A Withered Old Woman

It’s an ideal place for one to be unseen,

For a woman to be unseen.

 

A room for twenty-five dinars a night, in a cheap hotel that flaunts its ugliness as if it were an achievement. In the shadows of the mongrel crowds of Salmiya, among a group of sluggish cafés propped against each other as if holding themselves up, the cafés’ patrons spread out along the sidewalk next to the red coals of their nargilehs, enveloped by the thick scent of grilled meat and sitting under a turban of smoke.

I melt into the throng and nearly disappear.

I have no odor and no shadow.

I am no one.

 

I am in the right place. Not just because no one would expect to find me here, but because the place resembles me—its unforgivable lack of shame, already old despite its youth, a pond of fish gutted by grief. The blue curtains, the burgundy sofas, the scandalous absence of any harmony among its parts—everything here is me.

I feel I’ve lost many limbs crossing the miles. Emptiness has left its stains on me. I have died and buried myself many times, and have nowhere left inside that is green and alive. I am an old woman at twenty-five, a withered old woman.

When I talk about why I ran away I have to be convincing. I can’t come across like a crazy woman addicted to pills, a poet railing against the dryness and distance of things. It’s easy to condemn me; I need to make things clear, quantifiable, with sharp edges, simple as a percentage. The answer was to run. The data is endless and the story isn’t a straight line, but I will try anyway.

I want Faris to understand that I couldn’t stay in that world a moment longer. A world of coffins and tombs. A world of shoes that walk all over me. I want to eliminate all possible ties to the conventional way of life. I want chaos—to sleep when I want and eat as I want, to be silent as much as I want. I want to want. I am starved for my will, starved for myself. I hunger to feel, for the first time in my life, that I am immune to violation, that no one’s claws will rip away the shield masking my frailty.

I’ve started to understand that it’s pointless for me to think about our marriage, and our impending divorce, as isolated from the seven years I spent in that basement. That is what I tried, and failed, to tell Faris: you married an old woman of twenty. They stole many years; years that I was supposed to live, innocent and youthful. I can’t be your wife; nothing will grow here.

I’ll stay here. I’ll hide here my entire life, with my bottle of alprazolam, my socks, my glass vases stuffed with papers, my computer. Here in the hotel flaunting its three stars, celebrating its perpetual inferiority, and delighted by its truth. I’ll stay here on the second floor, room twenty-eight, and write.