Proof that I was here
*NOTE: Why am I posting my journal entries? See my inaugural post: Beyond journalism
(*artwork by Incé Husain)
Everyday I walk into this building, and everyday I am scanned because of the keffiyeh around my neck as if there were a knife hidden within. But I smile and banter like a queen, drawing laughter and confusion. They don’t know what to do with the contradiction. Neither do I.
Today, my exhaustion is chronic. I knew this before I opened my eyes. Nausea slumbers, the morning is slow in this quiet house. My every thought is of the neuroscience seminar presentation I must give tomorrow. Every second thought is of ceasefire, if the agreement is to be trusted, if it is safe to smile, how to coexist in a state of half-formed celebration and half-formed now-ritualistic dread.
I read a brain imaging paper and then Al Jazeera; I draw diagrams of brain activity and then read Al Jazeera; I pace in circles, reading Al Jazeera and sipping chai and eating an egg. My thoughts are erratic pinpricks of hyperfocus. I feel fluid and nonreal. All my group chats blare with tentative celebration and hearts.
Yesterday, I asked X: “The ceasefire. Is it real?”, and he said, “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Yesterday, Y wrote to me: “How is your week so far? I am glued to the news about a ceasefire and trying to breathe slowly.”
My articles lag, lag, lag. I have a long list of the half-written, the half-transcribed, the half-interviewed. I think: how do I write this right, and how do I write this fast, and when do I write it? My research, finally, lags less. Each obsession reels me out of the torpor of the other. There is a cost each time I am reeled in, reeled out: the brief emptiness when I am deep in neither is crushing.
Al Jazeera says: BREAKING - Qatari PM says the ceasefire will start on Sunday, January 19.
On January 21, I will hold the neuroscience program hostage for ten minutes with a seminar presentation on human cognition in a circuit of the brain, keffiyeh around my shoulders. My voice cannot tremble.
I dump my bag at my office and walk to the grad club. The air is ice cold, whipping my cheeks red. The snow falls slowly. I lift my keffiyeh to the bridge of my nose. I need its warmth.
I order a chamomile tea, drown the teabag in more honey than water. The grad club menu says “za’atar burger” and “za’atar salad”. I think: do you know the meaning of za’atar, right now?
I drink slowly and try to think of nothing. But my mind doesn’t need clearing, it needs documentation. Today could be history, and I want written proof that I was here, trying to breathe it in and be non-stagnant.
The articles will come. ♦