I’ve been meaning to start something like this for a long time. Not a blog in the way people use the word now — not a platform, not a presence, not a strategy. Just a place to write things down before I forget them.
Four years in Germany. Two as a student, two after. Long enough to stop feeling like a guest, not long enough to stop noticing things. The way the light falls differently here in February, flat and grey-white, nothing like further south. The specific silence of a church that’s been turned into a library. The disorientation of praying Asr in a city where the sun sets at half past three in winter.
I kept notes. Fragments, mostly. A sentence about a street, a paragraph about the Mezquita in Córdoba, a half-finished thought about what it means to visit a place when you carry a different kind of claim to it than most visitors do.
This is where I’ll put those things. The complete ones and the incomplete ones. The posts will be uneven — some short, some long, some personal, some more like field notes. I’ll write in English mostly, Arabic sometimes.
I’m not sure who reads this. Maybe no one. That’s fine.