Soliloquies

January 7, 2022 
Cairo
5:41 p.m.

I reach the rehabilitation center every morning with an effortful feeling of defeat. The world has beat me. I have lost the game, as usual. 

By the time the sun starts to set on Cairo, I am in the white waiting room of my impending panic attack. I always expect it. I start to feel it coming. But I tell myself that this time, it won’t happen. 

The internal dialogue ends in hyperventilation. My stiffening hands cause another overlay of panic. I begin to feel alarmed about my breathing and uncontrollable hands, my dry and separated lips; I can feel my heart too perfectly.

The first time it happened was in a mall in Maadi. Dima and Ahmed had had an argument in which I’d tried to intervene. I’d been anxious throughout the entire car ride there, then in every store we had visited, until it had finally broken.

Gripping the cold silver railing, I had stood watching the exposed floors of the mall from the tip of the level we were on. Before I knew it, my breath had turned short, quick, and loud, the way it used to in my bedroom throughout university when I had a major paper to submit. While trying to accept my breath’s speed and regain control over it, and after Dima and Ahmed had begun to notice what was happening to me, my hands started to go numb. “I can’t move my fingers,” I told Ahmed. “Can you look at them?” he asked me. My hands felt unfamiliar; the right ring and pinky finger were stuck together. I couldn’t get them to move. I couldn’t make a fist.

I wondered if this was what Mom had constantly felt in her left arm and leg. That thought made everything worse.

One day, we were completing our daily “goodnights” to Mom while she was laying in bed after a session of agitated soliloquies. I was lingering over her head, ready for my turn. I bursted out, “Good night, Mommy!” She replied within seconds, “Don’t call me Mommy. Every time you do, a piece of my heart breaks.” There was a strange pause in the dim lit room. “Just don’t call me Mommy. Mommy is dead.” 

I ran outside her room and stood in the garden. My siblings shortly followed. There I was, face snotty, breath quick, and hands frozen. “What’s happening to me?” 

“I’m panicking, I’m panicking, and it’s clear to everyone. I’m doomed and damaged. Dying.” 

Air entered my nostrils as if through a syringe. Then my breathing started to take shape and sink into the background. The needles in my hands scattered and fell, prickling down my body. Warmth grew from my belly into my limbs. “It’s okay, habibi,” Ahmed reassured me.

January 16, 2022 
Cairo
10:09 a.m.

I have a fantasy.

I am not on this Helwan highway. I am not savoring the last minutes of peace before facing my now very different mother. Instead, I’m on the way to Chekka.

A sweet and empty road in my Jeep Wrangler: exposed. I am thin and tanned. Long brown hair falls onto my light linen top. You’re sitting beside me with your hands on the wheel. I observe your grip and appreciate how safe it feels to be with you. The drive is soothingly endless.

We sing perfect notes and laugh. The windows reveal a fully colored-in sea. The breeze awakens the joy of a mountain drive. 

The fantasy ends. I step into the rehabilitation center, defeated.

February 11, 2022
Dubai
10:42 p.m.

I took the metro home early for a Friday night. 

Last night I couldn’t sleep at all, waking up every hour to check my phone, switch my position, or tuck myself into a colder space. 

Tonight I will sleep well, wake up late, have coffee, paint with watercolors, binge watch something, and listen to music at the highest volume.

On the metro now, self care seems far away. I ride through the entire red line.

Dubai is where I can beat my anxiety. I go out, dance, put on lipstick, meet people, and wear nice clothes. I perform my way out of myself. If Sharjah is my bedroom then Dubai is the guest salon: green velvet, gold decals and all. 

Sharjah: poster-ridden and colorful. Film cameras, expired film rolls, a bright Zarif bedroom at sunset. Teal and sky blue at the early hours, yellow and white for the day, orange and pink through my favorite minutes, and purple and navy blue until the light comes back at dawn in a lilac moment. I’m grateful to have found a city all for myself. There is space for a small girl who is too afraid to sit like a man in the train’s first cabin. 

Sharjah belongs to those who have been there for decades—full of coffee shops open just for me, corniches cleaned and ready for my walks, trees and bushes trimmed to my liking. Green men lighting up the crosswalk when I press a button. Food arriving when I order it. Water where it needs to be, and sun, sun, sun. 

I can see a port near my house from my bedroom window, with red, blue, and green containers which hold only non-explosive materials—a safe port. It makes me feel secure, anchored, and steady; nothing will blow up here. This way, no one can laugh at me for choosing this city. 

Sharjah also chose me. I embraced it back then as a naïve 21-year-old, too full of shame and innocence, too prideful to recognize my own happiness, too young to understand my strength.

A Blanket of Safety under the gently burning sun. Sharjah, I’m coming home. 

February 15, 2022
Sharjah
1:26 p.m.

The guilt lingers. It’s crawling around my stomach and painting my dreams. The tips of my fingers tickle.

I made a playlist yesterday, which I hadn’t done in months. It brought me an intimate joy, and made me want to plan who I could be: what I would listen to, what my house would look like, what I would wear to a party and how I would dance, what I would study, where I’d live, and who I could be friends with. Where I could publish whatever it is I’m writing now.

Don’t you hate that feeling? When you’re dreaming and it breaks? When waking up hurts? Doesn’t it crush you the way it crushes me? When you spend an hour on Pinterest boards and Spotify playlists, but something stays hollow and see-through. When you try your best to conquer a feeling and it continues to bite you back.

With the tips of my fingers on my perfectly-lined keyboard, the cold numb tickle continues trickling through me. 

February 17, 2022
Sharjah
6:02 p.m.

I go into the sun, startled by the wish-wash sounds of passing cars over the bridge near my apartment building. The sky is creating colors: oranges and pinks floating around in my periphery. It feels like the kind of day where you have an unexpectedly inspiring conversation with your taxi driver. 

February 23, 2022
Sharjah
7:17 p.m.

Yesterday I told Dima about my dream where she and Ahmed joined my Zoom call with my therapist and took up all 45 minutes of the session. 

I was afraid to reveal such a vulnerable dream to her, but I wanted to express myself without saying too much. 

Dima reheated a plate of Rez Blahem emptied from a cylindrical Tupperware and added the cold white yogurt near it, causing the rice to let out more steam. Bite after bite, I told her all the thoughts crossing my mind. She told me hers. 

We spoke about her students, my watercolors, TV shows, and the latest Wordles. She reassured me of my strength and composure throughout Mom’s health journey. I cried with gratitude. 

I realized I missed sisterhood.

Sisterhood used to mean laughing, smiling, and crying with no shame, confessing what I thought were my deepest darkest secrets, which we often shared. I missed when sisterhood meant I could behave comfortably instead of overthinking my posture and facial expressions. I missed being Noor, pure and free from the thick layer of cellophane in which the world had encased me. 

February 25, 2022
Dubai
2:54 p.m.

I remember Cairo through a piece of blackened glass smeared with Vaseline. 

I remember Cairo as a taxi passenger, anxious in the backseat, with my brother winking at me through the side mirror. The corniche made me nervous. It looked like Beirut’s but larger and more crowded. Sometimes Cairo also smelled like Beirut. But it looked like nothing I’d ever seen before, and that bothered me. I could never pin down any similarities between this city and the other geographical points of my life journey. Still, Cairo was the world that framed my novel of choice. 

I remember Cairo alone, despite being with people. I remember visiting the hospital to see Mom and finding that it was not really her. I remember visiting these places as if I were visiting a grave and I blamed my brain for that feeling. 

Our destination was always home or the hospital. Cairo housed my sick, unconscious, unfamiliar, aging, dying Mom. I didn’t want to exist in a time and place where Asma was not herself. Where she had been playing an endless game of table tennis with life, and life was winning.  

Cairo: it feels like you are at the center of the world and it’s caving in. It feels like a prank. In this city, you are minute. I was losing my mother and nobody knew.

I usually connected with the city I found myself in in a primitive, childish way. I kept fighting it. I fought to exist as a passenger without a book in my hands, or one earphone inserted in my left ear. I refused to stay up late, drink karak, and watch movies. My body physically could not stand the idea of engaging with a life that looked like mine at the time. My body rejected staying awake past a time that I didn’t need to be, so being in Cairo meant I never stayed up past 11 p.m. I blamed this on the inevitable panic attack that would wake me the next morning. Seeing it coming, I figured I might as well sleep earlier, just to compensate. I lost the joy that comes with staying up at night for no reason. I lost the perspective of just doing something for the heck of it. In Cairo, I did nothing for the heck of it. Everything had a purpose, or else it was filled with shame.

I remember purposefully staying up the entire night once when I was 13. MSN messenger and MySpace music kept me company. Through the internet-hungry rabbit hole that night threw me in, I only came out of my dark room at six in the morning, having fully discovered the magic of Daft Punk. I sat on the balcony couch still amazed by “Human After All”. My mother and sister shouted at me for staying up all night sitting at our computer desk, but I think that was the first time I had ever truly felt inspired by something. Still, it couldn’t be healthy to find so much inspiration then perceive it as a sin … I felt like a criminal.

Cairo was just as dim and blurry between my waking hours of seven to 11. As strong as the sun struck and as fast as its rays fell, it could never light up what were my darkest days. Feeling overwhelmed by all the tireless roundabouts in my sister’s neighborhood, I would take pictures of wherever I truly witnessed sun. In some instances, I would see the trees and sunshine on the dull concrete ground and forget why I was in Cairo in the first place. For a few seconds, I could be a professional pretender; sometimes I would notice and just shamelessly let myself continue the farce. Nights at Khan el Khalili, dinners in restaurants, lunches by the pyramids, during my birthday celebration … I allowed myself to pretend. 

I pretended the orange Cairo sun could burn all my darkness away. I pretended the light fading on the Nile could erase the cold, stone fact that was the destination of my Uber trip. A fantasy of heading anywhere but there. 

But the hospital would eventually draw nearer and I would grow more anxious. On those trips, the sun could only burn so much. 

March 2, 2022
Cairo
1:11 p.m.

I remember it. I remember it like you remember a movie projected on the scratched whiteboard of your grade school classroom. I remember it with light leaking onto it through the room’s broken blinds.

I remember it with all my senses, feeling the blood rushing to my knees and head. I remember my white, greasy palms. I remember fixating on the billboards and the betrayal of traffic around us. I don’t remember our Uber driver, but I was sure he could tell. He could tell that the three characters in his car were going to remember this trip.

I remember wearing Ahmed’s cardigan and being so angry with myself for how slowly I tied shoelaces. I was a kid again, being driven to and yelled at by new parents.

I remember the white corridor and the hospital staff. I remember pacing between two thoughts like a fleshy tennis ball. The surfaces of both thoughts so rough, like falling on gravel. One side of the gravel meant I was to be motherless within moments. I grounded myself in that gravel. You’re motherless and miserable and mourning and you accept it. I felt that gravel brushing my skin until I was falling head-first into it.

I found pieces of that gravel when I packed my bags, making sure I had enough black clothes and only the most necessary makeup to hide tears of grief. I pictured what a funeral-friendly makeup look consisted of and packed it. 

As we were running towards the hospital with untrained shaky legs, I felt like an idiot. Falling into the gravel, I almost wanted to pour more on top of my fallen body. I wanted to bury myself in the cold, dry, powdery white of motherlessness. I wanted to punish myself with an even deeper feeling of grief. 

The opposing side’s gravel, the second thought I paced in and out of, was my current gravel. Kinder, maybe. A gravel I could carry in my hands and pockets, as opposed to the kind you fall into and never get up from. Mom could still be alive, just not the same.

A few days after that panicked rush to the ICU, we learned that we still had a mom. She would just need a bit longer to be our Mom again. Kinder gravel. 

March 24, 2022
Cairo
8:15 a.m.

Ancient, transparent.

I find it fascinating that we have the same innards as any other person did years, decades, centuries ago. I wonder if this stops being fact the further we head backwards in the timeline.

I reflect on how my innards must have changed from when I was a young girl. What I know for sure: more cysts on my ovaries, more fat in my abdomen. I wonder if there are scars or marks in places I don’t know about. I wonder if anyone else has the same ones and is also just as unaware. I desire this awareness so much; I always have. I desire so much to be aware of my inner workings, to be aware of what Noor’s heart looks like, how my liver is, how bad it can get down in my ovaries. I wish to know how my endometrium sheds. Maybe that bleeding, as any other bleeding, is my only connection with my body from the inside. That is, the parts of my body I know exist, but never see. Almost godly.

I wish we were transparent people. I wish I was so see-through that I knew exactly what was going on, full control. I wish I knew what was twisting and turning and when it was happening. I wish I knew exactly how it looks inside when I shake uncontrollably, and what it is that causes my right eye to continue to twitch so vulnerably since November of 2021.

I wonder whether Descartes ever had a panic attack. What about Cézanne? Merleau-Ponty? Frederic Jameson seems to be an anxious person… Lacan and Bataille, maybe?

I wonder whether Albert Camus had a panic attack when he got the call.

I wonder if the anxieties I feel and continue to fear are occurrences so ancient. I wonder if this knowledge could ever console me like I want it to.

Does it being ancient make it less hurtful? Any less dangerous? Any less incapacitating?

Does it being ancient save me from its pain?

I wonder if the fact that everyone comes from a mother could mend my relationship with mine. Could it be that I can learn to view motherhood as a scientific, ancient human rule, and not as the natural perfume of Asma’s skin? Even in her coma, intubated, un-showered, with matted, half-buzzed-off white hair and a crippled left side, she still smelled like my mother. It's the only thing she’s retained that I know for certain. It’s the only way I would know it was her if I were to lose the rest of my senses.

In a hospital bed near the Nile, where passersby walk fast and cars swoosh by even faster, there, barely alive, sat my mother when my eye first began to show me its twitch. Every day had been a bargain then. We expected the call any minute. My right eye expected it, the breath going in and out of my nostrils expected it, my two feet, my knees, my chest, my stomach, all expected it. I wished I was able to speak to my organs and prepare them. I wished to explain to my knees that I needed them to be firmer. I wished to tell my right eye to save its coping mechanism for later. I wished to ask my stomach to be kinder, my hands to be calmer.

I wished I was fact, ancient and transparent. I wished I was science.

Artwork by Simone Hadebe

Noor Tannir was born and raised in the city of Beirut and is currently based in Sharjah, UAE, where she works for the independent art initiative Barjeel Art Foundation. She graduated from the American University of Beirut in 2018 with a BA in Art History and minors in both Philosophy and Film and Visual Culture. Tannir is interested in pursuing a career in art and memoir writing, and spends her free time crafting editorial makeup looks which she shares with her community.