Now it remains
Just an image, a reflection
All else gone, and she wonders
Was it all in vain?

“Have faith” is ingrained
through repeated assurances
now called upon
by fingers rubbing nervously

I buy flowers every Saturday and bake a few cakes; I even adopted a cat. Something is still missing. A carpet, maybe? Maybe, if it were the flying type that can take me back to Makhoul Street. But what if it were? What if I went back?

He is everything I cannot be. Blessed be he
Who dips his fingers into pots of rain water
And turns them into peach wine.

I love it when someone tells me “I’ll call you back as soon as possible,” and the hotline goes dead. I chew on it because it gets lonelier each time. As if the phone call never existed or the person on the other line was just an echo of mine but in a different voice.

When your world keeps getting harder and harder, where do you run to? When the future looks uncertain, is it still worth anticipating? When you live in an era where your children have no chance, what do you do?

When the wind arose in the afternoon sun,
We put our little shoes on and sprinted down the stairs
Tripping around corners as we missed steps
But as long as we didn’t bleed, we didn’t care.

“That’s always how it is in our culture, sons are just treated differently, it’s nothing really,” my mom would tell me, without a care in the world.

ما بين الرابعة والعاشرة ذاكرة من المحال أن تنسى يومًا ، من المحال أن تموت، ربما لأنها الفترة الزمنية التي ستشكلنا بسلبياتنا وإيجابياتنا مدى الحياة

At first, it feels like abandonment,
Like leaving your house with the lights on and the door unlocked.