return as if you never left

what progress, you ask, have i made?

i used to tell myself that it was too late to keep working, or at least that it was an unseemly hour to be sitting at my desk, so then i’d get up and quietly stay up much later into the night pretending to be asleep. i can never quite remember how i used to spend the following few hours, but my pale linen curtains would start to change color at 5 or 6 am and i’d pull them back and think that the last time i ate was at dinner yesterday, that yesterday i’d had said bye to my friends on call, and now it was today, and today i needed to make tea. so i’d sit on the edge of the kitchen table and watch the water boil around the edges of the pot, and then add milk and tea leaves and again for a few more minutes watch it bubble. i wish it was good tea but it was somehow always too watery, too sweet or too strong. i would still drink the tea, but with much less ceremony, because the quiet of the brewing tea had already passed, and whatever was to come was not so much important.

it was the same reason that i used to smoke cigarettes. i needed an alibi that sounded like im just finishing the cigarette! so i could pocket a few minutes from my 24 hour timesheet. no other form of taking some time off matches the grounds enjoyed by a smoker and a tea brewer. one could, in the literal sense, cross their legs, close their eyes, touch the tips of their thumbs to their forefingers, and meditate, but they’d still have to log the hours for meditation. what were you doing? i was meditating. on the other hand, picture someone putting out a cigarette or straining tea. unbeknownst to anyone else, they have just successfully carried out a grand heist and is now relishing the few stolen, meditative minutes they never have to give an account for. unless someone wanted to be really annoying, no one really asks what were you doing while you were smoking? because for all intents and purposes they were smoking, and digging deeper than that would be akin to ousting the time thief, and no thief likes that.

what’s just as annoying is for someone to assume that the person about to make tea just wants to drink the tea. i’ve fixed my sleep schedule, so by the time i wake up now my room is already sun kissed and copulated, and even worse my housekeeper is up and at attention. by the time ive brushed my teeth and gathered my bearings, she is already knocking at my door with a fresh cup of tea, and to make matters worse, the tea is not too watery, too sweet, or too strong. it tastes just right. i think, my life has been robbed of the last modicum of poetry, and this gives me something to grumble about. but not being able to make tea should theoretically be a minor loss, and the fact that i smoked the last of my cigarette carton that i had bought at the duty free is also pitiable albeit understandable, but surely this can’t be it. what has happened to all the other beautiful things that i was so proud of? i’ve lost some weight and my hair curls at the nape of my neck, so that’s nice. but im sure im missing something. have all the beautiful things been left, shocking if true, somewhere else?

four years ago i wanted to leave home, and i did, and there i had committed my original sin that i would make over and over again in the following years. i thought you only live once, and so i did everything for the here and now. i think i was complaining to a friend about love troubles once a few years ago and they’d said “young people worry too much about the future”, and i’m not sure why that stuck so much with me but in my naivety i stopped thinking about the future almost entirely, about everything that was to come once the four years were over. in reality, you live once at home, then a different life abroad, and then another one back at home. these lives depend on each other — whatever i did at home the first time around landed me a new life away from home, and whatever i did away from home led me back here. to wonder what i would have done if i were a little more forward thinking, is wishful thinking, and quarters of one’s mind as deep as where this happens does not befit the intrusion of the public. the wishful thinking still abounds, regardless.

i scheduled my first interview at a company at home the other day, and right then, once and for all, the sinking feeling belatedly took shape. my abu dhabi debit card or my etisalat sim that i’ve been continuing to use have only been instruments in making myself believe that i’m just a tourist here. that life over there that i thought was real and that which i was only putting on hold for a few months might have already ended, and i might already be a few months deep into my new life. (in the next sentence i will be fighting for my life not to use the annoying word “ephemeral”). i’m thinking now, exactly four months into my delusion, how bleak it had been all along — on the weekends, when my emirati friends used to say, “im going home”, they meant dubai, sharjah, or abu dhabi. i would also say the same, “i’m going home”, but i would just be heading back to my dorm room.

i might again someday in the future start another life somewhere else, but only after i see this one at home through to completion. these past few months, i’d get sad, annoyed, frustrated, sure, but sad, annoyed, and frustrated in the kind of way you are when your amazon order is delayed. you know that it will come anyway, at some point or another, if you just get through this dull wait. but imagine finding out that your amazon driver has driven off a cliff and your order is never coming, that now if you still wanted a beautiful thing you’d have to go and place a brand new order. you’d have to do it all over again.

when i found out my amazon driver had overdosed, self-immolated and floored it at the top of the grand canyon, for the first few hours it felt like one of those ai slop videos where everything keeps shape shifting and in the flurry of acrobats and dancers and surfers you can’t really make anything out. then a few days later i was reading an article on object oriented programming, and in there, of all places, i found some semblance of a grounding truth. in computer science, classes are like templates — they define placeholders for a set of properties. you can instantiate any number of objects of a class, and these objects will have real values for all the properties that they inherited from the class. the author of the article, in preambling his explanation of this concept, writes the following:

In the 5th century, B.C., the astonishingly brilliant philosopher, Plato, described what we now call the Theory of Forms. In this theory, forms are the non-physical essences of all things, of which objects in the physical world are merely imitations or stand-ins. Things, transient as they are, are not as real or true as the eternal concepts or blueprints from whence they come. So, for example, any given tree is not as real as the concept of Tree. But we cannot encounter forms directly, only through the objects that embody them, however imperfectly. It took us only 2.5 thousand years to begin to code in that direction.

this groundbreaking idea, which deservers a minute’s pause and then some more, is casually followed by some programming 101 code.

the canonical idea of being rooted somewhere makes you think that everyone belongs to a single place and leaves it to you to nominate the single place of belonging. so you go somewhere and when it starts to feel kinda right, you call it your home. but then one day you have to leave and some time later realize that you had only been a guest at the place you were so quick to call home. it is not unlikely that plato, astonishingly brilliant as he was, must have foreseen a boy in the 21st century falling to his knees realizing that the place that he presumed home was built with bricks of borrowed time, while the home he had at home did not even feel like his own. but if plato, in his theory of forms, is saying that all the places that feel right are stand-ins for an abstract home, and vice versa that the abstract home is the non-physical essence of all places that have felt/will feel right, then i take his word for it. because the abstract home is easier to come to terms with — it is eternal, and thus the fear of losing it is eliminated. a place that feels right, then, is just an instance of the eternal home. so if plato and a programmer walked into a bar and the bartender asked, “where’s home for you?”, this is probably what they’d come up with:

there is only one Home, and it is eternal. all the instances of Home, home1, home2, home3, and all the future instances of Home that will be created — don’t really matter that much. you could even write home2 = null to remove from your memory any reference to that home object, but the good things that mattered have already been added to the allTheGoodThings list.

in no way am i experiencing an original thought about home and belonging, only that i am experiencing this first-hand for the first time. i mean this is what everyone ever talked about in abu dhabi, and i used to think that they were thinking too much. i guess it’s just one of those things that you never think about, until you do. then when you do, it is a real hard-hitting topic, and if you were writing a blog post about this where you were leaving out a hundred and one follow-up thoughts that you thought no one else needed to know, you could still fill up a few pages just by scratching the surface. in fact, the delight that is yesmine’s substack is perhaps entirely dedicated to this, and im stealing her site’s name for this post because it fits only too well.

for a few hours every night, right up until fajr, my neighbor calls for god at the top of his lungs. at first i thought it might be some noisy appliance with a regular rhythm, perhaps an air conditioner that had been left on for too long and needed to be turned off. but once you stop pretending to be a tourist at a place of which you’re not a big fan, despite your reluctance, you start owning up to your spatial existence. so then i heard him, calling, “allah, allah, allah, …”. what could his prayer be for? for he enunciates the word so clearly, spelling out both syllables every time, as if to ensure that the one being called is aware of his calling. the unconcealed vehemence of his intonation speaks of the most private demand. the way his voice inflects up at the end of each repetition, makes clear the form of a desire, the content of which his neighbors are not privy to. but his neighbors really have no business knowing, as they are clearly not the intended addressee. either way, whether his calls really are being heard by Someone, is secondary. the primary understanding is this: the set of things that we can ask of one another is really quite limited. at some point, you just have to take it up with Someone higher up, whether they’re there or not.

as for me, i’ve picked up again the things i love. i’ve started reading a little here and there, i’m writing now, and i don’t shrug my friends off when they ask “how are you?”. in the words of seneca, "what progress, you ask, have i made? i have begun to be a friend to myself.”