I was never good at hide & seek because I'd always make enough noise so my friends would be sure to find me. I don't have anyone to play those games with anymore but now & then I make enough noise just in case someone's still looking & hasn't found me yet!!

Clementine: This is it, Joel. It's going to be gone soon.

Joel: I know.

Clementine: What do we do?

Joel: Enjoy it.

Today my uncle took me for a walk around the city and to his and my fathers primary and secondary school. The playgrounds where they used to spend their afternoons after school. The fishmarket where they got free fish from their friends father when they climbed over the fence of the school at midday and skipped some classes.

We strolled untill we reached the graveyard in the middle of town. I could not have recognised it on my own, for it is just a large field with occassional lumps in the ground with no apparent regularity. There are barely any gravestones to be seen, apart from a few severly damaged ones in the distance.

We walk through these lumps of earth carefully and respectfully to the middle of this field. Next to a ditch, which I am told it was a pool of water, and a dried out treetrunk, I find three graves one above the other two. All of them being my ancestors. They have large pieces of polished stone on top and brightwhite marmer gravestones with black engraved letters standing proud and tall amongst their surroundings.

We kneel before the graves and say our fatiah's. "My dear father, look, I have brought you your grandchild..." he says out loud whilst he is still resting three fingers on the polished stone. "...he is here to see you. To make you proud. He's here in this ruin..." he pauses and looks around and up, then he again looks at the stone and continues "...instead of seeing you as I have ... In your time of glory and greatness!"

All this time I'm looking at the polished stone with my head down. I raise my head, see the gravestone, read it in silence and say out loud "khuda biamorza shomar baboo (may you rest in peace oh grandfather of mine)"
He puts his hand on my shoulder and says "let us go" and smiles upon me.

She talked about him with such passion. As if he was a god among men and she worshipped him like no other.

She always told me that she loved those women who adored and worshipped their man. And how she waned to be like them. But she also knew, somewhere deepdown in her core, that she never could do that. I made her see that. I always told her that in order to be able to worship anything, you have to be able to forgive it's mistakes.

She never could forgive anything!

Sometimes I miss her and think of the days we spent and the days we could have spent if she would just have forgiven my little mistakes. But she couldn't and I respect that. I will for always worship her for that. Atleast worship the idea of her!

Tempus-fugit, a pill which gives your reflexes a jolt. Some have been known to take one or two occassionally to make a weekend feel like a month.
Primarily, though, they just stretch out your subjective time by a factor of ten or more, chop time into finer bits so that you live longer for the same amount of clock and calendar.

A man was known to die of old age within a month for taking them steadily. But who is to say that he did not have the right idea?

He lived a long and happy life. You can be sure that it was happy. And he surely died happy!

What does it matter that there were only 30 sunsets in his life? Who is keeping score and what are the rules exactly anyhow?

"It's good, it's very good in fact!" he says as he looks up from the photo I had handed him
I radiate with happiness with his approval.
Then he continues "although upon the story I want to say something"
I look at him not knowing what he might say
"Good luck finding her" he finally says!

In all poetry and other literature on the matter I keep on reading about the discrepantion between the heart and the mind. One logical and the other anything but.
Yet I find myself doubting Shakespeare and his most talented fellow writers.

For as I think that the heart is purely a slave of the mind. Nothing more than another sensory instrument like our other five senses. With the only difference being the two way communication channel.

If one has eliminated all heartly strings but when the mind refuses, really refuses, to forget that stimuli once held so dear. Will it then not be just rational to deduct from this mere fact that although it is the heart that, most of the time physically, aches, that it is truly the mind that weeps?

Everything is a joke and everything is dead and dead seriuous at the same time. The same phrase can kill you or save you at times.
Four kilometres from the airport we are stopped by some men with submachine guns in army and police uniforms although you can never be sure they're any of the two. He smiles and taps the driver window with the barrel of his gun. The driver rolls down the window, with the barrel pointed at him they tell him he should head back and they will take his passengers to the airport.
The driver smiles wide and says "no my brother, talk to Hussein, I know him!" The man is not convinced and it shows by the change of his tone and the sudden change of language. Our driver was so quick to call Hussein on his cellphone. "here, my dear brother, this is Hussein" he says as he hands his cellphone to the man with the gun.

The man takes the phone and heads to his colleaugue who had been ready behind the car to shoot us if we did anything unexpected. He talks on the phone with his head down and looking at the dirt that his boots set airborn with every step. Then, in an uncontrollable hysterical laughter he raises his head towards the sky and then back in our direction and he hands the phone to our driver saying "zah" meaning Go!
A kilometre from the airport the same thing happens again but this time we had to call Mahmood. No matter where you are in this country you should hold two things very close to you: one is acquiantances and the other is money to bribe people to become your acquiantance.

I'm sitting in the waiting area of the kandahar airport to be boarded. In my suitcase I have a small container which reads "Dove facial creme" but the contents may not be so refreshing to the face as the label suggests, it is atleast a million times more refreshing for the heart. For it contains a handfull soil of kandahar.

I tread upon a carpet which feels way too familliar in such a distant place. I study the texture with my toes and the print with my eyes. Everything suddenly falls into place.
When I was only a small kid, I only had one decent toy car, which I had gotten from a relative living in the west at the time, which was the envy of all my friends. It was a lego garbagetruck.

I recognise the flowers which were the parkings and restarea's and the large diamond shaped figure in the middle which was the dumping ground. The large super highways of that universe coloured by red, deepgreen and lightblue trails encircle everything. The branches of the flowers take you from these trails to the parkings and other sceneries along the road.

This urge of getting hold of my toy and playing garbageman on that carpet can barely be contained. I remember the joy and those laughters which woke my aunts those long gone summer noons. I remember all the tears I shed upon that carpet everytime I was punished for doing something wrong or breaking something.

After almost 13 years I realised that nothing has changed and that I, in essence, am still that little kid who has misplaced his shiny garbagetruck.

"You're different" she says "As if you're no longer the one I left"
I look up from my hands "Maybe you're right....no...you're definitely right" and look out the window
"What happened?" she asks me
"You just said it" I whisper and then look at her and continue "you left me!"

"I have to go" she says
"I know...I know.."

Her eyes burn with rage as if she wants to have that fight again about how I don't know anything about what she says but she just keeps silent as she buttons up her coat.

"I will see you around" she says as she leans to kiss me goodbye
"No you won't"

"I'm sorry" she whispers