Once more into the fray...
8 February 2025

I move quite regularly and can almost say that moving has become a habit, a treasured activity that forces me to reinvent myself while I reinvent my surroundings and ensure that either I adapt to them or they bear with me as I coax them into more habitable spaces that yield the kind of experience I wish. Every time I move, I unravel a trove of memories that come back to me like a storm or like a calm summer wind, depending upon how they were made and what they were made of.  Some memories transcend the place and time they were born into and stay rooted like a hundred year-old olive tree. Their traces are like its shimmering leaves, spreading the feelings they once gave rise to within our bosoms and etching their particular aroma within our hungry nostrils as their intricacies play within our minds.

I sometimes feel like the olive tree itself, my memories shimmering within me and shedding light onto the pathways they forged within my mind. I am a tree of memories, the good and the bad, all laid out for my inner eye to see and my guts to experience all over again. I carry them sometimes into the open so I may pour all over them again my keen mind, eager to make sense of what could sometimes be senseless or to feel again what I had suppressed before for fear of not being able to overcome the deep foreboding that overcame me at that time. I am like a tree, yet unlike a tree I am unable to root myself into any ground. It seems like my gypsy spirit always wants to soar above the ground and visit yet another distant land, another unexplored part of the world. I sometimes wish I were an astronaut, able to roam the Universe rather than just the Earth.

I wonder if it is the fact that I come from a multicultural, multiracial background that makes me unable to take root anywhere. I feel no kinship to any of the countries I was born in or originated from by way of my lineage. More than a citizen of the world, I feel like a citizen of nothing, just a mass of energy floating here and there, never settling anywhere more than 6 years at a time in general. The longest I ever lived somewhere was in Dubai at Al Thanya Street where I remained for 8 years from 2010 until early 2018. For some reason, if it is not I who want to move, circumstances push me to make a move for somewhere else to stay in and I have never been able to stay in one place for 10 years or so. Every time I think I have found the place I want to stay in, I am out of there before the usual 6 year chime. It is as if I were a home Cinderella where the home would become a pumpkin at the end of the 6th year and my slippers would turn into bristles, causing me to strip them off and get going. So once more into the fray, this was again my moving day…

Disturbed - Hold on to Memories