The Kindness of Strangers

Dina came rising out of the dark with a wooden plank across her back like Jesus Christ on the crucifix. Behind her, Faisal’s torchlight flickered in the night as he stumbled up the stone steps, a massive bench on his shoulder that he’d stolen from the deserted, neighboring camp below.

For a second there, I thought he would fall backwards into the mouth of darkness, but then he drunkenly, bravely hauled the dusty wooden bulk over his head into the bonfire. Everyone cooed in awe. It burnt all night.

Yann wrapped his fur lined Bedouin coat around my shoulders and pulled my waist close to him as we sat on the cliff together. His high school friend Ameen has a matching coat. They hadn’t seen each other in seven years till today, around the bonfire in this hilltop camp.

Yann had watched me try to photograph the full moon in all its glory, yet each attempt failed to capture its brilliance, the infinity of its light as it rippled and bounced onto the sleeping, forgiving Red Sea.

Hours later, he held me close and complained that the moon shone too brightly. I was baffled, wondered if he was joking. I decided that this stranger with his strange hands cradled around my ribs and cold nose tucked into my neck was kidding.

How could anyone not fall completely in love with this night, this bonfire, these people and their maniacal joy under the desert moon?

You can’t control the wind or the moon or Layla as she spins circles of light like dizzy stars out of orbit. Tata reached for my hand and asked where I had come from, how I had walked into his life and was I real?
His eyes were full of acid love and I giggled.

Kindness from strangers is humbling when you’ve been starved by the man you loved for years, and I’ll take any love I can get, in Tata’s eyes, in Ahmed’s lips as they curl into a catlike grin when he offers to give me a head massage, in Yann’s comforting arms as he tells me ‘You don’t need to be told you’re beautiful to know that you are.’
But yes I do. Yes I do.

Ameen takes us into the Valley of Camels, a barren space of open skies, forlorn trees, dust and echoes in the silent, forgotten red mountains around us.
He throws a granite rock across the quiet breeze and it makes a distinctive whizzing sound, hollow and vibrating in our ears. And the stillness of the desert valley is so deep; we can hear each other’s breaths through the gentle breeze.

He sings us the songs of the tribes that he once lived with amidst the rocks and gazelles for months. Songs in a foreign dialect to our city Arabic, songs of joy and generosity, welcoming guests into the desert, yells of ‘Ebsher!’, Cheer Up! as they jump up and down like the Maasai tribes and crack their whips in celebration of sound breaking the valley full of empty offerings.

At night, Omar holds his stick up towards the star-filled night, and fireworks explode above our heads as we coo in awe and down tequila to keep us warm and merry in the midnight chill and truly there is no beauty like this hill, this generous mouth of God, these strangers in all their love for me and it breaks the heart over and over again that this bliss is momentary and tomorrow I will wake up a stranger curled up against another stranger’s back and yet that gives me more than anything I had in two long, lonely years.

The kindness of strangers in the desert is comforting, wrapping their coats around me, pouring me shots of Malibu, telling me I have beautiful legs and calling me habibty. I am surrounded by loud laughter, drunken brawls, spinning bodies and madness and here I have found home, an open space filled with love for the barren, forgotten desert in me.

So we jump up and down barefoot like the Maasai in the desert, we do cartwheels underwater as the Red Sea currents pull us towards the stinging fire corals, we watch shadows rising from the dark with stolen furniture and meteors fall to the sea while Omar spins his colored balls into dizzying circles of joy. Joy.

And somewhere in the frantic dancing and stumbling into Yann’s arms as he tells me he missed me after minutes spent apart, somewhere in Ismail’s gut laughter as he tries to stick his finger in my eye while Shahira his wife berates him, her eyes sparkling like rough emeralds in the sand, somewhere in the drunken steps we take towards the cliff edge while Faisal sings off key into an empty bottle of vodka, Ameen plays 'Hallelujah' on the guitar and we huddle together for warmth and temporary comfort, somewhere in all this I am found.
There is so much love in me I can burn all night long like the wood in the fire.

With Yann’s hands, with his lips on my neck, I have reconstructed my heart to a different shape this time, one that lets in strangers but won’t allow your name, a shape that lets in the light through the cracks and shows the lies you made me into, and what a fool I was, to let you break me down, make me lose all sense of beauty and confidence that stranger on acid had to ask me where I had come from to make me wonder if perhaps there was more to me than what you’d left behind.

I loved you like a faded photograph, gentle around the edges, dark in the core, and now I am resurrected, I suppose.

Yann says the moon overpowers the stars, complains that he can’t see the constellations clearly, yet I show him Venus and Capricorn and he presses my palm to his lips. The kindness of strangers is humbling.