Snippy

Walking in a melting world in a grey hoodie that hasn’t zipped for at least a year and one of the two hand-knitted wristwarmers that wasn’t lost at the Water Tower mall by the pizza shop, failing at some ad hoc diet along with Hedaya, when Hedaya and Mohammed were here, and the wristwarmer was lost to the cause of groupwide forward momentum. Walking and the world smells like melting. It’s wierd, growing up, giving names to smells that existed namelessly, like heat, leaf decay, ice melt, and that cold that is so cold you can’t smell anything but your nose hairs freezing. Smells you can identify months with.

Dream. In an unidenitified hospital waiting room, waiting for something undefined and routine. Possibly Cook County Hospital, because the waiting room expands forever, like an airport full of flimsy clinical plastic chairs with triangular metal legs, the plastic bright orange and black and beige, like they were all salvaged from a defunct warehouse or bought over time by different people who didn’t bother to see what the others had ordered, or to visit the waiting room first. Anyway, they’re almost all full, the waiting room chairs, but somehow disparately empty at the same time. Because there are so many of them in every direction, I get a feeling of vertigo, in my dream. There is no counter in sight behind which any medical professionals might receive questions or patients. I bear down hard on something internal, maybe trying to execute a sit-up, it’s not clear, for no obvious reason but boredom after hours of waiting. And then my stomach splits two inches, smack in the middle, where my old scar was. A clean split, smooth and bloodless. And beneath it, anatomically incorrectly, splits my small intestine, a one-centimeter split. My intestine is white and nubbly and also smooth and clean, like the healthy appendix a pathologist showed me in a jar once, next to my own appendix, which I had just had taken out and was also in a jar looking like something that had rotted in the sun. A slow pain accumulates, then, and I walk through the lines of full-empty chairs to find a nonexistent medical professional, to inform someone I’ll probably be requiring surgery.

Phone: Hi, you’ve reached Shayna and Nehemiah. Leave a message after the beep.

Me: Hi, it’s me. I was just calling to say… that writing… is pain. Terrible… relentless pain. Pure, unmitigated pain. As in it hurts. Writing. Hurts. Um. Okay. That’s all I wanted to say. I’m, uh, kinda glad you didn’t pick up. I was hoping for the indifference of an answering machine. Uh, that’s all, I guess. Bye.

(38 minutes)

Phone: Ring.

Me: Hello?

Shayna: Are you okay?

Me: …Wha? Oh. Yeah. Great. Your answering machine is a great listener.

Shannon: You got if off your chest.

Me: I mean, I kinda feel like I should pay your answering machine at the rate of therapists or phone sex workers.

Shayna: Winter is like this.

3 pancakes + 3 bacon + 3 eggs + coffee = 5 bucks 51 cents @ the Golden Pancake 2 blocks away. Bacon is both personal confession and a wierd narcissistic sort of religious dissent, these two ideas inseperable as the lines of pure lipid and pure flesh, soaked in each others juices until merged and nearly crisp. Outside, 23 degrees F feels like spring following a day of negative two. Inside, lights non-flourescent, heat gratuitously up, voices overlapping you’d think family on Thanksgiving. Wierd almost-melting-pot atmosphhere roughly resembles Chicago’s beaches three months a year.

Dream. At a party and a woman trades clothes with me. I wear tight yellow spandex, lace, neck to ankles, wrist to wrist. She is taller than me and I grow into them. It is past late.

She gives me a handgun from her pocket. 

"Wouldn’t wanna be walking around this time of night without it," she says.

I hold it and it is all of those cliches about guns - cool and heavy in my hand, etc. Later in a room with the boys, one shows me his gun, and we compare, with both of them lying there on a table, in a side room, under a humming fluorescent light, me afraid that somehow one of us will shoot.

Then Hedaya and Mohammed and Ahmed and Rasha leave and the apartment feels kind of heartbreakingly empty.

Hedaya, teasing: 3shan ma fii boyfriend *.

Me, playing hostess but sincere: 3shan into ri7ayn **.

(Hedaya and Mohammed have not been able to call their families for four days because Israel has bombed the cell phone towers. This is not something we talk about more than we absolutely have to.)

* Because you don’t have a boyfriend.

** Because you are leaving. 

Long apartment full of art. Firm flat guest bed. Cell phone charger cord unrolled in a line.

The thing I fear most in the next six hours is spilling a glass of water on the floor. 

Hedaya and I talk diets all weekend. I recommend the 25-calorie hot cocoa, then eat three pieces of fudge. She eats only salad for dinner, then two pieces of pie.

Hedaya: Diet fashil*.

Me: Il-diet il-wahid b3rf 3mlha**.

Failing at diets with Hedaya begins to unrust my Arabic.

* "failed"

** "The only diet I know how to follow."

I begin to ask Hedaya about her family. She begins to tell me. Mohammed interrupts.

"Please. We are visiting Leora. Can we forget Gaza for a little while."

He smiles, painfully. 

Ahmed and Rasha scream together ecstatically, each reaching toward the other from the grasp of a different parent’s arms.

Ahmed: Two years old, speaks English, Arabic, and soomething incomprehensible in between.

Rasha: Eight months old, communicates through pitch of voice.

When they scream together, they speak a language they both understand.