Chiquitita

Chiquitita, tell me what’s wrong
you’re enchained by
your own sorrow
in your eyes
there is no hope for tomorrow
how I hate to see you like this
there is no way you can deny it
I can see that you’re
oh so sad, so quiet

Chiquitita, tell me the truth
I’m a shoulder you can cry on
your best friend
I’m the one you must rely on
you were always sure of yourself
now I see you’ve broken a feather
I hope we can
patch it up together

Chiquitita
you and I know
how the heartaches
come and they go
and the scars they’re leavin’
you’ll be dancin’ once again
and the pain will end
you will have no time for grievin’
Chiquitita
you and I cry
but the sun is still in the sky
and shining above you
let me hear you sing once more
like you did before
sing a new song
Chiquitita
try once more
like you did before
sing a new song
Chiquitita

So the walls came tumblin’ down
and your love’s a blown out candle
all is gone and it seems
too hard to handle
Chiquitita, tell me the truth
there is no way you can deny it
I see that you’re
oh so sad, so quiet

Chiquitita
you and I know
how the heartaches
come and they go
and the scars they’re leavin’
you’ll be dancin’ once again
and the pain will end
you will have no time for grievin’
Chiquitita
you and I cry
but the sun is still in the sky
and shining above you
let me hear you sing once more
like you did before
sing a new song
Chiquitita
try once more
like you did before
sing a new song
Chiquitita

A love less ordinary

I close my eyes and reach out, I can feel the warmth of his skin against mine and for a second the emptiness disappear folding the distance between us and I feel his face against the palm of my hand. He’s a breath away, I keep my eyes closed and I’m free falling through the gentleness of his smile and the joy I see reflected between the two of us stretches a lifetime of dreams and promises.

Whenever I think of love I think of a love less ordinary, as if there is something such as an ordinary love! I look back and see a passion that defied the distance, a connection that broke the lines of logic and normality and a simple belief in something extraordinary.

For long I wondered how this happened? I questioned with the scared heart of a child why was I blessed with such gift? When all around me are giving up in love, was I to be the one to carry on the faith that pure, unconditional, dizzyingly vast and all consuming love is out there to be won?

Years have passed, what started as a unique friendship has changed overnight to an avalanche of emotion that buried everything with a blanket of sweetness. Years on, and that sweetness remains, magically fragranced, intoxicating the soul with so much happiness.

Years on and I’m a changed person, but how can I not change when I know that after so long, I will never be alone again? A person can live his or her life alone, friends, family and colleagues are shadows that pass along the way but there is a personal space around that is never breach or violated. I walked through life with that space untouched, and with every broken heart, with every sad farewell the wall is tougher to break and harder to breach, I walked that lonely road till he walked to me and that wall vanished to thin air… He showed me what love is, held my hand and promised me with a believer’s faith, a child’s joy and a warrior’s strength that I will never have to walk alone ever again. He didn’t have to promise with words for the look in his eyes made a thousand and one promises for all to see and for me to cherish.

Now I know that I will never be alone again, oblivious to the distance separating us, I just close my eyes and lose myself in that promise. I know that while miles and miles of empty spaces between us he’s only a heartbeat way.

He is my faith and our love is my constitution, I can take anything that life throws at me for I shall never be alone.

For now I have known love and for that I will never be just a thought passing in time.

Now I’m truly loved and for that, I will forever leave a trace of something more than just a life lived.

You whisper your love for me to wake up to

and my heart blossoms a rose under your fingertips

Caramel

One of my old friends from Syria has recently moved to London. She stayed over at my place for a couple weeks before finding a flat and moving out. So far she has given me 2 wonderful gifts for my hospitality, both were visual feasts and I would have missed both if it wasn’t for her invite.

My friend unknowingly dragged me (and I have to admit that I was a bit cautious the first time so dragging is the word) to 2 non English speaking films! The first was in Persian* “The Kite Runner” and the 2^nd was Arabic, “Caramel/سكر بنات”.

I have to admit that if I was on my own, I wouldn’t have chosen to watch either of the two, for me going to the cinema is a time to disconnect from the real world and lose myself for a couple of hours. I like the collective psyche that you get from watching a film at a movie theatre, the audience laughing, gasping and cheering together. Taking that into consideration, watching a film that appeals to a niche market wasn’t much my thing but my friend has asked me to accompany her, and I’m too polite to say no!

What I got as a result of my politeness was breathtaking! I will write at another time about “The Kite Runner” it deserves another take before I can comment on the film, suffice to say that it was close to being a spiritual experience not just a movie.

The 2^nd film that my friend suggested, and I was a more willing companion this time, was “Caramel” or “سكر بنات”. A fellow blogger has already mentioned it here, and I’m happy that the film is getting some headlines as it is surely one to watch.

The story is very simple, it’s simple as life seem to be in a quiet Beirut street in a middle class area, everything goes by in its normal slow pass that is a trade mark of such neighbourhoods. A seemingly simple life at a seemingly simple time and the lives of four girls working at a beauty saloon with a satellite of characters surrounding them.

This simplicity is quickly dismissed once you’ve scratched the surface of the story! Tales of the forbidden and the unobtainable are tangled with the society’s views and taboos surrounding the female entity in our sunny orient.

Caramel, is a symbol of the simple act that all women are joint with, it’s sticky sweetness is that of a society’s view of what should be and not what is there. In it’s simple basis, it hides the painful differences that a woman have to suppress in order to fit into a structure that catalogues her in a rigid structure of looks, status, purity and sexual orientation; departing from that structure is not permitted and that same society has created the means to maintain this structure even by falsifying and masking the truth.

The simple/complexity of the story is mirrored in the langue used in the film, while the words are simple, common with no unnecessary pretence, the acting and the music complete the structure of the scene. One of the most breathtaking dialogues was with Rose sitting in front of her mirror preparing for the hope that arrived 30 years late only to be held back from her later day's dream by the ranting of Lili. You didn’t need words to read the conflict between duty and the simple hope for happiness. The words were redundant in that scene, the music was heart breaking and the acting was unbelievable.

The film touched on a number of challenging topics, some relevant only to our eastern society (purity, sexual orientation) and some relating to all women in all places and times, how the illusion of love can degrade someone, holding on to lost youth and how happiness is found in what we let go of rather than what we pursue.

I don’t know how a non Arabic speaker would rate this film, not being part of the culture, not understanding the usage of language that no mater how accurate the translation is, it can never convey the meaning of some of the words used. I know that for me and my friend, watching this film together at a west end cinema in London, we were transformed home for 90 minutes. In a way, I didn’t want it to end, I wanted to stay in that simple, sun drenched Beirut street and embrace more the different life that passes by there.

The last scene of the film was enchanting, crazy Lili gathering the discarded papers in the street with Rose, trying to find what a lost lover has written to her somewhere, sometime we don’t know about. How many of us walk through life chasing these pieces of papers? Never finding what we’re looking for but never giving up the search…

Caramel by director/actress Nadine Labaki

*Thanks Paolo!

I carry your heart with me

I carry your heart with me
I carry it in my heart
I am never without it

Anywhere I go you go, my dear;

and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling

I fear no fate
for you are my fate, my sweet

I want no world
for beautiful you are my world, my true

and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and

whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

here is the root of the root and

the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky

of a tree called life; which grows higher than the soul can hope

or mind can hide and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

I carry your heart I carry it in my heart

E.E. Cummings

Lists, lists, lists...

So, I think I’m officially the worst blogger to be tagged, ever! Syrian Brit tagged me more than 3 weeks ago, that was my first tag and, after this delay, I think it will be my last!

So I was tagged to list 6 things to do before you’re 18! Well my 29^th birthday was a couple of days ago so theoretically I’m not that far from the time I was 18 but it still feel eons ago.

Any way before I start with my usual flow (that is hard to stop) I have to start by listing the 6 rules to this task:
1. Post these rules before presenting your list.
2. List 6 actions or achievements you think every person should accomplish before turning 18.
3. There are no conditions on what can be included on the list.
4. At the end of your blog, choose 6, or less, people to get tagged and list their names.
5. People who are tagged write their own blog entry with their 6 suggestions.
6. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged.

Well, as Lujayn did, I’ll skip the last 3 due to the delay in replying to this blog plus the fact that most people I know on the blog sphere have already been tagged with this task.

So here it is, my contribution to this serial chain of ideas?

1-Read a book!

I know that this sounds extremely daft but I don’t mean to read just any book, before you’re 18, you should have read at least one book that was able to touch your heart and leave an imprint on your soul. Before you’re 18, you should discover the influence a written word can have. After that life just flow by so quickly and you will barely have time to open up to a book that way, and if you don’t, you’ll miss on so much. In today’s word that gives so much weight to the visual and high tech, the book is sliding away from the public landscape and if you don’t build it in your life before you’re 18 it will be very difficult to do so later and you’ll lose out on one of the greatest pleasures in life. When I was 18, the book that left the deepest impact on me was Roots; it still occupies its special place on the bookshelf on my mind.

2-Stay awake for 3 days working on something!

You will have the energy and the passion to drive you to do so and both will be much less available as you get older and “wiser” and things that will give you such a drive become more and more rare.

You stay awake on excitement and enthusiasm alone and by the end when your energy has finally been consumed you look at the fruit of your labour, let it be the last page on a book or the last touch on an essay and you’re filled with an overwhelming sense of achievement. Your achievement maybe only such a climax in your own mind, most people will tell you that you can’t really do something of substance before you’re 18 but then the eagerness of youth and the pride of a young mind cannot be suppressed by anyone and no one can convince you that what you’ve done isn’t a wonderful achievement. You have such high spirit and too much faith in yourself to allow that to happen, something much harder later in life.

3-Be there for someone,

When you’re 18, you’re in a gray area between adolescence and adulthood; it is during then that people are not sure of which side you’re on. During that time, the first time you get beyond the selfishness that marks us as children and teenagers and someone turns to you for help and you’re there for them that what marks your life in the years to come. If you never do that before you’re 18, you’ll find it more and more difficult to do when you’re older and the demands of life and more and more with every passing day. I remember the day that this happened with me as if it was yesterday, and I know that it has shaped me into the person I’m today.

4-Travel

The second your feet land on foreign soil you feel the possibilities open up in front of you. It’s amazing, how the narrow comfortable world you know, the casual and the mundane that one slips into in his or her own day to day surrounding dissolves when this new world stretches in front of you.

Before you’re 18, you have to know that the world is so much bigger and the possibilities on where you can be in this world are endless. Expand your horizon as much as possible before you’re 18 and you start being afraid of how big the outside is. Before you’re 18 the world is an adventure, the more you take in from this adventure the more you can expand into it afterwards.

5-Put a list of 6 things you want to do by the time you're 30!

It’s funny that just before Syrian Brit tagged me to do this blog, I was sketching the outline for a blog about the different lists we all have, that outline was lost when my blackberry crashed and I never returned to it! Nonetheless, one of the lists I thought of was the list we all put together when we’re younger and just coming out to the world.

Every 18 year old should have already put a list of things to achieve before they’re 30. The faith of an 18 year old will allow them to be bold and creative, they’re ambition is still in full force and the knock backs that life hands them are still too weak to cause damage. At 18, one can take on the world and that’s what one should aim for.

When you’re 30, although you haven’t done the things on your list, it did help in pushing you up and forward. Your list is your own, you don’t have to share it, and the advice is not to do so. This is your own Mount Everest that you will challenge yourself to climb it the following 12 years. Why 30? Well, I’m 29 now and my Mount Everest has changed a lot from how it was at 18 but it remains as challenging as it used to be then.

6- Fall in love

I know that this has been mentioned before in different ways and by many people but I don’t think any list can be completed without it. Before you’re 18, your notion of love is that what you read in books and see on screen, a view that is, in 99 cases out of a 100, skewed at best and totally distorted at worst. The distinction between love, sexual drive and friendship is very vague at that time and it’s so easy to think that any one of the latter two is love. Fall in love before you’re 18 and you’ll get your heart broken, you’ll feel the hurt and ache but you’ll become much wiser. Take your first step towards really falling in love; you’ll learn the difference between infatuation and love, between friendship and love and between desire and love. This is a lesson that you have to start learning before your 18 and carry on learning through out the following years. It is only when you have passed your finals that you can truly know the meaning of falling in love.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 116

Years on, you're still the one...

When I first saw you, I saw love.
And the first time you touched me, I felt love.
And after all this time, you're still the one I love.

Looks like we made it
Look how far we've come my baby
We mighta took the long way
We knew we'd get there someday

Bridge:
They said, I bet they'll never make it
But just look at us holding on
We're still together still going strong

Chorus:
(You're still the one)
You're still the one I run to
The one that I belong to
You're the one I want for life
(You're still the one)
You're still the one that I love
The only one I dream of
You're still the one I kiss good night

Ain't nothin' better
We beat the odds together
I'm glad we didn't listen
Look at what we would be missin'

Bridge:
They said, I bet they'll never make it
But just look at us holding on
We're still together still going strong

Chorus:
(You're still the one)
You're still the one I run to
The one that I belong to
You're the one I want for life
(You're still the one)
You're still the one that I love
The only one I dream of
You're still the one I kiss good night

Chorus:
(You're still the one)
You're still the one I run to
The one that I belong to
You're the one I want for life
(You're still the one)
You're still the one that I love
The only one I dream of
You're still the one I kiss good night

I'm so glad we made it
Look how far we've come my baby