Dream (December,19 2010)

I was in a crowded park when we were ordered to clear the way to a group of people to perform what seemed to be dances. They looked elegant and classy, and were joined later by a second group. I wondered who these people were and what authority they had so the park turned like their own property. I then realized that they were not dancing but practicing religious rites. I noticed one among them carrying a book on which "Baha'i" was written. Then they became completely nude talking, socializing and sitting in positions revealing their private parts. I thought that nudism was against the park rules and wondered why there was no objection from the park guards.

Stain

I: I stumbled over the stairs and hit my arm.

Mother: The teacher should have noticed the blood stain.

I: It is messy in the class.

Mother: And how is it going there? Are you having good friends now?

I: Yes Mama. They are very nice chaps. We play together. We think of going riding bikes in the park some afternoon.

Mother: When exactly?

I: I do not know, but we agreed to.

Mother: Good. I want you to get out of your shell. Anyone special among your friends now?

I: They are all nice and dear to me.

Mother: And the boy who beat you up last month. Any news about him?

I: He came and apologized few days ago. He is a nice fellow now.

Mother: So I do not need to go and meet your teacher.

I: No Mama. Please do not. They are very kind to me now.

Mother: But he should have noticed the blood stain.

I: I thought it was a minor wound. It is ok there Mama. They are nice chaps. Please, you do not need to go

Coffee Grounds

"Miles of wild despair lay between you and the place you want to be". Said the wise old man staring at me. I wondered "Should I give up?"."Not necessarily, but mind you it all depends on how eager you are to be there". "I am very eager" I assured him. "Then you should not stop. Try, but I guarantee you nothing".

He gazed again in my cup of Turkish coffee, trying to figure out how the shapes formed by the coffee grounds would reveal more. I waited, desperate and anxious. He turned the cup around and without getting his eyes off it asked "M N L, do these three letters mean something special to you?" I tried hard to guess any possible meaning these letters might give, but I failed. He added "Run as if beasts are chasing you if you see these letters together. If not, you will find yourself left alone in a dry wind-swept land". My heart sank and my world seemed narrow and cruel. Should I always fight the demons alone? Is there no shelter from that fate? I felt overwhelmed by a huge dark wave where faces of my late father, mother and distant relatives appeared and vanished for no reason. Some faces seemed friendly and others looked sarcastic. The wave finally pushed me to the shore exhausted, fragile and full of holes.

I went out of the coffee reader's house to the dark empty street. The November cool wind welcomed me. I stopped a moment, adjusted the scarf around my neck, looked left and right and started to walk back home. Nothing felt of more worth then than going back home.

Talking, Traveling and Observing a Turtle

Two simple conversations in two consecutive days.

Friend 1: Couple X has a wonderful mansion in the U. S. I visited them there last year.
I: Really? I did not know they owned a house back there. I heard about their huge house here.
Friend 1: I saw it too. Unbelievably lavish.
I: This is the sort of life I like to lead!
Friend 1: But do you know that their only son is autistic?
I (compassionately): No. I did not know that. Goodness, all their life means nothing to me now.

The following day.
I: Do you know that couple X has a mansion in the States and a wonderful house here.
Friend 2: Wow. Nice.
I: But I have also just got to know that their child is autistic.
Friend 2 (instantly): They are fortunate. There are undoubtedly many poor couples who have autistic sons too.

........

I visited Yemen for the first time last week. A troubled country that became (again) under spotlight after the incidents of the trapped parcels.

Much is being said about Yemen. Terror, failed regime, internal conflicts that might lead to separation, amazing traditional architecture and the kind people. But what amazed me most was how qat/khat chewing, which is deeply rooted and completely accepted in the society, went beyond the definition of a habit to become a collective activity that involved gathering, socialization, current affairs' discussion and sometimes decision making.

It was somehow surrealist to see, starting from 3 or 4 PM, almost every male adult (and some teenagers) in the streets, shops, taxis having like a bubble in one side of his mouth because it was "the time". Women, according to what I have heard, were also active except that we could not see their swollen cheeks under the veil.
By the end of my short visit I felt what I saw crossed the amazing borders to the depressing ones.

........

I bought a turtle 2 weeks ago. I have never seen a turtle walking that fast. She never stops moving in the house the whole day. A stereotype- shattering turtle. I love her!

Dream (October, 28 2010)

My sister, my late father and I were in a kitchen of some house. My sister was looking for a bottle of milk to pour some for her daughter and she finally found it in the fridge. The bottle was huge, brown and dusty. I warned her that the expiry date was in 2008, but she did not care, saying that the milk looked fine.

I left the kitchen dissatisfied when rain drops started to come down through the ceiling of the rooms in the house, taking off the colour of the painting of the walls. But when I opened a closed door, I found a dry, bright and untidy living room. I shouted at my sister and father to come stay with me. Only father came wearing his underwear (white t-shirt and white knee length boxer) and holding a newspaper in his hand. He entered the room and immediately lied on his back. I asked him: Papa, can I give you a hug? His face started to look lifeless and pale that I wondered if he was still alive. I repeated the question when I noticed his lips slowly moving and I could barely hear him saying: Yes son, you can. I hold his head in my hands and then his head turned to a skull. I screamed and waked up.

Home, Sweet and Sour Home

F is an old close friend whom I have not seen or heard of for about 14 years.I received a phone call last week and immediately recognized the husky voice. We caught up with the main events in our lives along these years. It was a moment from the past to exchange news with an old friend through a telephone call. No e-mails, no cyber social networks, just the good old way.

He was a very good friend for few years. To say an unforgettable character is an understatement. Spontaneous, genuine and so aggressive and so fragile at the same time. I still remember one day in a busy street at the business district in a foreign city, where we were both expatriates working in two different fields, when F began crying, even sobbing, in an emotional moment before he left to the airport. His stay in that country came to an end and he could not restrain his tears. There we were two grown up men in the middle of the street, one cried and the other tried to comfort. A picture shattering the cliché of Middle Eastern men! I still also remember my feelings at that moment. A mixture of helplessness (regarding the situation), embarrassment (at being the target of the staring passers) and compassion (with him. Some moments might not bear special significance in our lives, but we can not forget though. That was one of these moments.

After his first call, F called me again few days later to invite me for a dinner with our old group of friends. I have not seen some of them for more than 15 years. And some of them have not seen each other for a quite long time too. I was caught by the moment and accepted the invitation. But after I hang up I felt the idea was rather ridiculous. What could link 7 or 8 persons who once, long time ago, were good friends? Only the memories. Besides, one or two among the group I would not be thrilled to renew the contacts with for some reasons. Outdated reasons, but who ever said that being outdated weakened validity? I called F later to apologize but he insisted. He said that some of the friends accepted the invitation only when they knew I would be there. I did not believe him. I thought he lied to convince me to come but his lie worked anyway.

I was the first to arrive at the not so crowded restaurant. Then they started to arrive. I shook hands with someone whom I would have never recognized if we have met face to face accidentally. He complimented me on my unchanged look, and I found I had nothing to say but to lie and compliment him on his look too. He might have just started a lie and I ended it. We were 10 persons. I sat next to F at the head of the table thinking that that position would guarantee me the minimum interaction with the others. And I was right.

Faces changed. Attitudes remained the same. Compliments were exchanged. Questions and answers, well rehearsed, were raised and delivered in flat voices. By the end of the dinner some suggested another meeting. I smiled and said inshalla.
On my way back I looked at the chaotic busy streets and thought that nothing drastically changed in my home town, but nothing nonetheless remained the same. I think, in the eyes of the old friends, this same remark also applied to me. The basic "me" is there except some white hairs, hint of wrinkles, a shorter temper sometimes and a more apparent lack of interest other times.

Circa 1986

My mother's daily listening to the 5 pm radio news followed by drama episodes from her red transistor radio.

Father reading the newspaper in the terrace overlooking the street, and tips of yellow Bougainvillea flowers touching the railing.

My calm tidy bedroom. Semi dark with its white light curtains half drawn.

The always sunny kitchen in the afternoon. Its two square windows with security bars faced the west.

A huge mango tree in the garden with the high monotonous sounds of swallows by sunset.

Piles of British novels, anthologies and drama on my desk.

The Polish family neighbors on the right side and the continuous shouting of the mother at her 3 year old son: Sebastian!

Our neighbor on the right side exposing himself quite often in his room with the windows open.

Watching Dallas.

Silent calm afternoons when parents used to have siesta and sun heat started to fade.

Long evening talks with mama whenever we sat together in the terrace. She was mostly talking about her memories before getting married, her beloved deceased father and her cold mother.

Noise coming from our neighbors' house late night. I always thought husband and wife were fighting and she was crying, but my mother seemed to know better.

The audible trains' whistle by midnight despite the far distance between our house and the train station.

Lonely evenings.

A random exchange of books with an acquaintance introduced me to who became my very favorite poet for years to come.

Future seemed then, as usual, too far and vague to predict.

Scenes From Recent Dreams

My house was filled with water and I had to swim from one room to another.

A bowl, a big white bowl, got broken and fell down on the floor without spreading out, but the broken pieces fell down almost on top of each other.

I was sleeping on the sofa in the living room in my old family house. It was very dark but I felt somebody entered the room. I got up and saw the silhouette of a 4 years old girl in a healthy shape, wearing a dress and the upper half of her all white thick hair was tied upward in a ponytail. I felt afraid and asked her: Who are you? She did not answer but stared at me and did not seem a bit afraid. I repeated the question when she moved in a calm confident way to switch the light on. At the same moment I realized that there were figures of other strangers sleeping in the same room started to move. I felt panicked and kept screaming: who are you, who are you, who are you until I waked up.

A very old woman introduced herself to me as a fortune teller. I gave her my palm to read and she noticed that the lines in my palm made the shape of a circle and that meant a happy coming stage of life. Then she gazed more and said with a sarcastic look: No, I can not say what I see now. I asked her what she meant but she declined to reveal, always with a sarcastic look in her wrinkled face.

Naked

After my mother passed away we found out that she used to write, for few years, her diary. It came as a surprise because she was not known for her interest in that form of self expression, but when I think of it now I find it normal for an introvert person like her, and me, to find solace in turning feelings and ideas into written words than spoken ones.

My sisters found it interesting to read what she wrote about our late father and about us. I also feel the temptation to read the diary but I am not comfortable with the idea. It is like breaking her privacy. If she liked us to read it in her life, she could have let us do or at least know about it, but now we can never know if she liked or disliked us to read her diary.

For many years I also kept a diary. I do not think I would like a family member to read it, not because there is specifically anything that I do not want them to read, but simply it is like being seen naked by a family member, nothing wrong with it but it creates an awkward atmosphere. More awkward than being seen naked by a stranger. Revealing, the body or the soul, is usually easier in front of the strangers.

According to my sisters, one small part of the diary contained advices given to us. This was obviously meant to be read by us, but I think when she talked about her relation with our father or her feelings towards certain events along the relevant years better be kept for grandsons and granddaughters or great grandsons and daughters in the future to read. They will be by then strangers, total strangers no problem getting naked in their company.

July and August in all their glory

Home, sweet old tired home.
Family and friends' faces reflecting how old I grew.
Dusty carton boxes filled with photos, books and rusty memories.
Ground zero of my cradle.
The joy and suffering of searching for a new house.
A forcing fake sigh whenever I say: Yes, I was homesick.
Taste is a sort of fate I can never run away from.
Oceans of gaps.
Easily discarding what I always thought undiscardable.
Hypnotized and thinking unhypnotizable.
Everybody is asking why I lost weight although the scales don't show an ounce of weight loss.
The passing away of my favourit and terribly underestimated poet.
Surprising inability to forgive.
First time to witness the entire cycle of Karma.

The beginning

"There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning."
Louis L'Amour

Dream (July 17th, 2010)

Was it a celebration of some kind? In some park? I did not know, but there were long and long tables with a variety of delicious food and festivity atmosphere. I walked between the tables and choose whatever I liked to eat even when I did not feel really hungry.

Then I was in my parents' old house. People were gathering just outside the entrance door. There were small lamps shining in different colours but it was still dim though. We were waiting for a fortune teller to arrive. The entrance door of the house was wide open. An old guy from the crowd asked a little girl to go inside the house and open a very old small window or door made of wood. The door was a sliding one and when she slid it open, we found that another wood door was still closed behind. She slid the second door open. We could see palms and tress from that window. I stepped inside the house and looked at that window and it seemed more like a screen. I said to myself that it was on that screen we could see our future, not like the other people outside waiting for the fortune teller. I looked at the screen/window and saw my image wearing a flowers wreath around my neck (lei) and people were congratulating me and I looked thrilled.

I invited the people outside the house to come over clarifying that the future can be known through this window/screen but nobody seemed to care about what I said. They were still standing out waiting for their fortune teller to come.

Wheels

I do not know why Paris seemed less romantic in my eyes, in my very recent visit after an absence of more than 10 years, compared to how I always felt about the city in the past. It might be the age that let us see things as they are (or maybe in this case uglier than how they are). It could also be the hectic schedule of the visit that did not allow for slow contemplating walks on the banks of the seine and these walks, in my previous visits, used to be the best Paris could offer. Or simply this feeling of the lack of romantic touch might mean I could finally release myself from the fact that it was in Paris, many years ago, where my heart beat hard for what seemed to be, back then, an eternal flame.

Dream (June 12, 2010)

I was driving a right side steering wheel car and when I looked in the rear mirror I found a very fat beige Persian cat sitting in the backseat staring at me. I dislike cats and wondered how she could get into my car. A feeling of discomfort and annoyance prevailed. Looking at the right side mirror I saw her looking from the window and I thought if I opened the window she might drop out, so I did, but then I saw her in the left side mirror looking from the left window and I opened that window as well and accelerated the speed.
The cat seemed to have disappeared. I closed the windows to find out in the rear mirror that she was still there in the backseat staring at me with her fat peaceful face.
I panicked and moved down my body in the driving seat in order to avoid her possible attack. I had to find a way to get ride of the cat… the damn fat cat.

Dream (May 3, 2010)

My friends gave me a tambourine (riq) and said we would participate together as a band in a competition.
We went up the stage and the vocal started to sing and the music to play when I noticed that my riq had no jingles, and it did not make any sound no matter how hard I tried to strike it. It was like switching the mute button on. It was then on the stage that I realized I lacked the skill to play or even to correctly hold the instrument.
I felt ashamed of being the reason of the failure of our performance, and started to ask myself why we did not rehearse before and even how I accepted to be a member of the band without having the necessary skills to play the riq.
I went with a friend, who was also a member of the band, to someone to fix the instrument. We passed through a garden on our way and I kept apologizing to him for my mute broken riq.

Dream (April 27, 2010)

I was in a spacious room with big glass windows overlooking the sea. Weather became stormy. High tide and big waves reached the windows. I looked around and said to the others in the room:
- Look, this is what always happens in my dreams.

Dream (April 17, 2010)

There was an old palace open to the public visitors.
The palace was beautiful with big terraces, but in a rundown condition with dark hallways and broken glass windows. I ran into friends and acquaintances. S was an old friend who did not change a bit. He was still radiant and spontaneous as he used to be. H was my sister's friend. She also looked as she used to look 20 years ago. I was surprised to see her alone without her husband and four kids. And I also met B (I have just met B few days ago in a professional gathering)

Both S and B gave me two different pieces of clothes. Shirt and trousers.
I visited the palace again looking for S or B to give back the clothes. I felt it was my responsibility to return them but I walked alone in the hallways and there were very few people.

I only found H and we went together to one of the terraces. It was spacious and beautiful but the railing was broken. I looked around and felt happy and joyful and told H: Where can we find such beauty anywhere else? I looked at the broken railing and said to myself: Even this doesn't matter.

The key

After a hundred years
Nobody knows the place,--
Agony, that enacted there,
Motionless as peace.

Weeds triumphant ranged,
Strangers strolled and spelled
At the lone orthography
Of the elder dead.

Winds of summer fields
Recollect the way,--
Instinct picking up the key
Dropped by memory.

Emily Dickinson

Young, Happy and Dead

Painter: Morteza Katouzian


I knew him in 1998. He unexpectedly died from a brain stroke while walking in the street in 2001. He was 37 years old, married with one kid and he had an impressive path of changing careers.

What I remember most about him is when he said, while we were sipping our coffee some afternoon, that throughout his 4 year pre-marriage relationship and 6 year marriage, he never had a fight with his girlfriend/wife.

Superstitious as I was/am, I felt my heart sank at hearing him. It was never a tradition in my family to brag about being happy. Happiness seemed like a sin/bad omen the moment someone thought to utter the word.

I do not remember I met anyone who was as satisfied with his significant other and with his life as that friend was.

It is strange that the two friends of mine, whom I considered really lucky, passed away young.

In high school I had a close friend who seemed to miraculously get away with every wrong doing. When I heard later about his drowning in a lake, I felt ashamed of myself.

It was not only like admitting being happy was a bad omen, but even thinking that someone else was happy, I felt back then, was also a bad omen.

The Adoring Rock

The wandering is over,
and the road
is an adoring rock.
Here we are,
burying the corps of the day,
draped in the winds of tragedy.
But tomorrow we shall shake
the trunks of the forest of palms.
And tomorrow we shall wash
the body of the slender god
with the blood of the thunderbolt,
and construct the tenuous lines
between our eyelids and the road.

Adonis
Translated by Kamal Abou Deeb

Recurring Dreams

- I fly. I am overjoyed that I can fly. I fly over vast distances in seconds. Who said flying is impossible? I can fly.

- The toilet is full and dirty. I try to flush it down but there is something wrong. It is blocked and the dirt is coming up and flooding the floor. I am really disgusted and scared, but strangely somehow, dirt does not touch my feet.

- I have to go somewhere, but there is a problem, and sometimes a chain of problems that impedes me from going to where I'd like to go.

In The Army Then (2)

I spent one week in a jail. Well, it was not the jail as it was/is commonly known, but it was the jail of the military base. I broke some rule, but let us skip the details here.

The experience was not a Midnight Express-esque as I thought. It was more like what a group of illegal immigrants would face nowadays in their journey to a promised land. We were more than 20 persons living in one big room where we were not allowed to go out unless instructed. So we basically had nothing to do except eating, talking, fighting and suffering from lack of personal space.

M, a close friend of mine and my accomplice in the "crime", was a big source of consolation. He was one of the persons who could see a hidden funny side in every story. Chubby naivety iced with sense of humour. That was him.

Two incidents remained distinctive from that week: once, M waked me up in the middle of the night to ask if I smelt a hash cigarette. We wondered how any of the inmates could get it inside. The other memory was when one of the mates had diarrhea and could not control himself before we called the guards over to open the cell.

At the end of the week the situation became unbearable even with M's jokes, new interesting acquaintances and our non-stop laughs when, every night and immediately after the lights turned off, that rough looking guy started jokingly his show by imitating a female voice and calling every guy in the cell by name and citing what he would like that guy to do to him!

Dream (March 8, 2010)

Few electric wires came out of my head skin. I pulled them totally and smoothly out without feeling pain or getting wounded. I was told by someone that these wires were inserted in my skull in order to spy on what I was thinking of.

A bunch of new wires came out again from a different spot in my head. I pulled them all out too.

Despite the bizarre look of the wires coming out slowly from my head, it did not scare me. I felt like doing a normal procedure pulling them out.

Sigh

In the past I always thought if someday my mother passed away, I would regularly visit her grave and talk to her. I could not imagine, at the time, I would be able to stay weeks, not to say months or years, without talking to her even if it was a one way conversation. My mother had gone for few years now and my visits to her grave got less and less. It is not only because I live abroad but even when I go back home, I do not visit her. And the idea of talking to her now seems to me odd.

I used to dream of her a lot in the first year after she left, and some of these dreams were so vivid that I waked up emotionally satisfied that I saw her and she seemed fine. No dreams anymore.

I immensely miss her and miss what she represented in my life but I am aware now, after 8 years of her absence, that she is and will forever be far far away. All what remain are a blurry smiling face, faded warmth of a hug and increasing acceptance of the loss.

Dream (Sunday, February 15, 2010)

I grilled two odorless fish and I chopped the garlic to prepare the sauce. It took long time to grill and there were persons watching me. At the end, the fish did not look tasty. I wrapped them in a foil paper although I was not quite sure that they were already well cooked.

The Usual Frame

I waked up this morning and a song kept flashing in my mind for no apparent reason. The first thing I did when I arrived at the office was to play it on youtube. Old memory? Maybe. It is ABBA's the day before you came.

Dream (Friday, 12/2/ 2010)

T was at the airport carrying two suitcases and running late to catch the plane. I also ran to keep pace with him. Then he decided to abandon one of his suitcases because it would be easier to quicken the pace. As I was surprised by this decision, he explained that the suitcase did not contain important stuff except some cheese.

T disappeared in the crowd and I assumed he has already caught the plane, and I thought of going back to pick up the suitcase. The hall was empty except for a cleaning worker who finished his job although the floor was not quite proper. I tried to draw his attention in order to ask him about the lost suitcase but in vain. He walked away and I followed him until he entered an office and disappeared. I entered the same office and asked a uniformed staff about the lost luggage. The staff clarified that the lost and found office was located outside the airport. I argued about the impracticality of the location but the officer apathetically answered that that was it.

I thought that there must be a way to find the suitcase, but then I told myself it might not be that important because after all it was T who abandoned it.

Epcot Center, Florida, 1994

It is not usually very uncommon that someone tells me he/she knows an acquaintance or a friend who looks like me (I guess it is due to my "standard" look) but to see someone who really looked like me was a different feeling.
It happened once in a faraway city. A face just flashed for seconds in the crowd and I felt like looking in the mirror. One hour later I ran into the same person in a restaurant and asked my company to look and tell me what he saw. My friend replied: God, he looks exactly like you.
I felt a strange intimacy and resisted an urge to go and talk to him or at least to keep carefully looking at him.

Saturday's dream

I was completely naked in a busy street trying to hail a taxi cab. Nobody seemed to notice. A blondish smiley woman carrying a child tried also to hail a cab. She started, in a friendly way and a foreign dialect, to strike up a conversation. She said that she liked to do shopping especially buying handicrafts. I repeated what she said but instead of saying "handicrafts", I used the French word "artisanat". We found out that we wanted to go to the same place and decided to share a cab. A pistachio colored 1950s 2 door cab stopped. I ran to ride but the driver drove away. I turned around to look for the woman but she disappeared. I thought she might have taken a cab alone, and felt disappointed at her loss.

I then found myself in an underground metro station only wearing a large loose shirt. A man in his 50s with a big white moustache stood close. He had reddish skin and I guessed he must have been drunk. The man seemed friendly and kept looking at me. A female friend of his joined him and they argued about something I could not comprehend. He turned his head every now and then to look at me and smile. There was some sort of an inexplicable spark between us.

In the Army Then

It was our first lengthy talk. We briefly ran into each other before and exchanged few words, but that evening amid dozens of other recruits in the military base, we had the opportunity to talk about everything and anything. I do not know how the talk took us to the musical styles we preferred, but when I mentioned the name of my favorite singer, P seemed surprised. He said it was difficult for him to catch the lyrics of her songs because they were in a different dialect. I commented it was a matter of time and if we listened carefully, we could understand the words. P asked if I knew the lyrics of a certain mellow song that he loved without understanding the meaning. I explained it and added jokingly that I could even sing it. P was impressed and complimented me for my voice and singing skills. I thought he was sarcastic because my voice, husky as I have ever been told, had never been a singing material. P seemed honest though. He even asked me to sing it again.

It was a bit strange. In the recreational hall of the military base (where we were both performing our military service) and while dozens of other shaved head guys were shouting, talking, fighting, swearing or whatever, there were the two of us, in some corner, having our own live singing show.

Care to eat something, son?

T had a rugged ugly face and hard rock body. He was given an addressee in a seedy neighborhood where he would go up to the third floor of a decadent building. The visit should be between 10 and 11 a.m. on certain days of the week. He was told by a friend to be careful and keep it quiet. A fiftyish woman would open the door and take him in silence inside the apartment where they could have sex. The woman was a widow with grown up son and daughter who should be in their universities at the time.

T did as he was instructed. He found the widow, who was wearing a pajama, more unattractive than he thought. She took him by hand to the hallway and started to pull her pants down. When he asked her if they could do it in bed, she coldly replied that if they went to the bedroom, they had to close the windows' shutters and that would attract the attention of her nosy neighbours.

It took around 10 minutes. He felt pain in his knees because they were standing up and she was shorter than him.

That was it? I asked.

T answered me: No, the only words she uttered in a soulless voice after we finished and while I was adjusting myself: Care to eat something, son? I said no and hurried my way down to the street.

Yesterday's dream

Epidemic was spreading in the city and the authority tried to control the traffic and the movement of people. I was in my home/family home when I had a sudden desire to visit my sister who lived on the other side of the city. Doors and windows were sealed from inside with a big X shaped sellotape by the government as part of the procedures taken against the epidemic, but finally I found a way out to the street.

Streets were chaotic and many roads were closed. I had to take the accessible open roads although they were far from my sister's home. I felt like being taken away from where I should go. I reached narrow alleys in an old and popular neighborhood. I asked a shop owner standing in front of his shop about the direction to AL Street. He pointed at a different direction saying that that was the only open way.

I arrived at a big area looked like a railway station. It was divided into two sections. One of them was fully blocked by women wearing black from head to toe. They also carryied big black sheets (like flags). The other division was blocked by military soldiers in their khaki/brownish uniforms.

Suddenly I wondered what if, after all the trouble I went through, I did not find my sister at her home. What if she has already left to come to stay with us at our house? A wave of panic took me over at the idea of being alone and helpless in my sister's home. A nostalgic and desperate feeling emerged and I longed to go back home. My home, my family home. Nothing else really mattered more than going back home.

Two dreams

* It was in Paris busy streets. I wore a t-shirt and shorts but everybody wore heavy winter clothes. It was windy and I was afraid of catching cold. I heard my name mentioned and turned around to find an old friend of mine with a fortyish lady (tall and big). He introduced her to me and asked us to talk business. I was distracted because I noticed a pile of coats thrown in the street. I left my friend and the lady and hurried to search the pile. I found 3 lost pieces of my clothes (old green raincoat, denim and gray sweater). They were clean and wrinkled like they have been just washed. I first doubted that the sweater belonged to me, but when I found an old mark on it, I realized it was mine. I went back to my friend and the lady holding the 3 pieces, but by then I felt really disinterested about them.

* I came back home and just before opening the door, I noticed someone trying to break in from the kitchen window. He saw me and started to run away in the garden. The garden had a big banana tree. It was easy to catch him before he tried to jump over the fence. It was as if he did not bother to resist. It seemed that he had an accomplice waiting somewhere. The accomplice ran away. I started to feel a bit compassionate because the guy looked young with an innocent face. I handed him over to the cops though and they took him away in a bus. After their departure, I had ambiguous mixed feelings of remorse, compassion and dsappointment.