Rebecca Fisseha's Blog

Whether it is long lost distant relatives I had no business reuniting with, casual friends I had no business making, professional or academic ventures I had no business getting myself involved in, I have always had a hard time quitting, just saying, “That’s it, I’m out, peace.”

I am getting better at it, having learned the hard way that endurance medals are only for athletes, which I am in no danger of becoming anytime ever.

Getting better at it does not mean the process is seamless, or that it gets any easier before/during/after the actual calling it quits. This messy process often spills over into my dream life. (You know, the life where decisions aren’t supposed to follow logic or be good for you.)

Recently, while I was in the process of making-unmaking-remaking a quitting decision, I had the following dream. If you can guess which of the above scenarios triggered this dream, there’s a medal in it for you.

I was in a play. A very complex script. Something like Shakespeare. My costume had me attached to another actor. We were about to go on. I realized I didn’t know my lines. Or, I should know my lines but I hadn’t revised them in a while. I became terrified that I would blank when the time came to speak. I still went on. The play started. I was in the costume attached to the other actor. I was sure I was going to blank. So I whispered to the actor I was attached to, “I’m sorry but I have to go off and peek at the script. I’m really sorry.” I shuffled off the stage. But I forgot we were attached so if I left, that actor would have to leave too. I only realized this as I started to shuffle off, but I kept going. I went offstage. I knew everyone else on stage was thinking “What the hell! What the hell is she doing?” My plan was to get back onstage once I had looked over the script. But offstage either I couldn’t find the script or I found the script and I kept flipping through the pages and I couldn’t find the place where my lines were. I feel it was the latter. No matter how much I flipped through it, I just couldn’t find the place where my lines were. There was also some kind of office space where people were in conflict about where their desks were, and I was doing a very good job of mediating between the different people at the same time. I decided I have to go back onstage. I was starting to put my costume on. I have no idea where the other actor is all this time. Once I got offstage, the other half just went poof! But once I started to put my costume back on, that other actor reappeared. I was saying, “I am so sorry. This has never happened to me before. I don’t know what happened to me. I used to never go onstage without reading the script from cover to cover every single night, no matter how long the run.” The other actor seemed to know this. One of the other actors came by and they were backing me up. “This used to be me, no matter where the run, I never go onstage without reading every single line of a script.” I was saying it in a rhythmic way. I don’t think anything bad happened because I left the stage. I think it was either nothing bad happened or I hadn’t found out yet what the consequences or repercussions were for everybody else that I left on the stage.

Ever get the sense that the incense is avoiding you? You put it on your left, it wafts to the right. You put it on your right, it wafts to the left. You put it below you, it wafts around you. You put it behind you, it vaults way over you like it’s trying to bring home Olympic gold.

Meanwhile, smells you never asked for – smells, not aromas – find you just fine no matter where you are. Neighbour’s frying (always the onions). Neighbour’s baking (always the weed). Also the preferred detergent of the ghosts or spirits that decided to do some cleaning in your closed bathroom or bedroom. Else where’s that smell of detergent magically coming from when you enter? So strong you can feel the droplets on your skin, in the dark, before you’ve even switched on the light?

Oh, the vents.

The bathroom air vents from where you can hear, while sitting on the loo, deconstructing your last couple of meals, the construction noises from down the block, and the garbage truck noises from down the alley. Thankful for the latter, you are, since if smells can come in through the vents then what’s to say smells can exit through the vents? So you time your business to sync up with garbage pickup day, Mondays and Thursdays, around 11am. Of course you would prefer to just use incense, like normal people do. But it avoids you, as we know. It wants to be anywhere that you are not.

The cruelest have to be smells you walk into with no warning whatsoever. Last week, through unfortunately perfect timing, I walked SMACK into someone’s fresh, thick, complex fart in a grocery store aisle. No warning. No anticipation. Has happened to all of us. All of us have inflicted it on others. Of course immediately I try to catch who it might have been. But people never look more natural than after they’ve just laid a rotten green putrified egg in a public place. Not that there was anyone near enough to be reasonably suspected. And punished with my evil thoughts.

In such a situation the thing you have to do is hurry away fast not so much to escape the hell as to escape any chance of looking like the guilty one to the next person who comes along, gets hit by 50% of what you got (or less depending on if it’s an N95 they’re wearing) and locks you with an evil glare. Hurry away, grab the thing and go, now is not the time to price compare, to divide grams by dollars and evaluate which is the better bang for your buck.

And hope that it’s not following you, turning left when you turn left, right when you turn right, jumping ahead to announce you, dragging behind to denounce you, like deranged incense. No, a missile. A tracking missile.

Duck. Pâté, yes duck pâté is what they must have had.

We’re going to try again, gardenia 2.0 and I. By “we” of course I mean “I”, since gardenia 1.0, the original small tree that came up to my waist, a lovely housewarming present from a lovely person, is no longer on the premises.

I like to think gardenia 1.0 went to a better place, after we parted ways in the recycling room in the basement of my building. A better place where its petrified brown leaves and brittle branches regained juice and color and where it bloomed intoxicating white flowers again. For my part, I had to accept that I had ran out of ways to keep it alive that did not involve me actually doing something.

I blame winter. Winter and winter’s incompatibility with tropical plants. Winter and winter’s incompatibility with tropical plants whose owners don’t want to bring them inside for the winter because the plants bring in tiny flying insects with them.

Initially I had done the humane thing. I had brought gardenia 1.0 inside as soon as real winter began. But then, my floors, I worried about moisture on my floors. And then, these tiny black flying things. And then, gardenia 1.0 began to age, I swear. That’s how it looked to me. Gray fuzz in all its cracks, gossamer grays on its leaves. Internet later confirmed it as fungus. Ew.

So back out to the balcony went gardenia 1.0 for the rest of winter. I told myself that it would come alive again come spring (like those tender shoots that come up without anyone’s help in post apocalyptic landscapes). It’s ok. Everything is supposed to look dead in winter.

When Spring came. Life didn’t. And didn’t and didn’t.

So in came gardenia 1.0. All the way in to my bathroom. Now we were sharing. Tucked between the sink and the toilet, I hoped the humidity would recall its tropical homeland and I’d begin to see signs of green. Every time I thought I did, it would turn out to be a trick of the light. Gardenia 1.0 stayed as brown as the girl in the mirror next to it. What’s that, a subtle softness in the leaves?Nope. Leaves still as crumbly as the outer corners of brown girl’s eyes in the morning after a night of particularly sappy dreaming.

Did I mention this wasn’t gardenia 1.0’s first stay in my bathroom? Early on, while it was summer, it had started to go all yellow in all the leaves, I’d consulted with the local nursery and was told it was dehydrated, and just needed to spend a night soaked to the rim of the pot in water. Which I did, in the shower stall. Worked like magic. Proud moment for me.

Its second trip to the shower was in that hopeful time a few months later when I’d brought it inside for the winter. I gave it a good long shower, with the handheld, thinking that should drown any and all life forms (and fungi…or are fungi also life forms?) before it took up a spot in my living space. Nope.

So back to gardenia 1.0’s third stay in my shower, this time hoping to bring it back from to-all-appearances-deadness after winter. After several weeks of fighting for space so I can use the toilet without getting scratched or coming away with dead leaves stuck in my hair (can the dead still be vengeful?), someone had to call it. So I called it. Time of death: sometime in April 2021. Out of respect for our long struggle to make it work, and just in case of a miracle, I left gardenia 1.0 back out on the balcony for a few more weeks. No changes were detected. So after making a quick call to front desk to see if a plant qualifies for abandonment in the recycling room (good resident that I am), I left it between a mattress and a printer. Not a bad place to await the next chapter of its life, better than between a rock and a hard place, or between a sink and a toilet, or between a girl’s delusions and denials.

Maybe I’m just a cut flowers type of girl, I thought. Carnations, roses. There’s a certain meditative peace in the several times a week ritual of snipping the stems, rinsing them, throwing out the water, cleaning the vase, refilling it with fresh water, rearranging the stems, one by one, in a tastefully irregular circle, enjoying how the effect of the arrangement evolves as the stems get shorter over the weeks (I get every cent of my $8 worth) from starburst to tight bouquet…

But Summer 2021 said try again. Off I went to the nursery, asked for a gardenia specifically. Opted for a short little one instead of a tree. Now it lives on the corner of my desk, right by the window. I’m told it wants to be outside, in direct sunlight. But if I do that it’s going to make friends with yucky bugs and whatever else again. And come winter who’s gonna have to learn to manage that? Not this girl. I’m supposed to be a tropical creature too. We all adjust.

Welcome, gardenia 2.0. Now bloom. See below so you have an idea of my expectations, one of your ancestor gardenia 1.0’s best works. No pressure!

I got nothing today, except drinking cold beer out of a teacup in the hopes that it lasts longer, on my balcony, and also in the hopes that I won’t look too much the beer-bum to my several hundred neighbours whose balconies have a view of mine (then again, I have a view of theirs so…), but really more concerned about whether any of them (from their balconies or from within their units, which is really the ideal place to spy, I should know…) can tell that I am not wearing a bra underneath my too light pink t-shirt that should have changed careers to cleaning rag long ago, and not so much whether they can tell that I’m not…supported so much as what they’ll think of the…angle of my boobs at this particular moment in the evolution of my body, and now of course I’ve given you a mental image that you may or may not have been willing to receive but while you’re at it consider that it’d be a shame to strap myself up in the comfort and semi-privacy of my own home but also to not enjoy my own damn oversized balcony but also to not enjoy my balcony on this specific day when I gave it its first deep clean of the season, washing away surprised once-pregnant spiders along with my own overlong covid hairs and stray flowers and leaves and untold tons of dust, all of which I did in the early early hours when the neighbour beneath me (one of the few who’ll never see me being semi-casual on my balcony and vice versa) is least likely to be out on their balcony and therefore unlikely to get pissed by the runoff of the soapy water I used to wash my balcony windows and railings, an unfortunate byproduct of you getting (your balcony) clean is someone below you has to get dirtier kind of like that horrifying Spanish movie where people have to live on different floors and every day a feast is lowered on a platform from the top floor and this platform laden with a feast is lowered one floor at a time but it will only go down when the people on a given floor feel satisfied so as you can imagine by the time it reaches the bottom level it’s disgusting and vile oh wait no it’s completely empty, as it would be because your standards drop to the degree that your hunger is severe, and perhaps that means you care about the upstairs balcony washing water runoff hitting your balcony only to the degree that yours is clean and by the fact that I’ve not been cussed out in a south-to-North direction nor found a nasty note on my door nor received notice from management I can only assume that my neighbour below has either quite a dirty balcony or DGAF or the unit is vacant, except it’s not vacant and the reason I know this is because I stay informed about which units in my building are currently on the market as it’s a neat way of other peoples’ homes in a completely legitimate manner and it contributes to my store of real estate knowledge and now all the ice in my beer bucket has melted so I must end this exercise in how long can I keep a sentence going on a very uneventful Sunday but leave you with an image to replace the one of me braless in a ratty faded pink t-shirt (I hear it’s good for search results, an image I mean, just not the mental ones) and if you want to know the name of that horrifying nauseating shame-in-humanity-inducing Spanish movie just ask.

Within an instructional context, and not directed at me personally, I recently heard the question “When was the last time you touched a monkey?”

Once I finished choking on my drink, I realized that in all my life, I have never touched a monkey. Seen plenty of them. In Ethiopia, in southeast Asia, but never made contact.

It also got me thinking, what have I touched, animal-wise? These days it’s all about us humans not being able to touch each other (as much as we’d like, and possibly overrated) but ever thought about our other co-habitants?

I’ve seen plenty of animals, in real life and on screen, and that had me bipedaling around assuming that I’d actually felt their life force under my hand.

What I have touched. Cats, dogs. That’s easy. Practically everyone has.

Also: sheep (furtively, as a child, prior to us buying them to eat), chickens (see previous), goats (I am assuming, since where sheep are goats do follow).

More interestingly: horses, ponies, elephants, turtles, tortoises, a pig or two, a falcon or eagle (some big wild bird, unless I only dreamed it), stingray (minus stings removed), spiders (if we’re counting post-mortem and through a tissue), slugs. Probably a rabbit (again this might only have been a dream). “Black spiky ball in ocean” (which internet IDed for me as sea urchin aka diadema antillarum). Ladybugs (I like to think that was mutual).

I also want to say I’ve touched a snake. For some reason I feel like I’ve touched a snake. Similar to falcon/eagle. I can’t remember when or where I’d have touched a snake. Seems like a natural thing for the mind to put into ‘this never happened’ folder. I know I’ve jumped over a snake.

I’ve been touched by spiders, cockroaches, mosquitoes, mice, lizards, flies, bees. Monkeys too.

Being a cat person, I would love to touch one of the big cats, alive. Any of them will do. Doesn’t matter, since it’ll probably end up being the last thing I do, alive.

Then there are those animals I’ve seen so often I feel like I’ve touched them. Squirrels, police horses, pigeons…

There are also animals I’m sure I’ve been touched by…but I’ll never know.

You know that popular conversation starter/interview question: “If you could have dinner with anyone living or dead, who would you choose?” Sometimes combined with: “And what would you ask them?”

I am sure I’ve answered these questions at least a few times, but I can never remember who I said I’d choose. Not too long ago, however, I landed on the true and only answer that I know I’ll ever give. It seemed so obvious, once I thought of it, once my wiser subconscious pushed it forward like hello!

I would choose the two people who eventually became my parents, individually, long before they even met each other.

Hmm, just now I realize there’s a serious flaw in this plan.

It means that for those whose parents knew each other since early childhood, they’d be stuck having lunch with, say, a three-year-old. Or, if their parents met in high school, this scenario would have them having lunch with a preteen.

Save us.

However, that is not my problem. Therefore, moving on, I would choose having lunch with the young adults who eventually met and etc etc etc and resulting in yours truly. She in her late teens, he in his later teens. What I wouldn’t give to shadow each of them for an average day/week/month. For one thing I’d get the actual uncut truth of how they hooked up and so forth, a huge scoop in and of itself.

Sure I have some stories about them from that before time, far too few, and most of them offered up completely at random by relatives and old friends. But even in the versions of those stories that live in my memory, I can only imagine them as younger/skinnier versions of the parents I know, so the “memory” is forever wrong because I don’t know that person who was not defined in relation to me.

This is like trying to conceptualize my own non-existence … which, considering I’ve never managed to meditate for longer than 20min, is something I’ll not be achieving anytime this lifetime, only afterwards.

Meantime, I wait in eager anticipation of the next party or interview, my answers already prepared, like a nerd. And if no one asks, then I’ll say, “So, like, if you could have lunch with anyone living or dead…?”

…well? I’m waiting…

The carrot is walking. Or rather, “walking” is the carrot. The carrot with which I lure myself out of bed early in the morning to go dub-dub. (That’s Amharic for “jogging”, presumably because that’s the sound Ethiopian bodies make when they hit the trail.)

In order to get up, I promise myself that I don’t have to dub-dub at all, if I just get my ass out of bed. If I just get up, all I have to do today is shir-shir. (Yes, you guessed it. That’s the sound Ethiopian bodies make when they’re merely walking, hopefully at a brisk pace, yes even at 7am.)

It’s a lie. I know she’s lying. My better self. She’s the one doing all the promising and bargaining by the way. The hare spirit to my turtle body. The self that already knows how good it will feel later when I’m done dub-dub and sometimes even before I’m done, like when I’m only 65% of the way through and suddenly something clicks and all things seem possible and the world seems all right – that self is already up. She woke up on the first alarm. She didn’t need the backup second and third alarms (fun fact: you can outsleep the iPhone alarm after 15 minutes, especially if you set it to soothing chimes).

Yeah so future me, she is up, she’s dressed, she’s hydrated, she’s stretched. But being a figment of my mind she can’t actually do the doing for me. So she sits on the edge of my bed, saying “Here Little Turtle, heeere Little Turtle, come on now Little Turtle, you can just walk it today, no dub-dub, promise, just shir-shir. Get up Little Turtle, no harm in a little morning walk, right? We’ll leave your heart rate alone today. Etc etc.

So she dangles the “only walking today” carrot long enough (unlike the alarm she has no 15min timeout) and finally coaxes Little Turtle (moi) into getting up, dressed, stretched and hydrated, getting more and more awake each minute, but making her swear and promise on our lives that today it’s ONLY shir-shir, even while knowing that by the time that morning air hits my face (ok, morning-ish…we did outsleep alarm 1 and backup alarms 2 and 3) I will have forgotten all about the carrot and find myself dub-dub-ing before I realize it.

Why? Why all this when shir-shir offers so much room for surprises? (Like for example catching someone with a cat on a leash, crouching in the bushes off the beaten trail. Yes that happened.)

Because having ultra-hyped random jogger guy coming the opposite way in the rain yelling “NO DAYS OFF! WHOO! YEAH NO DAYS OFF!” makes for a far better story.

If I pass him again I’m recording him for my alarm ringtone.

But if you want to hear about the cat on a leash in the bushes, let me know.

Also let me know what necessary lies get you out of bed 3 mornings/week.

What better time to revive a blog that got started because of my travels than during the longest period of my life when I have not travelled anywhere? (16 monz and counting.)

Yeah re-reading that sentence a few times might be necessary because if this thing is going to continue one of my conditions is that short of obnoxiously bad mistakes I am NOT editing!

Run on sentences are also par for the course.

Speaking of running…meh that’s a long topic for future posts. In short: started it last June, and many many owie’s as hallelujahs later, it seems to be sticking. My passwords for associated accounts is (a version) Defar-Bikila, naturally.

Clearly social media has ruined me for paragraphs longer than a sentence. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? How many sentences would you prefer my paragraphs to be? I’ll try to meet specifications but will not meet any requests for emojis (ok last one argh damnit!)

I ought to be more serious. Address serious matters. The many ways shit promises to hit and is hitting the fan though nobody is cold for stink. On a whim (much like how I’m jumpstarting this thing using the cables from a mild case of social media allergy), I searched “Ethiopian blogger” and the hits that came up were either about travel blogs (by non-ETs) or press “discouragement” in ET. That’s what DuckDuckGo turned up anyway. Google turns up…(hold a sec) more of same. Zone 9 & related, food & related, fashion & related, travel & related.

My niche is still available then. Greaat.

…is this thing still working? or does it need more posts?

So, rather than me writing what I hope people want to know about re: the behind-the-scenes of Daughters of Silence, I asked my IG (Instagram) posse what they want to know. Here, the questions from near and far, and my responses, as well as a little behind-the-scenes action via YouTube. 

What is your first memory of the act of writing?

                                                -E, Ireland-by-way-of-Alberta

I have early memories of practicing writing. Funnily enough, not the Ethiopic (Ge’ez) alphabet, but the English. My English teacher in elementary school used to say, “Your penmanship should be precise and elegant. If I am standing on top of a mountain,” she’d point out the classroom window even though there were no mountains nearby, “I should be able to read it effortlessly.” Her cursive was exquisite. Even during school breaks, I spent many an afternoon practicing my cursive in special notebooks with layers of dotted lines.

I remember the first story I wrote in English, about a black cat who lived in a forest but didn’t have any friends. By the end, black cat has friends. Not sure if they all left the forest. Or if leaving the forest was part of the process of gaining friends.

I also used to pretend to read English before I learned how to. I’d flip through my parents’ thick English novels really fast, sounding out rolling ‘r’s. Must be why “my English is so good”