Absence

The wind often carries your voice

enveloped in a dream

sometimes your arm’s shadow reaches out with mine

in a trivial gesture; when turning off the night lamp  

or when closing and laying down a book

I wish to unwrap from your caging murmur

to feel the gentle falling of night

only you can touch darkness 

put the twitching flicker of candles to rest

next to me you lie

always in your absence.

My Hoover Resembles My Love Life! Does Yours?

I bought a silver flash cylinder vacuum cleaner with 1600W motor power, a 2L capacity, featured onboard tools and 4m cable. It wasn’t the best Hoover at the store, but I thought that 1600W was powerful enough to clean my floors and well it was affordable! But after using it for a few months the adjustable head brush broke, I replaced it with a spare part which was the same price as the whole Hoover! And just a few days later, the adjustable metal tube got so stiff that it wasn’t adjustable anymore, not to mention the dust bags were so small and needed constant replacing and they were not cheap. So I finally decided to get a new one, I went to the store full of determination that this time I will get myself a better Hoover, a stronger Hoover, a Hoover that was efficient and will make my life easier, better and cleaner and one that wasn’t high maintenance. There in the store surrounded by all those shiny new appliances each one with a tag that stated more advanced features than its rival makers I was spoilt for choice, I saw one exactly like the one I’ve got, passed it and started comparing prices between two other Hoovers that had caught my attention, after half an hour of deliberation I picked a silver flash cylinder vacuum cleaner with 1600W motor power, a 2L capacity, featured onboard tools and 4m cable, paid and went back home! I had no idea why I did what I did, I had gone to the store with my mind set on buying a more efficient machine but I didn’t I went with what I know and what I was used to. The new Hoover was working fine the first few months but soon enough the same symptoms began to show.

I decided to try and understand why I had settled for what was familiar rather than what was better, sure I had to pay a little bit more money, but that was something I had initially expected to do and am capable of doing, sure the new appliance might look and work differently but that’s a welcomed change - most of the time - so what went wrong?

In his article Gregory Pacana[1] poses the crucial question; how much choice do we really have when choosing our relationships? Some might say that we all have certain qualities and attributes that we look for in members of the opposite sex and based on those things we decide on the person who is right for us. But is it really that simple? Is the process of attraction and mate selection that logical and straight forward? If it was, why would so many people get it wrong? Why do so many people seem to choose the wrong person or even worse choose the wrong person over and over again? Clearly it is more complicated than simple free choice.

Dr. Daniel Tomasulo[2]  suggests that we love what’s familiar, in brief, the theory of love might be expressed by saying: “we are drawn to what is familiar rather than what is unfamiliar”. He goes on to explain that we learn how to love and who to love from our family, good, bad or indifferent, relationships with parents and siblings teach us what to look for when we go out into the world. In fact, our unconscious acts like a GPS unit to see a “familiar” love that we’ve had in our family.

Who we love is likely to be more similar emotionally to what we’ve been used to – the people in our family. We may look for someone different, and may in fact be devoted to finding someone who appears to be different than what we have known in our family, but time and time again research shows and people confirm that there is a pattern to who and how we love. If you came from a loving, caring, generous and supportive family, this is incredibly good news. But, if you are like most of us, your family may have had some degree of ... let’s say... dysfunction, then you will (unfortunately) be drawn that.

To demonstrate his theory Dr. Tomasulo provides the following example; suppose you were asked to write your signature on a piece of paper, then you were asked to write it on a blackboard, and then sign your name in the snow with a stick. Your signature will be identifiable and uniquely yours. But when, where and how did you learn to do this? You could write it with your elbow, your nose or your foot and pretty much you’d get your unique signature. In much the same way we have patterns inside of us that guide our actions. We may not recall how we learned them, but we are drawn to recreate them in a familiar pattern[3]. 

Going back to Gregory Pacana, he adds that in life we don't get the person that we want, we get the person that we are. So "what are" children who grow up with loving supportive parents? They are people who love themselves and think highly of themselves. They are also people who feel that they deserve to be treated in a very special way. And "what are" children who grow up with unsupportive indifferent parents? More often than not they are people who often do not believe that they are entitled to be treated like they are special or deserving. We've been subconsciously programmed from childhood to believe certain things about ourselves? It doesn't matter if these things are true or untrue; truth has nothing to do with it. That's one of the pitfalls of childhood, we don't have the ability to question or challenge the things we are told and taught to believe, we simply accept them to be true and move forward. There is tape recorder which resides in our subconscious child minds. It is running and recording all the time. It doesn't block out the bad and it doesn't have the ability to tell truth from lies; it records everything. And that tape gets played back over and over in our minds when we become adults. What we must do is reject the negative feelings and voices that are inside of us and start from scratch. That "tape recorder" that plays in our minds? Well quite often it plays false information and lies and those lies need to be challenged and erased. Our inner tape recording needs to be examined and edited and those negative messages need to be replaced with positive messages.

So what am I going to do? Well, the next time I go Hoover shopping, I’m going to get the best Hoover there is.

[1] http://ezinearticles.com/?Successful-Relationships-and-How-We-Choose-a-Mate&id=4116618

[2] Dr. Daniel J. Tomasula, Ph.D., TEP, MFA is a psychologist, psychodrama trainer and a writer on faculty at New Jersey City University and formerly a visiting faculty member on fellowship at Princeton University.

[3] http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2011/02/09/a-general-theory-of-love-part-1/.

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Library book: An analogy

Jurisprudence has always been my weakness, my supervisor has continuously criticised my writing of the philosophical basis of my thesis, I have written and rewritten this chapter so many times that I have grown to hate it, but he will accept nothing less than perfection and so I found myself - again - on the 5^th floor of the library, in the depth of the smelly section of legal theory, I left with ten books on Rawls, Nozick and Hart and their analysis of justice, fairness, and redistribution, not the most exciting read! As I rummaged my way through their complex ideas I found that these books were borrowed quite frequently and used heavily, some students have left pencil marks, others were more intense; circling important points, vigorously underlining and highlighting phrases with black, blue and even red markers, the pages were bruised with attention begging arrows that were embossed on the next page and even the next. But if we are borrowing these books knowing, without a doubt that we will return them, either because we are obligated to do so, or because we feel our use of them is temporary and no attachment to such material will ever be formed, then why do we abuse them? What is even more selfish is that if these books were ours i.e. we had spent a good sum of money to own them, we would have been a lot more careful and gentle, we would have thought twice about bruising or marking them, we would probably not lend them to others in fear they will not be returned to us. As people we get borrowed too and we are hurt by marks we are left with by our borrowers (and the marks made by our predecessors on our books) things that have been done to us stay with us, we never rid of them, they become a part of who we are, and we are never quite the same people as we were before being unkindly borrowed.

Someone I knew - not so long ago -  recently sent me a moving letter about how I had left things unsaid, how I mindlessly and selfishly underlined and marked pages before putting the book I had borrowed back on the shelve, in his message he demanded an explanation for my insensitive behaviour, he called it ‘his final stab for closure’. I said something about me being fire and him being water, that although water is pure, cool, nourishing and radiant, fire needs fire not water. It was just an excuse, and it was foolish and cowardly of me to have said that, what I should have said, is that I myself was borrowed, that I’ve been borrowed and scribbled on so many times and for so long that things have become blurry, leading me to become a scribbler too, but I didn’t say that, I couldn’t. I apologised for the pain I caused, but I know it was not enough.

I don’t scribble in borrowed books anymore and if absolutely necessary I keep my highlighting at a minimum with a very soft pencil that can easily be erased.

Cracked

In this unsettling silence

I spoon your silhouette  

I fit my shadow to your shadow

there are moments when loneliness opens

like a cracked egg

with its yellow gooey eye

its runny edges reach out

desperate

frying on the burning slate

it crackles and sears

nothing in this dead disfigured chick

resembles a living thing.

Old self

Since I’ve come to live in the UK I’ve sent my niece numerous presents on birthdays and other occasions, my older sister (her mother) probably felt she had to return the gesture, so for my last birthday she did, I opened a box that came in the post and found a small shiny red coffee cup. When I was still living in Kuwait I was a Turkish coffee addict, I worked hectic hours at the law firm where I practiced and came home around midnight with a mountain of cases to read, Turkish coffee (drank only in small cups due to intensity) was my only salvation. She must have made the connection; I like Turkish coffee and I like the colour red, therefore this red coffee cup must be the perfect birthday present, what was funny though was that I didn’t get it! Not right away at least. This is not surprising seeing how much I’ve changed; living in the UK, Turkish coffee became a luxury, even if I did find it in scarce Arabic shops it was never the good kind, I often didn't have time to make it, as it was – comparing to instant coffee – a bit of a hassle. Now I drink instant with milk in a large mug. However, these small - perhaps trivial - connections people have of us in their minds intrigue me; I am in my older sister’s mind a coffee drinker who likes the colour red! Which was once true, it is my old self, and it stayed with her all those years. But since I left home, I’ve had a child, divorced, moved house, done a postgraduate degree, had some of my poetry published, met people who have had tremendous influence on my thinking, and avoided my old life and my old home by not going back to it for as long as I possibly can. Thus, I’ve changed considerably, but how many old selves do I have? And who did I leave my old self with?

Am I to the doctor who treated my (vicious) asthma from the age of 3 to 14, still the frail, ill little girl who could not master the simple task of inhaling and exhaling? Am I to my old teachers still the obnoxious young woman who thought she knew everything, who always wore white cotton socks and glasses? Because I haven’t had breathing issues since I was 15, I’ve swapped glasses for lenses, and I only wear nude coloured silk holdups with lace tops, I like the feeling of lace and silk hugging my thighs.

I have shed my old selves, even though they were once who I am, I’ve outgrown them, or lost them. But they continue to live in other people’s memories - if a memory exists at all - otherwise my old self is swept away and forgotten like last autumn’s leaves. In most cases I am one of the many names that a person encounters, insignificant and similar, this perception materialized when I received my divorce papers in a DHL envelope a few months back, I was pleased to finally be unshackled after I had been separated for two years, my singularity finally validated, but what was astonishing is that the judge who signed my divorce paper is the same one who verified my marriage contract many years ago. Amongst the hundreds of women he marries and divorces every day, I am just another self, who had agreed to be someone to somebody and that agreement has now come to an end.     

Pill

I take you like a pill

reluctant, compelled.

I press you through the

thin, silver, metallic sheet

there’s a comic yet evil

sound to your piercing through

the malleable metal foil

always taking some of the

health warning in bold print as you go

20 mg capsules of chemical

substance I am unable to pronounce

your ridiculously complex name

is only an added emphases  

of your hazardous

side effects

You pop out so easily

but that is not how you go down  

you need to be pushed, thrust, forced
down my throat.

I feel you tumbling heavily

bumping blindly into the interior walls of the canal,
the hallow tube of my muscular chamber where my
vital air and food passages cross

I feel you twisting, turning upside down, down side up

I can never be sure on which face you have landed.

Rummaging

Rummaging in this plastered world

what do I hope to gain from giving the ever hungry?

what do I hope to save from my sieving religion?

i have loved, but never a love I could not poke holes in

sunk in pleasure, but never a sweetness that didn’t turn acid

in people’s hollow mouths, I feel defeated

i want a language that renders silence

a home that doesn’t grow small or weary

no door I’ve bolted ever barred these winds of unhappiness

no man’s warmth ever stopped my shivering in the night

i want to satisfy this female who rides me with reins harsh and jagged

i want to find a face under the cracks of my flawless foundation.