layla

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
― James Baldwin

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Because hatred gives one strength to go on; it maintains the fragile structure, it weaves the threads together so that emptiness doesn’t take over everything.”
― Agustina Bazterrica, Tender Is the Flesh

“Cloves

Where is the scent of cloves coming from?
her hair?
armpit?
or her dress
thrown on the Tunisian rug?
From the third step in the house?
Layla
makes everything smell of cloves.
Layla
is the orchard when it’s wet.
She is
what the orchard breathes
when it’s watered at night.
Layla knows now
that I am drunk with the scent of cloves,
she stiches together my clouds
and then scatters them together
in a sky like a sheet
as she clasps me.
Layla
feels that my fingers are numb,
over the dunes she knows
my pulse is hers,
my water is hers.
Layla
leaves me sleeping,
rocking between clouds
and cloves.”
― Saadi Youssef, Nostalgia, My Enemy