outgrowing myself

also some news - listaat is now margins!

“What about you?” a childhood friend asks as we turn a familiar corner in our comfort mall. 

This mall makes the list on Abu Dhabi’s Hop-on Hop-off day tour, which surprises anyone who grew up in the city. 

It’s decently sized; highlights are a massive bookshop, robotic servers at a gelato bar and a Chili’s, so there’s not much to complain about. “How’s England?” she asks.

The last time I saw her, my hair reached my waist and I had never seen her with painted lids. Golden lids suit her. I’m still deciding if the same can be said about my pixie. 

I read her face to see if she was looking for a serious reply or a funny reply to get the conversation rolling. I can never tell with pleasantries. 

England is hot, I say, so hot that I picked a Middle Eastern summer over a European one. 

We never acknowledge that this might be the last time we see each other for a long while, instead soaking up our different lives. We keep our chat silly; the best salads in Abu Dhabi, marital green flags and Scooby-Doo films.

I prefer it this way. 

One lesson I am learning is not to fight growing distances in relationships. To watch threads slowly loosen and ignore the innate need to pull out the stitching needle. To accept the wandering nature in your blood when you’re gifted/cursed with being transcultural. 

July always feels ephemeral. It slips between my fingers. 

It laughs in my face and slips between my fingers when I try to keep romance in my life. Because romance is long hugs and intertwined fingers and homemade fruit platters. And July reminds me that it will all go away, the hug will end and our palms will get sweaty and the fruit will rot. 

I always think I’ll be booked and busy in the summer. I'll forget my SPF and my friend will dye her hair red and our dads will smoke shisha and our moms will cut fruits and we’ll end up sticky because we’re all just kids. 

Instead, I rot in the sun until it’s unbearable. I get too bare, too greedy. One manic haircut at 3 AM, two showers a day, three mangoes before noon. I rot until I don’t recognise myself. Until I’m all wrinkly. Until I have a heatstroke on my morning walk and my vision goes black and I have to lie down on the concrete pavement so I don’t pass out. 

The hot concrete burns me. 43-degree weather is not for the weak.

There is always more leaving than loving in July, more wanting than giving, more questions than answers. It comes with the greed of summer.

“Why a zen era?,” my friend asked me on a video call a few weeks prior when I mentioned that I am entering a new phase for the summer.

I talk at her, hoping she laps up the flowery therapy talk. Self-actualisation, self-development. Self self self. Anything pre-fixed with ‘self’ can only be good, I’m sure. That’s what other people taught me in self-taught self-help books on self-care. George Carlin would agree. 

She smiles like she doesn’t buy any of it and I try not to flinch at being seen.

I don’t know, is the truth. I give her the same answer when she asks me to rationalise my belief in God. And that sounds like a good answer. I don’t have to understand everything I think and do, it’s fine to just trust your gut. 

There’s a “certain clinical satisfaction in seeing just how bad things can get,” writes Sylvia Plath in her unabridged journals. I reckon she’s not wrong, though I like the way Elena Ferrante says it better. She goes, “If nothing could save us, not money, not a male body, and not even studying, we might as well destroy everything immediately”.  She’s onto something.

I spent the last two years trying to see just how bad things could get. Peaking at the end of that tunnel, straight at rock bottom. This could be the outcome of any college student who graduates in a global pandemic. A delayed response to twenty years of being a good girl. A natural reaction to adapting to an individualistic culture as a twenty-something. Or maybe, unadulterated chaos is innate in all of us.

It’s why people cheat and lie and overindulge. We get a little greedy. We want a secret to keep. “You’re a bad influence” a friend tells me and I turn my head the other way so he doesn’t catch my grin.

My love language was overloving, overcaring, oversharing. When you asked how my weekend was, I thought you were actually wondering about what made me cry as a kid.

Now I want to sweep myself under the rug and take a long nap. I want to be tender and witty and whatever that stranger meant when they said I was fascinating. 

I’ve never had a nickname stick around, I reflect loudly to a few people I love. 

“You’re not a nickname kind of person” is the reply I often get. 

I list a few options. Zozo. Zizo. Zooz. Zeno. Zatouna.

“Zatouna? Why would you wanna be called ‘olive’?,” a loved one laughs, so I change the subject.

You can reinvent yourself any minute, God reminds me. Maybe that is why I believe in God.

I can’t explain why I need a zen era but I know it feels good to be in one. I solve sudokus when I wake up and hand-build a ceramic jar with my friend and make turmeric tea. I try lots of new fruits; fig, dragon fruit, Santa Rosa plums. I love wearing maxi skirts now. I have one at the moment. I might buy more. Maybe a maxi dress too if I’m feeling wild. 

I sit with my heart so I can understand what Kahlil Gibran meant when he said not to ‘love half lovers’. I learn to cool my heart, to stop being enthralled by people easily. 

I reminisce less about intangible love. I focus on the love I can touch — even if it has long left my life — because I will always yearn for romance. 

My grandma shares invocations for me to read when I first wake up. My father buys me a kilo of fruit when I tell him I tried a persimmon the other day. My grandfather hands me a Kitkat, which I boycotted years ago, as he name-checks presidents he met. I eat the KitKat, exceptionally. A friend catches me off-guard with an aromatherapy gift set. ‘You seemed stressed,’ she grins sheepishly. 

I like the parts of me that come from other people. I drink tea every night because a friend who lives in Tokyo used to do this often. I take pictures of moments I want to remember, all because a friend once aimed a film camera at me while we were playing dress up at her flat. 

Don’t get me wrong. It’s all still tucked away somewhere, the blind rage, the clenched fists, the gritted teeth. I just hope that Anam Raheem, who writes a newsletter here called Liminal Fuzz, had a point when she wrote that ‘love can be a powerful container for the fire of rage’. 

Maybe July is special in that way, you spend so much time around people that it makes you remember who you are, who you were cursed to be, who you could still become. 

Some housekeeping: This newsletter is no longer called ‘listaat’, nor is it exclusively dedicated to lists. It’s now called ‘margins’. I will still share lists - but I write other stuff now too. Margins will be a messy concoction of either or both when I find time and energy - or pressure from friends who care about me / inquisitive strangers at random dinner parties.