It is annoying. Really annoying… It’s been four years since we are together and I would move in with her in a heartbeat. We practically live together anyways. We are either at my place or hers, every night…  

I moved out this past March, and I rented an apartment in the same neighborhood as hers. Practically we are in 10 minutes walking distance to each other.  So what’s all this about, you ask… Well, parents… For starters. And then the ultra-curious, ultra-gossipy group of our professional friends. Last but not least, the entire society we live in. We wouldn’t give a damn about the latter two I guess. But it is the “parental advisory” that keeps us apart.

They all live in other towns but love to visit their kids every once in a couple of months. They are modern, civilised, understanding and loving parents. But the gayness of their daughters is just too much to handle for them. Especially for my folks. They somehow got comfortable with the idea that I am still single at age of 33. Now that my brother is married, their hopes of me doing the same is slowly fading away. The “don’t ask don’t tell” has always been my dad’s motto anyways. He had hard time accepting the fact that I have had boyfriends whom I slept with in the past. Now he might even be happy in a Freudian subconcious way that he kept his daughter to himself…

I think I would really make my mom upset, if I came out to her. If I told her that all her suspicions about my good friend were true, she’d cry. Maybe wouldn’t talk to me for days, weeks. But through time, I expect her to come around.

Not the same with my dad… He is an uncompromising man. He raised us as strong-willed kids. Me and my brother. He likes the fact that we are free-spirited, independent people. But he would simply shut down and I don’t feel like I can cause that at this stage of my life. He has heart condition. Two surgeries and diabetes… The entire family, especially mom is “tolerating” all his attitude and fury and outbursts. So I dare not speak. I pay the bill So he can sit in his daughter’s living room, in front of her LCD and feel OK.

Yes, it is glossy and very Hollywood… And some sequences make you feel like you are watching a Sex and the City episode in a world gone all lesbo. But on the other hand, it makes you want to sit on that table at Planet and join the camp fire conversations with all of them.

I even considered chasing for some place that could match that cafe in real life when I was in LA about a month ago. Not a chance…

And now there is the real life version: the Real L-word. More raw, much less polished. But there is rather a major disappointing aspect to all that. The characters they have in Real L-Word, seem to have much less complexity than the fictitious ones. Which is weird. All that honey-bunny dialogues of soon-to-be-wed, sickly rich couple, ultra-pretentious Shane wanna-be make-up artist Whitney and Mickey the fashion show organizer who wants to multi-task like Bette but screws up every single time… No… It is just not working for us. And the dialogues! Come on… Give us a break! Is this really the way you talk to your partner?

No thanks, but no thanks. Real L-word ain’t real for me.

My new job kept me away from doing that if you really wanna know. But I am just about to turn the corner for the next paycheck and I have been able to establish some daily routines already. So let me retreat to where I love to belong, and tell you some…

Let me start with a table conversation I was part of recently. It was with a good old friend of mine from college years, along with my dearest. My friend doesn’t know about our “condition” so he was making comments about lesbian couples at ease.

We were talking about gay couples adopting kids. This friend of mine was having a hard time to accept the idea. He was strictly against gay/lesbian people raising kids and he was furiously calling lesbian/homosexual couples who adopted kids “selfish freaks”.

Not that I am considering to adopt a child at the moment but I felt I had to speak my mind for this once. I tried to explain him that it could sometimes be even a better thing if the child was growing up among loving and caring people than with abusing and ego-crushing parents.

His argument was that the double fathers, or mothers were imposing on the child something he/she didn’t choose. Even if the kid had two great parents, limitless opportunities for a great education and so on, he/she would have to explain his/her situation to the outside world. “Imagine you are a 7 year-old at school and you have to explain your classmates who are teasing everything why you have two mothers…” was the example he gave.

According to him, we all had to go through hell ultimately, in society for all sorts of reasons. We were “different” from others in one way or another and standing out for that “difference” was an inevitable trauma. But gay or lesbian parents would force the child to take up this battle way earlier than usual and this fight was not even about something that these kids are or did.

I remember a lot of friends from primary school who had to take up the fight way earlier than most of us because of many reasons. Divorced parents, adoption, alcoholic parent, conman father, single parent, different religion… I can go on forever…

Life might have been tougher on them, true… But without an exception, they were always the cleverest, most creative and most fun classmates of mine. They were challenged at a much earlier stage of their lives and that didn’t push them over the cliff. Only made them more mature than the rest of us.

And after all, is there any of us who didn’t yell in our parents’ face “I hate you!”, or at least thought of doing that at some stage of our great depression years of adolescence? There is no perfect parent. There never will be…

Let me finish with mighty Bernard Shaw: “There may be some doubt as to who are the best people to have charge of children, but there can be no doubt that parents are the worst.”

In the previous post, I had written that the saddest part about Firmin was that our hairy hero wasn’t able to express himself to anyone through his life. Guess I was wrong since the mysterious paragraph is about his conversation with a guy at a bar. The guy asks Firmin how the books taste. His answer is “like the smell of coffee”.

So who on earth is he speaking to and how? That is a mystery…

Here is Hemingway summarizing my brief code of ethics… As simple as that. No need for volumes of holy books, schools of thought and philosophising.

I remember paying visit to my grandfather’s grave ages ago. It was shortly after I renounced all religion. My mother and her mother had insisted on visiting the cemetery to say their prayers. I was rejecting to follow any of the rituals, wearing a headscarf in particular.

Yes, I was born and raised in a Muslim society. In a pretty secular country and in a family that embraced the principle wholeheartedly. Cemetery visits are the rare occasions, where the women of my family feel the urge to throw a piece of cloth over their heads and they get rid of it as soon as they leave the fields of the dead.

So that visit was the first time I was revolting against the divine protocol. Mom was quite empathetic so she let me be. They opened their little books of prayer and began whispering. I wasn’t gonna join in. But I wanted to do something, my own way. I was carrying a copy of “For Whom the Bell Tolls” with me back then. So I opened the book, read some. I believe it was from the end where Robert Jordan was wounded and lying on the pine needle covered floor waiting for the enemy to kill him.

My grandpa had died from a heart attack. He barely had time to understand what was happening to him. He didn’t even have time to swallow the pill. So in a way, I thought, it was fitting to tell the story of a man who waited for his death. While I was reading, my mom and my grandma finished their prayers and moved on to visit the graves of some other ancestors or old neighbors.

I joined them later. On the way out, my mom asked me what I had done. “I read some Hemingway,” I said. “Ah, he would have loved that,” she replied. As if, I thought, he might have heard any of it. But it had helped me feel good. So that was it. Just feeling good, ‘s all. At least what I read made sense to me. It was in a language that I spoke, and the words meant something.

I wasn’t expecting to devour it in one night.  It is not hard to imagine Neil Gaiman biting his nails out of jealousy while reading the adventures of the literature-aficionado rodent. Actually it is not a bad idea at all to imagine Firmin as a comic book (Mmm…).

In Firmin’s (Fur man/vermin; as you please) world, Jane Austen books taste like lettuce. What struck me most? You mean apart from Firmin’s witty but priggish comments and judgements about the world, about the people in his habitat and about himself? The most tragic thing about him was that he never had anyone or anywhere to pour all his distilled thoughts. He wasn’t understood, that is for sure. But worse, he wasn’t even capable of expressing himself in any ways. Apart from his failed trial with sign language where he didn’t go any  further than saying “Goodbye zipper!” His poem, “Ode to night” didn’t even see the light of day (uhm, I meant moon). Even his companion, Jerry Magoon (as in Tom and Jerry? But then Firmin would have despised that) thinks Firmin is just fooling around by turning the pages of his books. So it is just him and his imaginary heroes and seductive ”lovelies”  from the movie theater.

Poor Firmin got so excited when he first learned about the typewriter… And how he was disillusioned when he realized that it was no good to him.

At a moment of desperation and delirium, after he ate the poisonous pills that Norman Shine, the bookstore owner left for him, he dreams that he is dancing with Norman. But in this dream, Firmin is in a silk Ginger Rogers outfit, i.e. the dame…  A transgender reference? Yeah, you got it. But he is very masculine. He can’t stop imagining how he would get the first attractive woman into his bed if he was a man.

One of the undisputable climaxes of the book is when he tells about Jerry’s sci-fi book. How a group of aliens try to establish dialogue with the livings on planet earth but they are mistaken to think that the dominant race is Norwegian rats. Their mission fails…

Well said Mr. Sam Savage…

P.S. The translated copy I got has a nice local touch. On its cover, it describes Firmin as humanist, egghead trump.

We were lying lazily on the couch. I somehow found the power in me to get up and walk towards the book shelves. I was checking for some of my good reads. It is a shame that most of my treasures are back at my parents’ house. Most of the art of my great heroes, I mean. For some reason, I managed to build up this tiny library with non-fictions. That is probably gonna be the story of another post. Why I am not reading much literature, poetry, etc. lately… Anyway, I picked a couple of books that I thought could still work for what I wanted to do. Brought them back to her. And she picked the perfect one. As always…

“Love, etc.” by Julian Barnes… I began to read it to her. Aloud. She hadn’t read it. It was the perfect book because it is written like a radio story. Characters taking turns and telling the story and stuff… It is as if the author doesn’t exist. I leave it to Barnes to make the description: “ the membrane between readers and characters is so thinned, that if it works, is like meeting real people.” Indeed. While reading, I was trying to impersonate the characters. Especially the smart arse Oliver. She started to giggle… After a while, when I felt tired of reading and began to make mistakes, she took over. And we went on and on. I read some, she read some. Lost in the pages, lost in each others arms. It was the best thing we came up for some time. We loved it so much that we brought the book to bed with us. Under the dim light of my sea shell night stand, we read and read until we were both washed with words and phrases and thoughts.

How can you not love Oliver’s French way of describing the simplest things with most complicated phrasings like: ”I dropped my little testimentary heirs and assigns off at the local force-feeding establishment, where the pretty little goslings gave their throats gently massaged while the Big Honker pours in knowledge like so much corn.” Isn’t this fantastic?

Another fantastic thing is to be able to share this with your beloved. And I don’t mean like in a book club thing or anything. At the very same moment that you are reading the lines. Spontaneously… It is like watching a movie but constantly commenting about the plot, the framings, the characters, etc. So rich… So in the moment!

I think this is the beginning of a big ritual for us now. We are already dreaming about getting our hands on some Jack Kerouac or Mark Twain. Ah, I love spring! It always brings something new…

I am a pretty resolute person in the workspace. Don’t allow much to infiltrate through my protective walls, they can’t even feel the heat of my skin. She was different.

Whenever I raised my eyes from my computer, just to stare at the void for a second -the only moment where I probably expose myself to the outside world-, our eyes would meet. We went through ups and downs, we rode the high tide and the low tide. Soon, we were a team. She understood what I was after even before I put it down in words. And I, her…

Four months later, we were sharing a bottle of wine on the terrace of a restaurant, under the summer sky, telling each other the stories of our lives. We both had ended traumatic relationships years ago. Neither of us had found the courage in ourselves to sail into the uneasy waters of relationship ever since. Trust issues. That’s how we called it.

Then one night, at my apartment, after sharing a pot with friends; I remember us talking to each other in whispers, lying on the floor. Everybody else was either sleeping or day dreaming. I remember how she looked at me, how she put her head next to mine. There was something about it.

I couldn’t even dare to think about that moment afterwards. I was repulsed, in denial. How could I fall for a woman? I pushed her away… She didn’t resist. Just kept watching me from a distance, silently. Accepting tiny bits of communication I granted. And we started all over again. With small talks, workspace jokes and all. Incrementally, she was back. This time, I knew there was something different, growing in us, waiting for the right moment to come out.

It did. After an absurd night at the bar with two other friends, we were back at my apartment. I was falling apart, she was holding my hand. I kept pulling it away, she would hold it back. For the first time, she was leading the dance.

I sent her off to a trip in Prague with her sister and crawled back into my deepest, darkest galleries to chase my demons away. She returned with a bottle of absinthe which we shared in her place. Our thoughts on fire. We slept side by side for the first time that night.

I was in constant conflict. Scolding, berating, torturing myself then rushing back to her. At the height of this inner war, I poured my doubts and fears to a dearest friend. As he always does, he blessed me with his wisdom and opened a whole range of possibilities with these words: “Don’t focus on form, when meaning is evident.”

There it was. Clear as day… “If you feel that this friend is inside, let her
inside and explore. For, tell me, what is the meaning of a no, when a
yes is at hand?”

She was already inside. So why try to rip her off and hurt both of us? I stopped resisting. And opened up…

Her gentle kisses, her warm breath and softness gave me something I had never experienced in my life. An undescribable surrender. I have finally tasted la petite mort in her arms. No man had ever been able to give it to me.

We were already intoxicated that afternoon with whatever we had found in the liquor cabinet, along with some Rimbaud and some Jim Morrison. Can’t quite remember what we had been talking about. Probably the usual adolescent rhetoric of life and death and what we want to do with our lives…

At some point, I remember her taking the pack out of her purse and shaking it in her hand. My first reaction? “Duh! How couldn’t I think about this before?” We walked out to the balcony. My parents had stopped smoking a couple of years ago. So there was no way we could get away with a thick cloud of smoke in the apartment.

She also asked for some cologne. I was puzzled but she said they did it back in Morocco and you could get pretty high with that. We poured the lavender cologne all over and she lit. I was expecting her to blow in flames but instead, it burnt like a regular cigarette and she slowly inhaled. Threw her head back with closed eyes and handed the cigarette to me. I remember the burning feeling in my nose but nothing about getting high… Maybe I was already too drunk to feel it. But that’s how I had my first.

Fall came. My friend had returned back to her leisure class life in Morocco. I had bought a pack for myself. It probably took me more than three weeks to smoke it. I had developed this ritual: after school, before mom came back from work, I had a couple of hours to myself. My brother back in the living room, glued to the TV, I would go into my room, read, think, dream, write and then lit up a cigarette sitting by the open window. My nose was running, my throat burning. But I enjoyed watching the smoke run out of the window, vanish into the air. It felt as the smoke was diffusing, my thoughts were getting together, my mind clearer.

Between then and now, I must have lit up and put off thousands of cigarettes. I’ve also done it all. Hand rolls, slims, menthols… At some stage, I switched to pipes and then even to water pipes. I remember puffing our pipes with my boyfriend on our well-earned backpacking tour in Austria when I was a sophomore. We had puzzled the hostel staff who asked us whether pipes were in fashion among the youngsters in our country. Fooled them with all sorts of stories, puffing our meerschaum pipes.

Water pipes? I switched to them when I felt like cigarettes were simply not doing it anymore… They were no longer my thinking rituals but simple routines of daily life. But it was different when I was bubbling through those magical instruments and it took much longer to consume them.

Then again, you can’t bring around your gigantic water pipe and light it up whenever you have a rush of nicotine. Back to cigarettes then…

I should also say that I had some intervals along the way. A year or two without a puff. But I always got back to my good old friend, asking for forgiveness. It was about three years ago that I got introduced to the sublime Djarum Black. The famous Indonesian kretek cigarettes. It has been a while since I last indulged myself with one but they simply rule the tobacco kingdom if you’d ask me.

Spreading that enchanting aroma of clove around, they are simply majestic and I don’t think I can ever manage to downgrade them to a daily routine. I can detect a lit Djarum Black from 20 meters and always give appreciating looks to their inhalers.

I was once forced to put one off in Amsterdam, at an Argentinian restaurant. The waitress, who looked more like a cow with lipstick than a woman approached me and commanded to put my Djarum off, saying that the restaurant only allowed “regular cigarettes”. Thinking that she was worried my cigarette involved different ingredients than tobacco, I tried to explain her: “But mam, this is the ultimate cigarette. The Djarum.” These words didn’t help and just put her off a little more. “I know what these Indonesian cigarettes are. They are not allowed in here… So would you?” I had to kill it right then and there. What a disgrace…

Early childhood memories, still in reach of my conscience, bring back anecdotes of mine, praying in bed for a brother who in fact joined the family when I was six. But other than that, can’t seem to remember myself practising the rituals of any religion.

My mom, a sincere believer, used to tell me bedtime stories. Things like Moses tearing the sea apart with his stick or Mohammed talking to God in a cave. but she would also tell ancient Greek or Sumeran myths with same excitement. So I guess, from my early years, religion has established itself as part of the magical realm of fairy tales on my mind.

I remember checking out all holy books from the school library for the summer break whin I was in high school. But I had also included Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and George Politzer to that list. I spent an entire summer, sitting on a rock at the park nearby, or on the floor of my room, ruminate on these books. When it was September, I was embracing the chilling winds of fall with a whole new world where deities, angels -both glorified and damned-, and an after life had no more significance. It was refreshing, and relieving…

I had no one else but my own conscience as judge. I would erase all established good and evil and rewrite them for myself. At first, it seemed far easier. But after a while, I realized that the path I had chosen was the hardest of them all. It required absolute honesty. You could cheat God but how could you cheat yourself?