Assignment 4

In between: short stories and poems.

Easy Like Sunday Morning

“I can’t sleep,” my brother confessed to me one Berlin afternoon. My clock was still set to Seattle time, the time indicated 8AM on a Sunday morning. I could read the surrender in his tone through the pixels on the screen. There was desolation in his words, as if the missing period at the end of that sentence was meant for the words that failed to fill in the space of the chat box. And though I could only assume mild girl issues as the case, I decided it best to avoid any further diagnosis. My reluctance to respond made him quickly fill in the void with a question of his own, one that came all too easily, “How’s Europe?”
“Lonely,” I began to type in response, but found myself hitting the backspace, replacing it instead with “Expensive.”
I wondered if he could smell the hesitance in my answer; but seeking one another’s truth was not a part of our relationship, our sibling love settled on clenched fists and bruised skin, not revealing dialogues.
Still.
There was so much I wanted to say amidst the casualness. I wanted to ask him if morning loneliness was just as isolating as evening’s. I wanted to ask him if he found relief at the break of dawn’s light through his window blinds or restless at the thought of the stretch of day ahead. I imagined him rolling over in bed uneasily as the neon numbers on his alarm clock beamed relentlessly with numbers that kept moving forward.
I wondered if he imagined my stillness amongst a group of twenty other people. My sealed mouth. I wondered if he felt the foreign I felt, even when he was in the comforts of home and I was overseas. But instead, I found myself folding these questions up and tucking them away, pulling out humorous comments instead, something easier to handle on a Sunday morning.

Soundtrack of the U-Bahn

“The TV is your window pane, the view won’t let you down.”
Eight heads unknowingly bob in unison to John Mayer’s strumming
As I drown out the whir and metal screeching of the U-bahn’s wheels
Grinding against the tracks.

In front of me sits an attractive young woman
Her legs tentatively crossed, her left shielding her right.
Her lips moves slightly in rotation, mutely chewing her gum,
At the same time her eyes seem to be scanning me.
I take on this invitation to stare back,
We hold one another’s gaze as John Mayer transitions into John Legend.

She continues chewing, unblinking,
As if savoring the taste of a stranger’s unbinding attention.

“We just better land on the stars before they come crashing down.”
Her eyelids are lined meticulously with black liner
Can she see the restless sleep I had the night before?
Her cheekbones are slightly dashed with rouge,
I wondered if those bones were often put to work from laughter?

How much of me was she able to decipher?

Her eyes continue to mercilessly grasp mine in a full nelson.
A generous breeze grazes through the opened windows,
Surprising fresh air make its way through the enclosed tunnel.

“You can’t stop wishin’ if you don’t let go.”
Our bodies jerk from left to right
As if rehearsing some synchronized dance,
“We sway like branches in a storm.”

The sudden realization of the awkwardness of staring hits me.
I blink, the wave of my white flag.
I decide to deter from any more uncomfortable confrontation,
After all it’s nine in the morning.

And while
Relentless mouths throw in their towels for the morning
Letting tired eyes shamelessly converse with one another,
I sit in tune with Paul McCartney crooning
“Oh, I believe in yesterday.”
Still unadjusted to this social rule of conduct,
I cheat the game,
Finding amusement in the empty space
Occupying in between the heads of strangers.

A La Mosque

She folds herself over into what looks like Child’s pose. Stretching out her spine she places her forehead on the sea-green carpet. “Subhaana rabbiyal 'Allah.” After a few seconds, she gradually pulls herself upright again, this time revealing a serene face. The lines on her forehead have smoothed over and she miraculously looks younger, somehow more rejuvenated, renewed. She proceeds to close her eyes, letting her lips part ways to let words trickle out. She half sings half chants a prayer, resting her hands on top of her knees, the melody of her voice drifts toward the mosaic walls, bouncing off the tiles and travels throughout the entire mosque. “Allahu Akbar…”
To her background, two men silently pray over in the left corner of the mosque, they rotate between kneeling and standing up, palms extended out as if anticipating the Divine’s touch. Praying with their bodies, they seem to unify the physical with the spiritual.
The only other sound that seems to dare make itself known is the soft sigh of the carpet beneath the shifting bodies.
She looks like an angel with the golden daylight outlining her silhouette and the glow from the chandelier dangling above her. The giant structure of light shimmers boldly, not a single light bulb out of tune. Its sheer height seems to challenge gravity.
In this miniature world, man has constructed his own ocean, his own earth, his own sun, and his own language all for an intangible force with which man dares to reckon.
In this state of mind, she allows herself to be weakened and rebuilt again, here, she finds the vowels and consonants that make up her own language that is to be spoken and understood by only one other existence. And while she realizes that others may never come to understand why she returns to such a solemn place, so different from the outside world, she has found the reason to which only she will come to understand. That language has been uncovered, and with it comes her unbinding vow to rehearse it everyday. As Salaamu 'alaikum wa rahmatulaah…

Untitled

The sun is setting over the Bosporus as I pause to look down a row of fishing poles leisurely hanging over the bridge’s railing. The sound of car horns honking ceaselessly mix with the voices of hundreds milling about on this Friday afternoon. I inhale a deep breath of salty sea air mixed in with city dust. I admit that it tastes a bit more refreshing than the Puget Sound.
A relieving breeze picks up and begins blowing wisps of my hair across my face, after a few seconds I give up trying to keep my hair tamed, letting the strands fly about with no inhibitions. I feel liberated standing in the midst of so much commotion, as my ears attempt to make out the number of syllables in the unrecognizable dialogues. Old fishermen converse with one another, sharing heaves of laughter in between words. Their weathered skin, leather-like, wrinkle up in heavy folds when their lips curl up, exposing jack-o-lantern teeth.
Up ahead I see a scrawny boy who couldn’t have been more than nine, scrambling over the railing, climbing over to the edge. “Wait a minute, is he gonna…” Taking one look around, as if daring onlookers to stop him, he leaps into the air, an image of bony arms and legs flailing freely through space before finally making a loud splash into the sea. Intrigued by this, a few more people gather over to the railing to watch this escapade. A few seconds later, his head emerges from the water and his bony arms and legs go back to work, kicking and splashing, bringing him towards the dock. Immediately, the maternal instinct in me is to feel relief, alas, he is still alive; at the same time, the kid in me wants to jump in along with him. The waves below tauntingly splash against one another.
It turns out that he is accompanied by several of his other friends, all around his age. One by one they take turn showing off their jumps and cannonballs, tugging and pushing one another into the water. A man in a security guard uniform heads in their direction, he looks on sternly at first, until he, too, seems amused by this childhood glee. Several of the little boys look at him with concern until he gives them a nod of acknowledgement and walks away.
A few men to my side take out their cameras and begin taking pictures of the lively kids in their element. Tanned, scrawny pre-teen boys enjoying the cool relief of the sea on a hot summer day without a care in the world. Their pubescent shrieks and laughter manages to ring above the crashing waves of the Bosporus. The winds begin to pick up again, so I continue my way across the bridge, walking to the rhythmic pace of whizzing cars and indecipherable dialogues.


Temporary

These arrows
Stuck to the side
Of this building
Next to this plot
Of open land
Will no longer
Exist in five
Years.

Tombstones

In the Jewish tradition,
Stones are used in lieu of flowers
To be placed at the gravesite of dead ones.

Piled like pyramids,
One on top of the other,
They sit motionless against the pressing wind.

Perhaps flowers are too delicate,
Too temporary a gift,
For too permanent of an ending.

Whereas stones have weight.
Speaking honestly
Of the burdens left behind by impermeable souls.

Within their pores they contain the pounds of sorrow
That flowers are too vain to carry,
And tears are too fearful to make last.

Distant relatives to Infinity
They can withstand the ticking of the clock,
Remaining forgiving to the disintegration of human memories.