Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

najat el hachmi T here was a hoar-frost early this morning. The dew froze over the slurry-scented fields as I tossed and turned on my squeaky spring bed that was so ridiculously short and narrow in my dingy bedroom in the old part of town. My mother sleeps very lightly, has such good hearing she must have heard. I thought about her whenever I turned and the bobbly sheets rucked up. I was sure that all the sounds reaching her from my room meant she always knew my every movement, every twist and turn of my body, even when I hardly moved, the way I breathed, even my insides rumbling. In bed, clutching my pillow with tensed fingers, to remind myself that I shouldn’t think about her, I kept repeating that this was the most difficult part of the

day just beginning, of my life that was just beginning, that, however hard, I had to do it. If I let her enter my thoughts, if only surreptitiously, it would be like lookingbackand turning into a pillar of salt. I whiffed the damp, stale air, and if I smelled it awhile I could trace the breath I’d been exhaling over the last few hours, the emanations from my own body. I tried to distract myself analysing the making and breaking of everything that had come out of me and was now stone dead. Driven by insomnia, I was swept along by a spiral of fleeting thoughts that took me from one place to another, to another and then another. And so on to infinity. The way my brain works, a brain that’s restless and volatile, comes to the rescue, now and then. Diverts me, makes the hours not drag

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