Category: Berkeley

This box is my means of vision and communication and a newfound, intrinsic piece of me. Others experience me through it – so why shouldn’t it be considered an extension of my being?

When I receive the same words, I take reprieve in the knowledge that someone, even if it’s not me, especially because it’s not me, knows that I will keep fighting. 

My prevailing prayer and five star review: I will return again.

But I don’t fear what’s behind my door anymore; I don’t recognize the footsteps walking past it. The sound of my palace crumbling was once deafening; now it lingers quietly in the background. I look forward to silence, for once.

Both of us sitting, static, waiting to be cut open and consumed.

“You can’t keep doing this,” she inhaled, her breath shaking. “You’re going to die doing this, do you understand?”

When I first saw the Abounaddara Shorts Exhibit at BAMPFA early in the first semester, it was a couple of months before the downfall of the Assad Regime. I remember sitting in a darkened theater with a friend, Simah, watching a collection of shorts that various people had filmed during Syria’s civil war. I remember…

i.  We patterned the sky with our spit, bellies down on the linoleum floor, to the rhythm of the metal-bladed 1970s ceiling fan. Z and I learned how to pray under an olive tree on De Soto Ave. Z talked as if she was teething her lips into shreds like orange peels –opening her mouth…

I step in at N 52nd Street Station.  The fluorescent lights flicker, then settle into a steady hum, casting pale halos on the passengers already inside. The air is thick with July dampness and the clatter of shoes against concrete as the doors sigh open– exhaling bodies into the station, inhaling the new ones. We…

It is winter break now and we are together, listening to nine people play nine different instruments in nine different rooms, all singing one song. 

A tall oak tree shifting in the sunlight of a distant memory.

Sickened smog trembles on the horizon, smelling of brimstone, same as always. They sip and wait, slowly, slowly sip and wait.

Just like the threatening weather, losing a customer was nothing in comparison to all else the people of Derry had lost.

The war will turn course and spring will persist If through the cruel cold, we care for the trees.

She clutched the cross on her breast, praying to God that when she met her husband he would be kind and handsome.

I’m sorry for wanting, that all I do is want and want and want.

I’ll listen and talk and learn between them, and maybe, just maybe, everything works out.