Thirty minutes from Heathrow, making a stop at a place that has only ever been an in-between for me. Shuffling through, but only ever through and through knowing we were only half-way through a journey with yet another ocean to cross, but I'm stepping into and away from this liminal space this time around, moving beyond the no-man's land of duty-free shops and luggage stores and into the world that exists beyond this threshold mired in transience itself.
I am not nervous--I can hardly imagine what is to unfold around me. It seems more of a pop-up book than any kind of reality. The angles of the Buckingham Palace yawning into place with the turn of a page, the bridges rising like slow beasts over still water, and the Eye of London unblinking over it all.
I have been awake for two nights folding and unfolding my own life into the open mouths of suitcases that can never consume enough--and my own hungry desire to feed them full, to carry along all that I can. I sat in the current of flowing blouses and trousers, waves to get out creases, deciding that this dress and that one and one must be left behind, decisions must be made, in my new life which has yet to materialize will require a blue and white striped dress with belt loops and not a frumpy white one but I have no way of knowing, no way of knowing with no sense of place, what can be purpose…but it will be and it won't be of course made of woven thread either, it will be built up along walls and written across so many pages--still this character must where something that reflects her character…but what, how...
And after all that thought, suddenly I am here at the very conveyor belt, hauling away final decisions and wishing they weren't so final as I stand at some cusp of the very beginning of it all. But an end wrapped in all of that as well--since tomorrow is Eid, the end of a month which is better than a thousand months in its 30 days of decided starvation and into a year of feeding the want of a dream that has given me hunger pangs for so long. I have wanted this life, this away, this sweet desert, much deserved, dare I say…but I can't bear to.
But Eid was unfamiliar, the first one I have had away from a white dome in an expanse of golden husks, away from the flocks of women who peck the cheeks like parrots, dress in the colors of their feathers---a thousand forgivenesses after a year of repentances. All ceremonies and cemeteries, unearthing memories and making them come alive enough to hold them in our arms and finding wishes granted by unwrapping gifts in small sweet boxes. And there was a bottle of blue perfume for me this year in this country across the way, and embracing only strangers. I hardly recognized my cousin the airport so of course there was no hope for any of the other women who walked into the prayer hall with their shoes in plastic bags, listening to a half-hearted sermon that was nothing but a list of questions submitted by "young brothers" but all on a theme to seem too groomed to be genuine. Then back down the road from halal fusion restaurants and men standing outside them in a kameez and jeans as if to further assert their hybridity, then home again for heaping bowls of sawaiyyah, the park, a pizza place, and me to my hotel room.
And so a day is done in some place that has always been a place.
