I slept...

Silence. Silence and lots and lots of beautiful quiet
need to sleep; overwhelming
Bed envelops me and holds me in it's womb
Just the invisible hum of the heat-breathing radiator
Warmth inside, Cold everywhere else

Soft darkness with a yellow glow around the garden
Peace, safety and the loving smell of freshly laundered linens
Falling in backwards, melting into feathers of softness
In a small house, surrounded by strong trees
As the moon was welcomed into a big blue sky of stars, I slept.

I'm only happy when it rains

My husband just found me on the porch in a frantic race against the rain, swishing water out into the garden with the most useless of tools. It's not raining cats and dogs. It's raining cattle, and there are cows of rain on my porch; my safe spot. This is where I’m planning to sit on my wicker furniture, curled up drinking tea and reading a good book during the rainy holiday. This is not supposed to be the set for Water world. I was battling the puddles threatening my doorstep with such enthusiasm I raised my heart rate to cardio-training levels. Wearing cropped pants and beach slippers in the cold, I think I scared him when I turned around to explain what I was doing.

I stood there breathless with electrified frizzy hair, face pink with determination and soaking wet, holding my weapons of choice. The name eludes me now, but in one hand, I was holding that thing you use to swipe water of your shower glass door. To a passer-by I must've looked like a mad hockey player seized with dementia.

"What are you doing?" he asked.
"What does it look like I'm doing?" I answer waving my other tool, the spade-ish thingy that comes with a matching brush.
"Farah, you're going to get sick! What you're doing is pointless."
"Well, somebody has to save the house from "The Flood". Hand me that bucket will you?" I answer hysterically.
He walked back into the house shaking his head, wondering if when he wasn't looking someone switched me with a look-a-like maniac.

Three Hours Earlier

"I love it when it rains...Isn’t it amazing?" I sigh staring out the window of the car.
It felt so safe driving around, dry inside and wet and splashy outside. It's especially wonderful if you're the front-seat passenger and the executive DJ.

I had bullied my husband into plugging in my iPod, because my music was cooler. He listens to old Arabic songs that go on forever and sound to me like someone is wailing from a prison cell. I can't take it more than 3 seconds. When we were engaged I used to drown out the sound by humming in my head, trying not to be one of those people who have to have things their way. Now that he’s legally bound to me, I decided to tell him the truth.

"Nayef, I can't. It's killing me!" I mutter through clenched teeth.
"What's wrong with your face? Why is it scrunched up like that?"
"It's the music. It hurts my ears. I will die if you don't change it.” I begged, looking like a constipated Pug.

So with good music as our soundtrack, we marveled at the rain’s strength and felt the thrill of driving through big puddles spraying the sides of the streets. However, the peace I found in the rain earlier today was immediately erased when I saw my own porch flooding with pools of water gathering at the threshold, soaking up the make-shift Welcome mat. My domestic safety was vulnerable and I immediately started drawing up architectural solutions to this leakage into my covered porch, while rushing to grab for the nearest squeegee. (I just remembered the name)

Looking out of my window now, I see that the puddle has been revitalized and is collecting smugly in the corner of the porch. I realized that my insane thrashing at it earlier was futile, but either way it was satisfying.

Enjoy the long rainy weekend and “Be one with the puddles…”

GDN Letters that annoy me...

In reference to the letter linked below:

http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/story.asp?Article=163674&Sn=LETT&IssueID=29261

Dear Dark Magician, (whatever the hell that means)

First of all, I got a headache from reading your jumbled letter. Nothing flows smoothly and you don’t have a single healthy sentence in the entire text. You seem to be a bit confused, trying to back your unquestioned beliefs with facts and logic that just don’t mesh with each other. In some instances, I wasn’t sure whether you were for or against something, but I figured out a little bit of your mishmash to understand that you have taken the liberty to “correct” someone by dictating that the hijab is compulsory and in fact not a personal choice.

In all logic and reason, the only people who should have the right to discuss hijab, and its wonderful protective benefits, are women. They are the ones who wear them, and they should be the ones to evaluate their effectiveness against temptation, evil and nuclear war.

I don’t see any passionate campaigns by men, telling women about the wonderful benefits of wearing bras. “Bras…because you don’t want to look like a cow” or “women and bras, unite against gravity!”

So why is it every man’s business to tell us their opinion on how liberating wearing a hijab is. I personally don’t find it liberating nor useful and never will. Others find comfort in it, the same way I am comfortable wearing jeans as opposed to hotpants. It’s my personal choice and right not to reveal my body to whomever I don’t want to reveal it to and I can say the same for every other woman. If you are not comfortable with your hair showing, cover it, and get on with your life.

But to accept that men are telling us, in the name of religion, that it is compulsory to cover your hair, THAT I don’t accept. And just to prove that it isn’t something specifically called for in the Quran, you now see this hijab propaganda gradually evolving and being redefined to include covering the face. I can only anticipate that the next step to “protecting” women will be to ban them from speaking, because their voices will be the only feminine element left to delete. The popular “Islamic” compromise which is unfortunately starting to exist in Bahrain now, is that a woman exists and has alleged “equality”, on the condition that she be covered from head to toe, with no face. This only serves one dangerous and highly poisonous purpose, which is to erase her from existence. She can offer no human feature to appeal to others and essentially becomes a faceless nameless object, easy to ignore or abuse, because she’s not familiar anymore.

You can no longer view her as a mother, a sister or a friend. She becomes your temptation that must be covered, synonymous with sin. She is now that, which will get you into hell if you touch her, think of her or look at her. Something to quickly avert your eyes from and not acknowledge, lest you have sinful thoughts and become tempted to rape, pillage and commit adultery.

I fear that we have gotten to the point where we have to modify God’s creation in order to avoid committing crimes. We no longer take responsibility for our civility, mutual respect, or self-control. If you are on a diet, every baker must close his windows and curb the smell of freshly baked bread, so that YOU don’t feel tempted to grab and devour a loaf of olive bread and get fat. We don’t care! Get fat, or don’t get fat, but pay for the damn bread or go sit in your room under your blanket.

Hair is hair. It is not inherently sexy. How attractive is it lying on the bathroom floor? Does it make you go wild, when you see hair on your carpet? What is beautiful, is the woman, who the hair belongs to. Whether she covers it or not, you cannot reduce her femininity without erasing her presence. Her features will be in your daughter’s faces, her tenderness will shine through in the way she holds your children when they cry and she will always be attractive, no matter what you cover.