Like Fallen Beads -- Atiq's Wadi Rum not-so-short story

**NotLostJustWandering** · Oct 30, 2010, 1:45 PM

I sleep late in the morning. For the first time since coming here I have slept well and awoken refreshed. I hear Saboora's van come and let it go without leaving my tent.

Skylar and Elke are staying another day. We play more rounds of Kuhhandel. Things seem OK but Skylar and I are both a bit cranky today and take snipes at each other in the course of the game.

I want a shower but the water has run out. I call the office and Mr. Muhammad tells me to ask Mahmoud to get the pump running, but I can't find him. I call his name and give one of his bird cries. I hear a reply and chase after it to find it was Elke playing with me. I am not amused, and get further annoyed when Skylar advises me to stop trying and just wait til the water is fixed. "Just some free advice." I bite my tongue, about to quip "glad I didn't pay for it."

Later in the afternoon I cheer up and invite them along with me for a walk in the desert. They'd like to later, they say, and I know better than to wait. I go out barefoot; I never replaced my sandals and shoes are too heavy in the sand.

I walk alone in great openness and overwhelming beauty. The beauty holds a promise; that everything is being created by the most brilliant Artist. All is beautiful, and one's self and life are an inseparable part of it. All pain is redeemed. My heart can touch the jebels distant on either side. The sun pours light into it and the light is reflected in all directions. I almost succumb to the impulse to sing out. What would I cry? Allahu akbar, allahu akbar. Yes, my faith is one born of the desert. Something within, much older than the forty-one years this body has encircled it, recognizes its home.

**NotLostJustWandering** · Oct 30, 2010, 1:47 PM

I return to camp as the sun sets. My Dutch friends are watching it from the big rock. They see me carrying garbage I've collected and they smile. I tell them about what I experienced out there, and they listen with appreciation.

They tell me they are starting to like the desert, too, but still feel they should be doing something more significant than cleaning a few tents and hanging around. They are still planning to leave the next day.

"You know I'll miss you. Thanks for staying these extra days."

I take the cigarette from Skylar's hand and take a deep drag. “You don't smoke!” he is astonished. “That's right, I don't.” I answer quietly, without further explanation, and hand it back to him.

Skylar doesn't show up for dinner. I ask Elke about him and she tells me that he went for a run, as he often does in the evening, but he is taking a long time to come back. The first day we were here, a similar thing happened during the day. He went out for a walk without carrying water, and she got worried when he was late in returning. Turned out he'd fallen asleep in a cave. Skylar is like this, so we must try not to worry.

The tourist who's chatting with us changes the subject. I think about Skylar's impulsiveness and how selfish chasing one's moods can be. In the dark he could have tripped over something, or maybe he found a snake or scorpion. Or maybe he just took a scenic route because that's just what he felt like, and at that time that impulse was stronger than any concern for the people who love him. Bastard.

I collect the dirty dishes and bring them to the kitchen, but then go to the big rock where Elke is calling his name out into the dark expanse.

Does he have water? No. A flashlight? No. I am thinking over what I know about snake bites and first aid.

Damn it. This is awkward. If it hadn't been for all this emotional shit between us, I would think nothing of going out and looking for him. Goddamn Skylar.

"Should I go and look for him?"

"If you feel like it. I wouldn't go too far; suppose he comes back while you're out and then you get lost?" I go to my tent to put on warmer clothes and my shoes. If I feel like it, indeed. She's the wife, and I'm the guy who has to act cool all the time, in fear that any passion I display will scare him away from ever speaking or writing to me again. If I feel like it, indeed.

But just as I am rising to go, I hear his voice calling her name, and I am spared having to write up a real life experience that would read like contrived melodrama. Time to do the dishes. Elke comes running. "Atiq! You're still here! Skylar came back!"

"I heard." I answer without turning around from the sink. "Good. Now I don't have to get pissed at him."

"Hey, Atiq." I am mopping the kitchen floor, he is standing in the doorway with his used dinner dishes. "I don't want to ruin your cleaning."

"Then I'll ruin it for you," I say, walking over and taking the dishes from him.

"Thanks," he laughs.

"Afwan." I stiffly reply.

I do his dishes as he explains. "I got lost. It's hard to judge distances in the dark. I recognized the big rocks, but couldn't tell how far away they were or from each other. I thought the camp was over there," he points, "and went too far that way."

"I see," I say, and walk back to the door, mopping up my footprints.

"Elke says you were about to go looking for me."

"Yeah."

"Thank you," he says and gives me a rough slap on the shoulder.

"De nada. I think you would have done the same for me. Maybe tomorrow you'll do your running during the day."

"Sure."

**NotLostJustWandering** · Oct 30, 2010, 1:49 PM

My last time sharing a fireside with them, they bring up the subject of a documentary film they saw about penguins. I don't remember what gets them on the topic. Skylar has on other times extolled his philosophy that humans are just another kind of animal and that the vain belief that we are in a different category than the animals is what enables us to commit acts of cruelty to them. Maybe this comes up again, I don't remember, and I'm sure he never says what makes the lives of penguins so relevant to him right now, but he speaks about the penguins with fervor, as if I mustn't fail to catch some vital point.

"They were the only animals that didn't leave the South Pole as the warm age ended and it froze. Their bodies aren't really adapted to the cold, just their behavior. You can see them in zoos everywhere in the world, they're quite happy in any climate."

"Yes, I've always wondered that penguins displays weren't full of freezing water, and whether the penguins felt hot."

"They lay only one egg in a mating season, and they take turns sitting on the egg, keeping it warm. It's so cold that the egg will freeze in seconds if they lose contact with it. They sit for months without eating, doing nothing but keep the egg warm. The mother and father take turns, and when it's time to change turns one rolls the egg to the other. And sometimes when they do this the egg breaks. The film captures that, the egg breaking. And when the egg breaks the parents cry. They cry just like humans. They've sacrificed for months and now they have nothing. It's the saddest sound in the world, the penguin crying."

Later that evening I climb the hill behind my tent and call David. I had Saboora pick up a phone card for me in town today, and now I'm going to blow it all on one call to Australia. At last, a chance to really talk.

Skylar strikes David as narcissistic. He asks me, why do I want to be friends with these people, anyway?

Now I'm stirred up again. Memories and questions teem and churn in my mind, and again I am slow to come to sleep. I remember Skylar seeming so full of tenderness that first night here. What did he want from me in the first place? It wasn't sex, apparently.

Over and over my mind replays his chilly pronouncement "you are in love." How devoid of compassion he seemed. Was he enjoying his power?

I did indeed fall into a trap. They knew I could fall in love with Skylar before I even realized I was attracted to him, and it had all happened before with the man who fell for Elke. If they really were my friends, how could they allow this to happen to me?

I think of how my fear of losing them as friends has stalked me from the beginning, and how Skylar utterly terrorized me by suggesting that we break off all contact. Since then I have been holding back anger, sweeping everything under the rug to keep the drama reduced, make things as comfortable for them as possible, anything to keep their friendship. And does anyone but me believe in this friendship? Do I still?

I wake up angry. They are still sleeping when the van comes and takes me to the office. I get my laptop and phone recharged but can't use my laptop with their internet connection. And so I am using the office computer when a second van brings them with all their gear.

"So, you're really leaving this time?"

"Yes, we will try to catch the next bus back to Amman."

They have a number of loose ends to tie at the office, so I show them around and get back on the computer as they talk with Mr. Muhammad. When the moment comes for the final goodbye we have the audience of Mr. Muhammad, Saboora, a tour guide and a new crop of freshly arrived tourists. We are stiff and formulaic. We must be in touch. I don't have anything to write your e-mail address on, but send it to me over CouchSurfing. Will do, you do the same. Well, take care and good luck with everything. Yes, you too; enjoy the desert. One rapid hug apiece.

**NotLostJustWandering** · Oct 30, 2010, 1:52 PM

The days follow a grind. Up the hill in the hopes of receiving SMSs. Help with breakfast, clean up, take a walk or do my own housework. Help with dinner. Hang out with the tourists and Bedouins in the fire tent. Go to sleep. Throughout the day I check for SMSs. Though I know it won't happen, I can't help imagining how nice it would be to get one from either of them, just checking in to see that I'm OK.

The tourists seldom stay more than one night. Most engage with me very little, few interest me in any way.

Most of the Bedouins speak very little English, but call me sahbihi, my friend, and repeat my name affectionately. They ask me how I'm doing, I say alhamdulillah, but they won't buy it. You look maybe sad, maybe you have problem, you tell me, sahbihi. We fill each other's glasses with tea from the pot in the fire and I decline their cigarettes.

Some days I feel like I'm getting better. The ache in my heart seems duller, generalized, a cry for love detached from the form of Skylar. I resume meditating. Twenty minutes, once a day. I think that this all must be very good for me.

But meditation is so difficult. Whenever I close my eyes I see his face. My mind teems with memories, questions, scenarios, fantasies. The camp is saturated with echoes of the recent past. I am chopping vegetables and suddenly remember the sound of their chattering in Dutch behind my back, and again I feel my stomach tighten. The sight of the sunset from the great rock is interrupted by the feeling of his thigh against mine and his arm draped around my shoulders.

Thanksgiving is approaching. Must remember to call Mom.

With the daily coming and going of tourists I grow more antisocial, inclined to share less and less with the only people who speak fluent English around here. I observe good-looking young men and women, and feel no desire of any kind. Rather than getting used to my lot, I feel with only greater acuteness the pain of unfulfillable desire.

I try to write. When my laptop battery approaches death I use my notebook and pen. I don't dare write about what just happened, but try to bring my diary up-to-date. I get up to where I'm thirty days behind, placing the narrative up to where I first came to this country, whereupon I lose inspiration and can no longer tell myself why I am writing.

I think with melancholy about the approach of Christmas and Thanksgiving, the latter of which is only tomorrow. To be here without family or friends...

My sadness is unconcealable. I accept a cigarette from a Bedouin. An additive-laden commercial cigarette, just the thing I never smoke, but I take it in the spirit of accepting his sympathy, and actually relish every toke of it.

I must go into the village tomorrow and get my visa renewed. This is a fixed idea which I only question as I am writing an SMS about it. Is this really true? I don't have to, it's my choice to stay. I could leave.

Hope stirs in my heart, a voice cries Yes! Let's get out of here!
The monastery comes to mind. I had been thinking it would be a great place to be for Christmas. But there I would be even more isolated, in terms of the Internet. My heart sinks again. I'm not fit for any of the ascetic settings I've been imagining for myself.

Then I remember Dahab, where I keep getting tempted to go, and which I most recently imagined as the place to segue from writing to working. I think of the beach, the sea, cheap and plentiful hashish. Most of all I'll be back in Egypt, the only country around here where I have good friends. I'll have to pay for my accommodation, and there may be more distractions from my writing than here or the monastery, but maybe sweeter medicine is what the sickness calls for now. I will make my final decision in the morning. But my mind is made up about leaving here, and it feels good. For the first time since I came here I feel happy.

**NotLostJustWandering** · Oct 30, 2010, 1:54 PM

I move into a beach camp in one of the last remaining quiet spots on Dahab's shoreline. Whenever I ask someone where I can buy some hash or ganja, they give me some. Sometimes they ask for money, usually they just give it to me.

After four months of traveling in this smokey part of the world without once buying tobacco in any form, I finally find pure shag tobacco. I buy a pack and begin smoking every day. Initially it's just to roll the hash in but soon I am smoking it straight. I have never so appreciated tobacco and its anaesthetic properties. It numbs the emotions.

Days blur one into the next. It takes me a few days to realize how depressed I am. I seclude myself in my room and into a haze of smoke. I have no inspiration to swim, to clean my room, or even shower or shave. I do nothing but smoke, listen to music, and stare into space, often in imaginary conversation with him.

I have difficulty admitting to myself how much it bothers me that he's chosen not to keep in touch with me, that no e-mail will come saying how are you doing, hope you're feeling better. In the whirlwind of repeating thoughts this one has been added: "He really doesn't care about me at all. I have fallen in love with a man who doesn't care about me at all."

I try to meditate. It's very hard. Some mornings I wake feeling not so bad, and then I meditate and feel like I'm in hell again.

My worst terror is that I see no way to prevent this, or something as painful as this, from happening again. I see no way to live at peace with my conflicting desires. Is there no better position for a man like me than to have a woman as patient and sacrificing as Elke? I could live like Skylar, be the man at the wheel and let other pitiful souls take their turn as roadkill...

At this point, writing this story seems the only way to deal with the deadening depression. I need to come to terms with what happened, to make what sense I can out of what led me to this state.

The limits of my memory are a torture to me. There is no video to play back and forward, only a jumble of impressions and images like beads fallen from a broken rosary. Putting them back in order I often must fill in some missing piece from my imagination and so I weave this story out of what facts I recall and feel regret the stitching I must give the holes. I despise my handiwork, and fear that in the story I tell I must unconsciously portray myself in a better light than I deserve. What makes it so deadly serious is that this is not just the story I tell you, my friends, this is as close to the truth as I have.

Copyright 2009 Atiq Zabinski

**tenni** · Oct 31, 2010, 12:12 AM

Thank you for sharing your experience and your thoughts. I can relate to several passages and give them personal meaning to me. I've copied some of the particular passages that meant something to me.

A few over view thoughts. I think that when we come into contact with people of either gender that we bisexuals may have a capability to experience a connection to them that is not gender based. We may connect deeply and emotions may come into play. It doesn't matter whether they are male or female. I can not help but think that this may have been your experience. You might have just as well developed deeper connections with Elke over Skylar. How might that have changed what happened or not? Elke and Skylar have developed a tight and closed bond that they profess to be permeable but really is not. They speak of being brothers, sisters and family but frightened by your "love". They seem to "play" with other's emotions and their genuine connection may have been shallower that your connection. They seem to be fearful about permitting deeper connections with humans as if it will destroy their connection between themselves. I think that this mainstream rigidity/ belief is the most threatening for bisexuals to truly find peace and happiness.

As a bisexual, I believe that I am able to connect at times with a person regardless of their gender. I can grow to develop an emotional connection that may or may not have as explicitly a sexual component. (vice versa may also happen...ie all sexual and no emotion) I'm sometimes uncertain as to when a platonic attachment is there rather than a sexual attraction. (not always but sometimes) (ie. Distinguishing between a love friendship attachment to a person from a sexual attraction attachment with emotional connections.) I think that is what happened between you and Skylar. Elke mentioned the one night stand that she had misread as probably not having an emotional connection and was bothered by the point that the man established a connection beyond the physical sexual connection. They seem to be only partially open to exploring their connection with other humans regardless of the gender. They hold their own bond as a couple as sacred. They tell those singles that they come into contact that this is the rule. When they feel their connection with another human that is not their partner growing, they retreat.

Overall, though, I think that you have had an enriching experience with these people. Your connection to Skylar was deeper though than the connection with Elke. I hope that you are able to see it as such.

post 14
"I look back on the days when I actually sought out men for partnership. How I would have loved to have had a boyfriend like Skylar back then. None of the men I dated were hippies, and most of them had that attachment to the gay identity that never really jibed with me. I get the sense Skylar was never like that. He would have been too authentic, too much in tune with his true self. "

post 15
"At any rate, having this conversation has left me feeling as if a stone were lifted from my chest. Two stones, actually: carrying an uncomfortable secret, and not knowing my attraction was reciprocated. The one makes me more comfortable with my friends, the other makes me feel a lot better about myself."

Several ideas come to my mind reading passage 15. a/ the friendship relltionship between men and the affection between these men versus the sexual affection that may exist between bisexual men. Is there a distinction between bisexual men as to when friendship and fondess exists compared to a sexual arousal between bisexual men?"

post 18
"I am playing a game in which Skylar has all the power, I have none, and am only figuring out the rules as I play. I watch him relishing the game. A bisexual man with a woman who lets him play with other men."

post 21
"I totally respect it. And if you didn't have Elke, I wouldn't dare touch you. I would have run away by now."

post 23
"And as for myself, I just want you to know, that for me the worst thing that could come out of this would be if our friendship were damaged in any way." I feel obliged to add "meaning yours and mine as well as mine and his." She gives me a blank, probing look and in her silence I hear doubt that this friendship between myself and her is real."

post #29
"I talk about our time in Amman and how she and Skylar had made me feel like their family. How I loved that feeling so much I couldn't tell heed the voice saying I had fallen into a trap. I guess this was the first time they had had something like this get so dramatic? No, she said, there was one time a man she'd pegged as a one-night stand fell in love with her. They'd been through this all before."

post #31
"The Love that requires no reciprocation is here. This pain has served to expand my heart to let more in. The people and things we love in our limited way serve to prepare us to let this Love through. The expanse of the cosmos bears witness to the Love's endlessness."

post #30
"She sits but says "I am not comfortable when you talk like this and look at Skylar that way. I feel how much in love you are with him and it makes me feel... I don't want to say threatened... but yeah, kind of... I know I'm not threatened, but the feeling is as if I were."

**void()** · Oct 31, 2010, 6:41 PM

"Is there a distinction between bisexual men as to when friendship and fondess exists compared to a sexual arousal between bisexual men?"

You've left this open in a public forum, tenni. Perhaps, this view is not significant but it is mine and you've posed the question.

I think we as human beings, indeed have control over emotions, no matter how base or primal they be. That isn't to say no cases in which those same emotions sweep us away, don't exist. But even then we are the masters or mistresses of them.

To suggest emotions capable of forging control without regard to consequence, accountability is madness for sure. And this comes from personal experience. I have in the past gotten direly angry. The rage welled causing me to black out. Weeks later I was made aware of nearly killing someone using my hands.

Of course, I'm known to get fits of severe melancholy, depression as well. And then bliss or satori occur at times also. It is a constant struggle maintaining any semblance of an even keel. Nonetheless, these emotions are not me. Yes I'm accountable to a degree for them, fully if on tack. We all are, or ought to be.

So, in responding to your question, I think we are more than able to distinguish between friendship, love, lust. It is in how we respond to our emotions which cause us headaches, putting it mildly.

Atiq,

Thank you for sharing your story. It confirms to me, even the better of us are not always saints nor sinners. Not sure how I would have responded in the same boat as you. Possibly would have been crushed just as you. Again, thank you.

**MarieDelta** · Oct 31, 2010, 7:04 PM

Such a bittersweet experience.

Thank you for sharing it, Atiq, I did find it enlightening.

I am sorry that this relationship did not turn out the way you hoped, but perhaps it is for the best?

**onewhocares** · Nov 1, 2010, 1:42 PM

Thank you for sharing your story. I enjoyed reading it and do like your style of writing.

Belle

**NotLostJustWandering** · Nov 2, 2010, 12:08 AM