When I was about 10 years old, my youngest brother was born. My father brought a new crib in his car. All the boys in the neighborhood rushed to help him move the crib to the house. My dad heard them repeat: “this is for Ghinwa’s brother, this is for Ghinwa’s brother.”
Later on, in the evening, my dad asked me in a playful tone, hiding his rage and jealousy: so you like blue eyes eh?, trying to find out which of these kids I was attracted to. Defiantly and very confidently, I said: No, I like brown. After that moment, every time I would go out on our balcony, my dad would yell at me to go inside.
The balcony and the crib had similar railings. I would spend hours every day carrying my little brother on the balcony, looking at people, telling him stories, pointing at birds, while my mother was running errands. He would cry for her, and I would take him out to the balcony to wait for her then I would invent ways to distract him from missing her. I was turning into a teenager. All the boys in the neighborhood were interested in me, and I was in them. It was not allowed.
Soon the balcony was not allowed to me either. The railings were a barrier, a barricade. I was told to stay indoors. As years passed, my father started calling me Ghinwa Outdoors, he saw this yearning in me to leave. And indeed I left. I left to a bigger container. Railing turned into a fence. I left to a gated community in Saudi Arabia. I was protected by guards at the entrance. A few months after I moved there, I suffered from extreme anxiety. At night, I couldn’t sleep. I would walk around in circles around the house, still inside the gates. I was in constant panic mode. The moment I would leave the community, I would get an overwhelming fear. The moment I would go back home I would feel restless, the moment I would lay my head on the pillow, I would lose control, panic, and lift my head back up. I was no longer Ghinwa Outdoors, I was neither indoors nor outdoors. I no longer knew who I was.
Fiction:
She had just moved to a small city outside Paris, on her own. She bought a large bed for her new studio apartment. The bed got delivered to the building’s entrance and dismantled in a large cardboard box. It was very heavy. She brought a big pair of scissors, opened the box right there on the sidewalk, and took a large piece out. It was the headrest. She carried it upstairs to her apartment. She went back and did the same with a few other pieces. A few hours later, all that was left was a big piece of wood that was the base of the bed. She couldn’t figure out how to carry it on her own. It was already night, and she was getting tired. She went upstairs, brought down a thick blanket, and decided to spend her first day in her apartment, outside her building.
