Metaphors & Medicine

As humans, we have been given such wonderful and amazing gifts from our Creator, and yet we find ways to misuse them all. We are given brains to think, we end up using them to over-analyze situations and make things up to become something they aren't. We are given hearts, and we go after desires that aren't healthy for us, ones we can never have. We are given eyes that we let cry over nights of studying only to end up with a grade on an exam we never wanted. We are given souls, and we haunt them with our regrets, our wishes, all these things that we want instead of looking at our lives realistically. We spend years and years dreaming of our lives in the years ahead because we make the present seem unbearable. Why is it so hard to live in the present and see it as something more? When I was in elementary school, we had firefighters come to our school once every year to teach us what to do if a fire started in our homes. They took us to a trailer that they brought with them ...

In a bottle I've kept all my secrets, hoping that one day I could throw it all away, as if one day they'd stop being such a big part of me, and I'd be able to start a whole new day. In a lock I've kept my deepest desires, wishing to someday be able to unleash them once the right person has the power to open me, and I wouldn't have to work so hard to conquer them. In a dream I've locked my passions, anticipating when I'd be tall enough to grab them, as though I have to grow to earn them, my budding flower waiting for a longer stem. In a land beyond the olive groves, I've buried my love, waiting for the right time for it to be freed, like a wound hidden deep under my skin, my words the only weapon to make it bleed.

The urge had been gnawing at me for the past few days, words trying to claw their way out of me. I've become really good at shutting my "writing brain" down during school, avoiding it more than ever. It is hard to push something away like poetry or story characters brewing inside your head, until you get good at it. Then the characters go silent. You don't hear their heartbeats. You don't get random sentences in the middle of the day, you don't come up with poetry lines in the middle of a Biochemistry lecture. If you stop feeding it long enough, the feeling goes away. You stop feeling guilty for leaving it behind, for watching dust accumulate on your journal. Then you think, "Perfect. I can keep this going until winter break." Here's what happens when you are a writer trying to silence your inner writer: 1- You can sleep without having to worry about dropping a few ideas you had onto a page. 2- You finally get more homework done without h...

In a land beyond the olive groves, there is a world where people are always running around frantically. There is always an appointment to catch, a phone call to make, a meeting to attend, or an assignment to complete. Here I am trying to finish reviewing three chapters we covered in class this week so that I can catch up and have enough time for my other 1001 assignments that will be due this week. My life has always been like this, but today, it all feels much worse. Beyond the olive groves, the world is spinning. Time is ticking. In the middle of this overwhelming thing called Life, we have family we spend days not interacting enough with because we are locked in the library, trying to convince ourselves one day this will all be worth it. But will it be worth it if by the time that day comes, there are many other days that we've missed? Suddenly the saying "I wish the world would just stop" has much more meaning. The world will probably continue to spin and go ...

"So what exactly is going on with Israel and Gaza right now?" I don't consider myself someone who easily is at loss for words. It usually takes something either really upsetting or really shocking to render me speechless. And yet this question, which seems so simple, so common, so basic to be asked as a Palestinian, left me unable to form the words I was so used to saying. The last time I had been left unable to express something into words right away was during a game of twenty questions. A friend asked if I could live in any place in the world, where would it be and I said simply and quickly, Jerusalem. If we lived in a world where my Palestinian ID didn't ban me from certain parts of my homeland, if I didn't have to stand at checkpoints that were designed to make me not want to return, I would live in Jerusalem. If we lived in a world where the hundreds of people that go to pray on Fridays weren't left to pray outside, far from the mosque they want to ...

Please hold while I push away the virtual dust that has accumulated on my blog page. Give me a moment to find my comfortable writing place that I have left abandoned for quite some time. Allow me to take a second to take in the fact that I am returning to my writing again.  Now I hope that shows just how much I've missed my blog. I feel like I abandoned a person. The worst part is I stopped updating it when I was telling you all about my crazy-amazing-life-changing-self-enhancing summer journey to the other side of the world. So why did I come back? Because too many times these past few days, although I have returned to America and am no longer physically in the Occupied land, I've been visiting it mentally. I've tossed and turned in my bed tucked away beneath olive trees, hid under the shade of the fig tree, and when I felt myself losing inspiration to journal, I ended up returning to the window in my grandparents' old house that looked over the whole village. Sin...