her body, exhausted, holding something that is far too small to be a person. I’m surprised by how little she is, as I always am. She’s a good pound bigger than her sister was at 15 hours old, and that’s a lot when you weigh seven pounds. But she’s simply too tiny.

“Hey! Come meet Lucy,” my sister says in the slanted afternoon light.

I dump everything everywhere, descarf, unjacket, fling sunglasses and clamber onto the half-raised hospital bed. Lucy, meet Lizzy. My sister hands her over.

She weighs less than my cat by a long shot. She doesn’t frown, really, just barely squirms or adjusts for a second as she settles into my smaller arms. My sister doesn’t think she looks like anyone, but instantly I’m thinking that she reminds me of baby pictures of my sister that I’ve memorized. Her lips are like her sister’s. Her eyelashes, tucked up tight in her swollen newborn lids, are pale. Her eyebrows barely make a shadow on her forehead. One hand is peeking out the top of her cocooned blanket, the nails long and square and soft, never touched by anything. Each finger slowly curls around my pinky if I touch it to her palm, as though it’s automatic. Affection is easy, instinctive.

I was expecting to draw every analogy between Lucy’s arrival and the rest of ours, but sitting there on the bed, I don’t. I smell her, sweet, and it takes me about an hour to rack up the courage to kiss that flower-petal skin. I’m afraid I’ll break her.

Why are babies the easiest things in the world to love? I love her. She’s never spoken to me, or at this point even looked at me – I don’t even know what color her eyes are. She won’t know my name for months, maybe a year, maybe more if I go far away to school – and I love her. I forget myself with Lucy in my arms, and find myself thanking God after I hand her back to her mother that I don’t have kids yet.

She has a feel, which is more than the newborn feel, and I’ve either forgotten about this or I’m clueless because she’s really only the second baby I’ve ever met still in-hospital. Adalee was a showgirl even then; she was full of faces, smiles, she stared at us like she didn’t like how much we were staring at her. Lucy feels…calm, steady, and I realize that there’s a soul in this body, that she’s already a person with a fate and talents and interests. A person I don’t know yet. She’s so quiet and good-natured, so easy, so unassumingly accepting of all the caresses we are offering, so uncomplaining, that I imagine she will become the shy sister, the bookish one. At some point she opens her eyes and we all race to catch a glimpse, but she blinks quickly, as though the dim inside of the maternity ward is too much to take in, as though the world is overwhelming.

I am engulfed by a desire to take her and tuck her somewhere safe, where the world is slow and dark, and brightness can be negotiated in stages. Why? She has parents. She’s not my kid. There is a whole family, so many people we have here, to love her and cuddle her and make her feel like the specialest center of the world there ever was. It’s not my job. I don’t know why I feel so in love with her. Is it some parahormonal function of being a woman? Is this what I felt last time? I don’t think so; but memory is a funny thing. It moves to conform to the present.

And this child, this Lucyloo, in my arms, with almost-my name, she feels like tranquility in a blanket. I was once told that the reason we bond so swiftly and lovingly to some and just never feel as enthralled by others is that some souls were created nearer to each other. Souls that were close to each other in the beginning retain some cosmic affinity – they find each other here on earth and click, they are bonded to each other, they love each other unreasonably, they long for each other’s company. And others, they may be perfectly amiable or charming, perfectly beautiful or moral or interesting, but it’s like silk on silk – you just touch and slip off one another, taken by some other breeze. The Near Souls, you stick to them like velcro. One touch, and you’re going to have to rip yourself off. It doesn’t happen on its own.

I wonder how we tell this. Sometimes it becomes apparent later…short friendships that were too comfortable to explain, the only people we ever let hold our hands indefinitely, people who let us be ourselves before we even knew who that was. We look back on these marvels later, or those around us look in and say: bizarre. Sometimes, and this is hard, you realize it as it’s happening, a steeping of your heart in this new color that you know is going to stain. The moments are intoxicating, they are vibrant, you feel like something special is happening to you, that you’ve been selected for some extraordinary sensation that the rest of humanity cannot know or understand. It feels unreal, dizzying. This is what it’s like to hold this child, my niece. She feels like home.

What life lies in wait for her, this quiet one? Will life be kind to her, gentle, because hers is an embered glow? Prayers are pouring out of me as I watch her in the space between sleeping and waking. May this life be to you, Lucyloo, as extraordinary and pleasant as it was for me to meet you. Let me deposit you back in your tired mother’s arms. Visiting hours ended an hour ago. I have work tomorrow.

I’m unnecessarily worried, agitated, for the drive home. The city suddenly feels insignificant; 93 is in freefall. The apartment is quiet, the doors are shut, the kitchen light out.

Proof

There are three of us, and a fourth orange chair-plus-desk sits empty to our left. It’s life at the bottom of a well this next hour; we’re looking out at a modest mostly-if-not-totally Muslim audience. We’re here to tell our stories: the tall, white redheaded brother, the punkish hijabi in a ripped jean skirt and All-Stars, the blue-eyed first grade teacher in black abaya.

I never know what I’m going to say at these things. How many times have I told “my story”? Dozens? More than a hundred? It’s always slightly different. I don’t know why. Every time I omit something else, or leave out what feels like a whole pile of important details – and have some new thing that is central to the story. Today it turns out to be the story of Islam coming and finding me, and taking hold of my heart, and dragging me, kicking and screaming (partying and piercing?) into the world of Islam. I hear myself telling it as though it’s one unified string of events and nothing else belongs in the narrative. But you can’t lay out your life at the feet of strangers in a 15-minute span. A heart can’t fit in that space.

I’m the middle person in the panel. It goes like this: The Scientist (The Rational Surveyor of Tradition), The Reluctant Believer (The Dancer), The Born-Believer. So the ginger-haired boy who inspected every religious tradition for truth and Truth precedes me. I speak next, the free spirit who lived in the same house as a Muslim for almost a decade before she noticed that she belonged to the same religion, who would get drunk and declare that she needed God (though of course I omit this) and declare things along the lines of, “I will never become Muslim if Muslims can’t have dogs,” and ask things like, “But can I still dance?” I finish, disturbed by how moved I always become when I describe the choice I felt I was making when I became Muslim (in one hand, the world; in the other, a relationship with God….), make the sign of the horns and tell them, “Never look back, right?” They laugh. I’m glad they do. It puts my feet back on the ground.

Rock hard, Mozlems. Rock. Hard.

And then there is the girl after me. In a quiet voice, she describes a shy child who imagined sleeping in the hand of God and said the shahada for the first time at fifteen, stirring pasta sauce alone in a midwestern kitchen.

And that’s it: three converts. Three stories. Three souls in three safety nets, still swinging above the spikes of a purposeless existence, praying the net holds. And as we’re swinging in our orange chairs, before the enraptured faces of those born into a safer web built by generations of their forbears, I realize that we’re a proof of the very thing we hold dearest.

Because here we are: male and female, gregarious and introverted, tall and short; punk and put-together, bearded and hijabed, intuitive and intellectual. We are dancers and musicians and engineers; we are religion majors and science geeks; we are married and single; we are wild and we are tame; we are gentle and we are rough; we are soft and we are loud. And all three of us walked some winding road to here: in this classroom, at this university, in these chairs – the embracers of this religion, this Islam, this precious hot coal burning into our palms all the time that we will not let go. We’re all three here. For three different reasons, with a multitude of different struggles.

All three of us say the same thing: the story we’ve just told? It’s only the beginning.

Safe journeys, ye travelers!

Hot hipster lovin’

Saturday morning in a Somerville cafe: in stroll the hipsters. They come for the open doors, the walls covered in art, the outdoor patio and killer fritattas…who knows why they come? Maybe they just happen to be the people living within a stone’s throw of The Biscuit, our favorite closes-too-early-because-of-course-I-forgot-I-live-in-Boston spot. Anyway, in they stroll in their unwashed-hair, unmatching-in-a-surprisingly-fetching-way splendor.

Raise your hand if you don't want to be one of the people in this picture...didn't think so.

I’m, well, ungracefully trying not to stare at these gum-chewing dislays of companionable affection and discipline myself into reading a novel that I am not enjoying one bit. People-watching proves to be the far more compelling pastime (why do I end up feeling like every time I read a novel translated into English it’s full of unnecessarily exhibitionistic excalamations of premature emotion?), and Snow gets ignored, sitting closed by my cooling coffee.

The most charmingly in love couple takes the table next to me (!) before they place their orders. The man is sitting opposite me, and as his girl stands next to him (to better see the menu), he sort of absentmindedly lets one hand travel up and down the inside of the thigh closest to him. She seems not to notice – absorbed instead by the sandwich selections. Embarrassed to be intruding on such an intimate moment, I avert my gaze, yet again, back to my disappointing literature.

Later on, these two chat about some common project on their (shared?) overgrown Mac. He leans over as if to kiss her cheek – doesn’t – whispers something in her ear, and BAM. They disappear.

I start to think about this. At work, we’ve just finished a house meeting campaign, which basically means that we’ve gone around and asked hundreds of people who are part of the Boston Muslim community what issues they’re facing. These were both among the top issues:

1. getting married (as in, we’re having trouble doing it)

2. staying married (as in, we’re having trouble doing it)

And looking at my idealized fantasy of hipster love, I’m wondering if a little of this ain’t what we’re missing:

Matching, hugging, absorbing L-O-V-E.

Now one could argue that this is, for a lot of reasons, not the appropriate model for Muslim relationships. I’m going to ignore that whole side of it for now, hoping you’ll forgive me – as I explore What the Hipsters Have and We Don’t.

Speaking with some of my (not that much older) married friends, these are prominent commentaries on marriage (slash advice):

1. People think that married people don’t get lonely. Married people are often really lonely.

2. Dishes. Every day. Be prepared to do them. And be prepared that he won’t.

3. You should be picky, because this is the man you’re going to obey for the rest of your life.

Fantastic! Where do I sign up?

And then I’m looking around me at all the marriageable people, and I’m thinking, No freaking wonder we’re still single. I mean, here we are, for better or worse, completely immersed in a culture that not only prizes romantic love very highly, but displays it prominently – both in person and in the media. I don’t need Disney to form a warped, idealistic picture of romance – I have the thigh-touching, whispering, disappearing hipsters next to me. So we’re trapped – maybe not unpleasantly – in a world in love, surrounded by a bunch of married Muslims who are either not in love with each other, or who don’t show us that they’re in love with each other because they consider it to be inappropriate.

I’m not asking for people to start making out with each other outside of Eid prayers or anything. That would be kind of gross. But, like, a little something? Like holding hands with each other, maybe, or the occasional smile from across the room as though you share a private joke? That would be nice. That would make the rest of us maybe find marriage a more attractive state – not some sort of elaborately disguised prison.

The conventional wisdom goes: romantic love does not last; therefore, it’s an illogical and doomed reason to get married. Better to marry for the sake of common values and a synchornicity in thinking about gender roles within marriage and how Islam should be practiced/Muslim kids should be raised – 10 years later you’ll thank us.

I would counter with, “What about the Obamas?”…But I’ll admit that they are the exception and not the rule. So this may very well be sage advice. Nevertheless, I’m not positive that it’s responding – or suitable – to our cultural milieu. It may very well be unwise, but Muslim kids grow up watching their peers fall in love again and again – Muslims see people around them in love all the time. The common cultural narrative goes like this: boy meets girl in some sort of meet-cute, they exchange some pleasant witticisms and then numbers – or maybe they friend each other on Facebook first (baby steps), then they agree under some pretense to meet for coffee (perhaps they happen to be reading the same book, which one of them only read because the other was reading it…), they flirt, they walk to some other destination (someone’s class? The bus stop? He walks her home?), navigate the awkward first goodbye (are we kissing or hugging?) but not before making plans to see each other again. They meet a second time – in the evening, so as to make looking hot and kissing more plausible, have a surprisingly wonderful time, and end the night with a kiss – which, if it’s sublime (and why wouldn’t it be?), will initiate a love affair that may or may not involve thigh-touching at the local cafe, much to the Muslim next door’s chagrin – and, if everyone’s amenable and things go well, could very well end in marriage, kids, and a plot at the local community garden.

And…apart from the kissing, etc. pre-marriage, what’s wrong with this picture? Are we telling ourselves to want something we can’t want?

I feel like we might be approaching it like this: the married community (to the extent that such a thing exists) is telling the unmarried community, “This [i.e. romantic love] is what’s broken in your culture [self].” So we’re supposed to want to get married for very practical reasons: to have a family, to have religious support, to not sin. But I don’t think that’s why we really want to get married. We’d like to be swept off our feet by an experience that makes us feel like taking on responsibility and adulthood with this person will feel less of a burden, and maybe even fun – we want to lose sense of ourselves, to desire someone – hopefully for deep and shallow reasons, we’d like to come across a person who makes us feel like all this waiting we’ve done is insignificant, erased, by the pleasure of his/her company. We’d like our minds to be blown – and eventually think about a family, support each other, happily not-sin together.

It’s not that we’d like to marry someone with terrible character and a tendency to shirk responsibility. It’s that we don’t want it to be just that. Who wants to end up in Charlotte’s marriage to Mr. Collins?

Practical? Very. Hot for each other? ...I rather think not.

Now, Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy? There’s a better model. The beauty of this fictional match is that neither partner compromised on the ideal character of their imagined beloved – they both dreamed of marrying refined, interesting people of superb character. Perhaps Elizabeth imagined herself with someone a tad more outgoing, and Mr. Darcy imagined himself with someone a tad more rich – but these things are not the glue that holds people together. They loved and respected each other, and with good reason. And no surprise, happy ending there.

I like this much better. Much.

Why should we be trying to fit ourselves into a box that…doesn’t fit? If we want to love our spouses, I mean – isn’t that okay – isn’t it desirable? It only needs to be tempered with some sort of reasonable wisdom or reason – of course it’s possible to lust after, or even to be infatuated with, a person who is all kinds of wrong for you. Of course. It happens all the time. But that is very different than feeling deeply in love with a person you respect and admire, and therefore want to spend your every day with. Maybe he doesn’t rake leaves, and maybe she’s not so on top of the dishes, or the laundry, or whatever. But I’d so much rather do without a few of the teeny little chore expectations I had and have someone I actually like spending time with. Isn’t that what marriage is? Time? I’d so much rather enjoy it.

So I think it’s hot hipster lovin’ or bust. This unhot transactional nonsense has got to go, dig? Can’t nobody defenestrate that but us, one lovemonkey marriage at a time. Ready?

Because properly married people should stand like this. Really it's indecent not to.

Coming home, take 473

I’m sitting on a plane that left from Detroit at an indecent hour. Having left an immoderately bright morning behind us, we are descending into a dreary midday sky over Boston. I am crooking my neck over the two slumbering figures between me and the oval window, which is finally showing us the grey-navy bay water and some pentagonal memorial-looking stone structure. I blush, reminded yet again of what a horrible Bostonian I am. I don’t go to Red Sox games, I’ve never been to Walden Pond, and then there’s this new something that I have yet to visit and admire. We sink shakily, and I feel like my spine has wrapped it’s arms around my belly button and is squeezing. It’s the same thing I feel when I meet people whose books I have read wonderingly, the same thing I used to feel in junior high when a boy I wasn’t sure liked me looked at my lips. It is magnified on the plane, accompanied by my breathy la ilaha ila Allah’s. But the delightful-scary sensation isn’t caused only by the plane playing hopscotch on the wind. I’m excited to come home. Then I realize what I have just thought: home.

For years, maybe ever since high school, whenever I have come back to the place I am most rooted in at the moment, I have always thought about it like this: I’m going back to New York. I’m back in Amherst. I’m returning to Cairo. Everywhere, including Boston, has been the place that I happen to be living at the moment. I haven’t lived – that is, haven’t placed my bed – in any one room for more than nine months at a time since I was seventeen. That was nine years ago. Nothing has felt solid. It was all slipping through my fingers all the time, and this too might be slipping, but at the moment I’m ignoring that possibility. Suddenly, magically, Boston has become my home.

Few things can compare to the shivery thrill of the familiar. The beauty of this particular pleasure is so rare. New, bright and shiny things have an easy time fascinating us. But when you find yourself peculiarly enthralled by, say, your toaster, as opposed to the new iPhone sitting on your desk – that is a special moment.

Oh, how I love thee. Let me count the toasty mornings...

Now, I know that I have an unreasonable tendency to romanticize anything and everything that could possibly be construed as wholesome or New Englandy. Let’s leave that aside for the moment. Because what I want to say is this: what is familiar, known, comfortable already, the love of these types of things offers us a comfort incomparable to what is new and exciting.

This is what is easy: it is easy to fall in love with the new curve of a soft cheek, the sharp green smell of a new jacket, the inevitably surprising softness of a new hand. This is what is difficult: to hold hands for the 857th time and feel your heart jump a little, the priviledge of being beloved, and companionably touched, by this person still impossible to take for granted. To fall in love is no achievement. To stay in love? A feat of wonder.

You knew I was going to do that.

Of course, I’m as clueless as everyone else (except, apparently, our darling President and his lovely wife) when it comes to the actual realization of this feeling with another person. Generally, I am enamored more of the old than the new. I’m hoping this is a good start. But I’ve found myself changing, as well – where I used to think that I would never manage to be anything other than a die-hard country bumpkin, I find myself more and more unable to imagine living in Amherst again – or any place like it. I have started to enjoy the smallness of the city and its possibility, the thrill of meeting someone at my local cafe and then realizing as I walk home that we live on the same street. I find that there is something peculiarly enjoyable in having so much access to so much life by foot and bike, and in passing so many people on the street. I used to think that there was nothing I would trade for the pleasant, breezy solitude of an aimless country drive – but I find now that a stroll by the river or through residential streets with a friend is preferable.

It is not the promise of newness that the city offers me. The city is, in most ways, just as mundane as the country. We have routines just as those in the suburbs do. We have circles of people we are used to seeing, grocery stores we visit, the baristas that can greet us by name. I don’t attend every lecture or exhibit; I am not persistently aware that the next person walking through the door of my office could be someone I’ve never met before – I don’t live my days in anticipation.

What is it? Perhaps Boston has bred into me a love of rotaries and an endless supply of unnamed streets – or the Irish-y tendency to nickname places with the most endearing possible epithet: Southie, JP, Dot. As though the places are good childhood friends.

Maybe it was only a matter of time, and no matter where I had laid my head for most of the years since graduation it would have been the same. Perhaps I could have felt the same way about Cairo, or L.A., had I remained in either place. Perhaps it was a matter of knowledge and connectedness; I know more Boston history (what could be more charming than a whole sprawl of roads built on cow paths?) than any other place – excepting maybe Amherst. And then there is that so many of those I admire and wish to emulate have at least passed through this city: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Barack Obama, Louisa May Alcott, Emerson, Thoreau, William James, Malcolm X, Jhumpa Lahiri.

It could also be my stubbornness. It might be easy to love Florida, with her sunny promises, or L.A., because she flirts with fame – or even the slick, forward New York, all gaunt limbs and labels. But Boston, who has given us so many people that make us proud to be American, whose people do ridiculous things like throwing tea into the ocean and naming walls in ballparks ‘The Green Monstah,’ what of her? Maybe we could use some more street signs; perhaps we could do without a Bertucci’s or Cheesecake Factory here and there. Perhaps we’d have more good, old-fashioned summertime fun if we didn’t risk serious infection by dipping a toe into the Charles – but really, where’s the excitement in that?

I don’t need things to be so easy, so sunny, so sophisticated. The New Englander in me recoils a bit from these things – the moment I decided I couldn’t stay in L.A., I was watching a nipped-and-tucked woman draped in gold lamé and skin-tight everything shuffle into a hippie-vegan brunch spot in stilletos. On a Saturday. I don’t want to be that stylish – or primped – I just want to eat my organic tofu scramble in my jammies, thankyouverymuch. I mean, what are Saturday mornings for?

Seriously?...like, in the daytime?

Ultimately, I suppose, this feeling continues to be a mystery. And now that I am so close (less than five months – and counting) to maybe-leaving Boston, it feels more present – and more precious. What is it to be home? To love a thing?

Muppie takes the Fifth.