A couple of years ago, Noor brought me a mirrorball that I now keep on my windowsill. In the middle of the day, when the sun hits it at a forty-five degree angle, I tilt my head up to find dozens of speckled sun spots dappling the ceiling. Within half an hour, the daytime constellation fades.

There were whole days in March, where I’d stop working and lie down just to stare blankly at the light patches. Bereft of words and overwhelmed with too many feelings, I’d pour my grief into these little ceiling stars and imagine it traveling to constellations far away.

The month opened with Theo’s passing. I got the news as I was about to leave the

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I spent the second half of January into early February at a residency in a small village in Switzerland. The mountains blanketed in snow stood in the distance behind the house, and everywhere I looked, sprawling green fields, lush and alive in what seems like a rapidly decaying world. Most mornings, the fog covered everything in sight outside my window, and for a few hours, I’d lose myself in the comfort of opacity. Occasionally, car headlights race across the nebulous mass like fireflies then disappear from view. Swiss folklore speaks of spirits from Mount Rigi in central Switzerland that can occasionally take on the form of ethereal lights appearing on foggy dawns or dusks tasked with protecting travelers from harm.

As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about freedom of movement and manufactured hierarchy surrounding the right to cross a border, I often interrogate my position as a traveler. In Switzerland, my questions to locals rule me out as someone of that place, but my language fluency and my light features position me as someone who likely wandered in from France or Belgium. And, so, my transience is welcomed. I am seen as kin, deserving of cordiality. At the airport, where both my light features and language skills are invisibilized by my passport, I become an object of scrutiny. One that must be treated with urgency and firmness. I clutch a pouch containing supporting documents, a return ticket, proof of insurance policy. Once cleared, I make my way to the train and overhear an older couple behind me commenting on the number of hijabi women waiting in line at passport control: “Did you see how many there were? I can’t believe what’s become of Switzerland.”

In a small bookstore in Nyon, I come across a Dolores Marat monograph and spend half an hour immersed in the

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In Beirut, the menus are dollarized, and their items are listed at prices that rival New York. It’s been like this for a while. The local currency has been reduced to a passing mention traded to the tune of millions. “How much to Beirut?” I ask the cab. “1.3 million”, $14 USD. Prior to the collapse seven years ago, this sum amounted to $867 USD. The large stacks of bills and endless lines at the currency exchange have dissipated since I was last here. Banks have begun releasing people’s life savings through little trickles.

In the morning, I crack eggs that come from a nearby farm. I watch the deep orange yolks sizzle in locally sourced olive oil, opaque, yellow-green and sharp. A thick layer of dust crowns the tops of salt and pepper shakers I got from Mexico a few years ago that have since sat unused on the counter. The beauty of dust is that it shows us time passing, F said to me a while back while I was fretting over cleaning chores. But time terrifies me. It is the universe’s only invincible thief, the biggest guarantor of loss in a world that abounds with it. I’m scared of how it will claim my loved ones, scared of the distance it keeps putting between me and my memories. And yes, I know theft isn’t the only thing time promises but in this city, all I see is anticipatory grief.

There’s the anticipatory grief of loss that seeps through my parents’ slowed gestures, their aged faces that bear in their creases, a lifetime of hardship. There’s the anticipatory grief of a country that lives in foreboding. “They’re probably coming back. It’s good you’re leaving soon,” my mother says calmly, mostly to herself. “They,” the israelis who never need be named. The doomsday specter that has hovered over the land for decades. The one that has not stopped bombing the south, which many in the country have forsaken in exchange for the illusion of a promised peace.

There’s the unprocessed grief of the many tragedies that have torpedoed through the land. The many houses in the south reduced to untouched piles of rubble no one can clear due to continued bombing, read: occupation.

*

Conversations with friends reveal that time is textured by tragedy: “M’s daughter is a little over two now. Yeah, that sounds right. She was born a couple of weeks before the genocide.” “Haven’t been to that place since the [economic] collapse.” “Haven’t heard from [person] since the explosion.” We’re having this conversation at a local Hamra

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The year ran in rivulets, and at times I felt like I stood on its banks, watching time hurtle by. If I had to pick a word to sum up 2025, I’d choose motion. As in, moving across time and space, but also migrating away from / towards. I lived in motion, and thought about what it does to us. The us that relocates whether by force or by choice. The us that clambers out of a depression trench. The us that chooses motion despite inertia’s appeal. The us that awakens to inconvenient truths and is permanently changed by these realizations.

Last summer, in Portland, I walked by the Willamette, held a newborn, and sang karaoke with one of my closest friends in a college’s student union HQ late into the night. In Dearborn, I walked into the frame of a long diasporic movie and moved through streets and communities that had audienced themselves into a third culture of their own, alive with its own language. During my stay, I watched the city become a simmering cauldron on the brink of a boil peppered with white supremacists who barged into Mayor Abdallah Hammoud’s town hall demanding “their” “country” back. In Houston, I found fragmentation among a community that had misplaced its true north. Back in New York, there was familiarity. The ease of friends’ living rooms and the creeping, quiet, but palpable anxiety of the growing affordability crisis glazing many facial expressions on the subway, at the store, at the pharmacy, behind the barricaded shampoo at Walgreens, in the Whole Foods’ self-checkout line.

In 2025, a lot of motion tended toward hyper-scrutiny, often resulting in fragmentation. Psyops, in-fighting, self-cannibalization flourished in the sludge of murky rhetoric. The world’s horrors moved with accelerating urgency. We had never been easier to surveil and track, and yet rather than beget order —albeit coerced—all signs pointed to increased entropy. The airwaves filled with noise. So I sought obsessions to drown out the chatter.

I listened to I remember, I forget on loop sinking into Yasmine’s voice. The music filled the air with distant memories of the Mediterranean Sea. A sea that never felt further away. Devastating, sad, ethereal, a reckoning of above-mentioned

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CW: makes mention of suicide / suicidal ideation

In the summer of 2013, two friends and I flew to Vegas and drove across the south back to New York. All week, I drank until my face went numb. I carried with me a wooden 4x5 pinhole camera and failed to make most photos with the exception of this one photo of the Grand Canyon. Even with its light leaks and barely perceptible details, I still remember how the rising sun washed its copper ridges, the deep purple sky we chased as we drove away. I return to this photograph often, hearing in its nebulousness the echo of a former self I still find morsels of now and again.

When I tell that story, I focus on how we slept on T’s apartment floor, and tried our luck with $5 at the slot machines in Vegas. The breakfast burrito from a gas station in Santa Fe. That odd steakhouse in Amarillo, TX past the Cadillac Ranch. The dry Arizonan heat that laced its fingers on our skin like a quiet threat. How the desert trailed us across the southwest, a sacred stillness haloing its petrified rocks and sand. There was the David Lynch-esque encounter with a blind woman in Arkansas. The night spent camping by the Grand Canyon, drunk and high off our minds, sitting on the hood of T’s white sedan staring up at a sky full of stars streaked red. And the canyon, a mouth agape eager to swallow the sky whole.

For much of the road I kept my eyes on the dilapidated motels scattered like ruins along Route 66. Somewhere in Texas, we got out of the car and started walking around rooms that were deserted overnight a couple of decades ago. Doors and windows left open for wild animals to pass through. The furniture had been tipped over, some fragments of curtains still fluttered in the light breeze. We stood in the relics of a defunct Americana that fell into disrepair during the Reagan era when the route was decommissioned in favor of the current Interstate system. The desolation shaped a vernacular of disillusion. Over the next decades, it would choke the idea of an invincible American life.

What I always leave out of the cross-country adventure story is what prompted me to run away from the city, and spend a week day-drunk sleeping in tents, motels, or a spare room on an old Mississippi farm.

Two weeks before we left for Vegas, my classmate D who had been missing for a week had turned up in a morgue. He had made the decision to part ways with this world, leaving a note in his apartment that read: “I’m tired.” For a week, I sat on his studio floor and stared at his printout of a teary Paris Hilton with D’s “I’m too sad to tell you,” added like a subtitle at the bottom of the photo, a riff on Bas Jan Ader’s work by the same title.

D was and still is one of the most fascinating people I’ve ever met. Aloof, deadpan, hilarious, and incredibly sweet. He’d show up in designer heels and handbags, claim he got all his knowledge about the world from watching The Simple Life then quote Roland Barthes not two minutes later. A few days before he went missing, we had made plans to get lunch together later that week. That would be the last time we ever spoke. For a week, I kept my eyes on the photo, on Paris Hilton’s contorted sobbing face, the running mascara, and that line in yellow type flashing like an alarm hidden in plain sight that none of us heard. I was angry at myself, at him, at despair that can shred a heart so irreparably that nothing short of death can offer longed-for solace.

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In Dearborn, I settle into the ease of routine. Most of my days begin at 6:30 - 7 AM. Faint daylight paints the sky a gloomy silver, and there is a big orange cat who oversees my breakfast making activities with (dis)approving meows. On my daily walk, the lawns are dotted with flags that alternate between US, Lebanon, and Palestine. The local butcher is Lebanese and we share some banter as he hands me a pound of ground beef. Michigan Avenue is lined with a dozen coffeeshops. All white countertops, white tiles and comfy seats made for hours-long hangouts. The days are slow and mostly quiet.

There’s a complexity to this city that I try to parse out with every visit. A microcosm of Arab America, where both qualifiers hold equal weight. At times, the latter takes up more space than anyone cares to admit.

But Arab America is its own archetype. Most importantly, it isn’t a monolith. Each pocket, from Dearborn, to DC, Houston, or California has molded its own version of the label. It is an identity in flux, always trying to make sense of itself. It oscillates between a pressure to vanish into erasure, and the pull to recreate the village left behind in a country where the task is logistically and ideologically near-impossible.

In the car with Layan, she tells me she moved here from Beirut five years ago and doesn’t feel connected to a community that is more American than it realizes. She sees it in people’s relationship to music, their broken—or in some cases— non-existent Arabic. Homelands sit in the rearview mirror. Their holograms are summoned in home kitchens and restaurants whose shawarma hasn’t been tailored to foreign palates.

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What is an artist on the frontlines of catastrophe? At their best, they are bellwethers of history, translators of tragedy who’ve tasked themselves with bending language—sometimes going as far as shredding it— at a junction where current vocabulary fails to deliver. The function of art, then, is to put language and its vultures on trial, and shepherd collective thought towards truths that in hindsight will have always seemed self-evident.

I think of Etel Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse, a text more alive today than it was in the 80s.

Where do you want ghosts to reside?

In our wakeful hours there are flowers which produce nightmares

We burned continents of silence the future of nations

the breathing of the fighters got thicker became like oxen’s

Here we are, a world whose heartbeat is held by the ghosts who walk among us. Gaza fills with the living dead, those whose protruding ribs and hollow faces resurrect the nazi german concept of the Muselmann. This century’s living dead is a silenced witness straddling the outer rings of televised death. They offer their testimony to the surviving witness, through an infinite stream of screens and the ever-present option to swipe past. Our comfort creatures and our refusal to give them up are the flowers which produce nightmares.

In the wake of his recent passing, I think of Ziad el Rahbani, whom everyone simply refers to as “Ziad,” as though he’s always been everyone’s lifelong friend. A man who was never a stranger to any household and who found his place in every living room, in every college dorm, in every Hamra bar, precisely by owning his choice to be a renegade at a piano. He did so with an unfaltering commitment to liberatory politics and a devil-may-care attitude.

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I’ve written three different versions of this newsletter, trying to probe past the surface of what’s really on my mind, and I keep coming back to the same idea: it takes delusion to force a paradigm shift. A staunch belief that reality is malleable, if we keep pushing the boundaries of what we've been told is impossible.

In Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), a woman reads letters to a traveler. The film is a visual essay about memory filmed mostly in Japan and Guinea-Bissau. A meditation on survival between two places that sit on opposite poles of history and geography, the film features many cats. Some on the streets, others such as the Maneki Neko—otherwise known as the beckoning cat— is a symbol of abundance, wealth, even love in shrines. I’ve visited some of these shrines where people leave a wish penned on a small piece of paper, then ring a bell before walking past a horde of beckoning cats waving their paw. To a cat, not much seems impossible. They goes about their lives with non-negotiable boundaries they make known to anyone they encounter. I understand why they may be seen as harbingers of blessings. Their staunch refusal of suboptimal conditions is part of what makes them so endearing, and inspiring. They don’t compromise their comfort, safety, and most importantly, their joy.

Anyone marginalized by a system built on their oppression spends most of their waking hours internalizing a manufactured ceiling, one that insists there's an upper limit to their joy. That they must endure life as opposed to live it. And this is what makes joy deeply political: who gets to effortlessly access it by birthright, and who’s forced to fight for crumbs of it. Cynicism calcifies as a defense, perfected by years of settling for hard-won scraps. The threshold of what the marginalized deem possible is actively lowered by a system that forces them to concede for less and less and less and less. To cope, they learn to package these limitations by revisiting their aspirations to what they’re taught to call “realistic.”

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Well I dreamed there was an island

That rose up from the sea.

And everybody on the island was somebody on TV.

And there was a beautiful view but nobody could see.

Cause everybody on the…

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