Lola

“I still smell your absence on my skin. It smells of insomnia and rusted key locks...”
― Malak El Halabi

“Miseries of a birth.”
― Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary: October 26, 1977–September 15, 1979

“I watched you storm towards the restaurant door. It was a chilly December morning and the birds sitting on the high wires in the neighborhood refused to fly any longer.”
― Malak El Halabi

“I didn't sleep all night, thinking. I thought about you, about those puppy eyes you give me, when you fake your sadness to make me smile-- and that upper lip of yours that brings life to all of my senses. I thought about your laughter when you get tickled, and that soft mellow place near your arm pit that I wish could be knit into a pillow for me to hug all night long. I thought about your stomach, your soft and sensitive stomach, scared like a baby kitten under the pouring rain. And I remembered the feeling of protection that comes washing over me when I get a glimpse of it, the feeling of covering it with the layers of my very own skin. I remembered your head when it rests on my heart, a rock sheltering itself on the verdure of infinity. I remembered your silky black hair, and how I never imagined that hair curls so thin could twirl, in the way they do, the rigid core of my existence.”
― Malak El Halabi