Soot sky

(to listen: nassam alayna el hawa -fairuz)

it’s hard to explain what it was like

(it was after the earthquake, fires rampaged the city, lovers were torn like my watercolor paintings in your hands, then you came and there was blood pooling in your palms and you took my face in them, splashed my cheeks with that sticky, sickly crimson and cried)

I think at that time, we were younger, everything seemed more dramatic. Birth, death, they seemed like the greatest things in the world, like they ran it. And they did! Back then…

(your body lay on the asphalt, twisted, the sky was blooming with dark clouds, I looked up and wailed and you didn’t hear me. I bent over you and my tears dripped into your torn stitches, your shirt was taut around your neck, choking you, but my fingers were too weak to save you, I pulled and pulled and all that I succeeded in doing was exhausting myself. I splashed you with water in an attempt to revive your beautiful face. The droplets slid off your white face slowly, I cried)

Now, all I crave is warmth. Blue skies feel homey and safe. I cuddle in the granny square blankets. I think then, it was like everything was an adventure. When the wars first started, when we started to run out of things, when I met you, when the skies were falling, it all seemed like a grand escapade. Something we would live and write about. I had a name for a book, that I whispered in your ear one night, like a confession of a dream.

(You were pulling me back, the stairwell fell, falling, crumbling, how will we get down now? The blackness, the roar of the world falling, my wrist was burning as I screamed, don’t let me go! You ran, we leapt, my ankle twisted and the fire there was more than the flames licking the building around us. The gun! you snatched it, your voice was hoarse, we coughed and coughed. I painted your face with the soot and my kisses, we tried to hold it in and couldn’t, because now what if everything was lost? I screamed that I hated you)

I will write that book one day, write about all the things from the beginning all the way until I am written out. Maybe I’ll end where you ended, or where the world tilted back into place, crunched back into the bend of earth it belongs in, or maybe I’ll end where it began (after all, the sliver of a first chapter is enough sometimes, to tell the whole story). It’s too early now, and plus, the sun is streaming, the coffee is steaming, my heart is still beating with a little bit of hurt. I console it with the promise that oh, this too shall pass! And I will pen these things before they are forgot.

(bullets in my pocket, cutoff jean shorts at this point, band-aids peeling off our grimy skin, what color were you before all of this? i miss death and dying. your fingers slide away from mine)

I go to the back room, to a drawer where I keep everything, and I open in with sure hands. Inside is a chipped bullet, the green knife that is the sole reason I am still alive today, and a photograph, of us grinning in the lush green underwood we called The Hideout.

I pull out the typewriter and make a new teapot of earlgrey. I pull on fingerless gloves (the weather requires it), and then I play a bit of Fairuz.

…نسم علينا الهوا

nassam alaynal hawa…