Our first evening together, he said it was like watching two people on an incredible date. We couldn’t share enough, and it was impossible to tone down the excitement. Little has changed since.

We share the same vulnerabilities and wound in the same way, but confront these things differently. Without having to say much about a thing, we both automatically know where and why the others’ pain is rooted, and this is only one of the reasons we bonded immediately.

As a writer, I rage externally. I wear my pain on my sleeve and bleed it all over my words, so that I might understand it, in order to put it to rest. And when I cannot understand it, my writing at least lays it out into the fresh air so that it might dry and heal itself on its own.

As is always the case around this time of the month (thanks Hormones! You’re swell), I face a slightly challenging day wherein at different times I find myself looking for My Hope (in all things, but especially in Love things) which slips through a rip in my pocket. Time with Poppy this afternoon, and Laurence this evening helped me find it hidden at the bottom of my coat’s lining. Thank you to both of these extraordinary women (you too are swell, but not like my Hormones ‘swell’).

A conversation thread throughout the day was healing and dating. Do we wait until we are fully healed from one, before dating another? Absolutely not, for me. Relationships are an interchange between two people (or more. I don’t judge); wounds from relationships happen only because of the players involved and the infliction of unkindness by one or more against another. Almost always, it can be traced to one root – the breaking of trust. (When you’re lucky, it’s just incompatibility. But that is, in fact, the rare breakdown.)

To me then, it’s simple. We can only heal and grow so much on our own. At some point, that theory which we’ve learned, needs a practicum. Hence dating.

Besides, show me one person who will ever, at any point in their lives, tell you that they are not walking wounded, and I will show you a liar at best, an idiot at worst.

(That written. Please don’t date people as sport, unless they know the rules of the game which you’ve set up, and they have explicitly accepted. Also, don’t date at the beginning of your healing process, but rather later on. No one wants to be your therapist unless they’re billing you. Finally, if you don’t know how to be alone, then none of the above is for you. You really and truly cannot learn to be with someone right, unless you are comfortable being on your own without distraction. People aren’t here to be your hobby, and if you’re looking for filler, talk to your dentist.)

Today, I am grateful for:
1. Abundance. Today, today, today, today, I really need to be thankful for this today.
2. Sam. She is the owner of Venus Envy, married to my Ghaida. Thank you for carrying rose-water syrup. Thank you for your patience and all of the photos.
3. The first review of rose-water syrup came in while I was at war with insurance and I didn’t enjoy it as I really should have. Here it is, by poet Kenza Saadi. What a thing it was to receive this the first time, and now reading it again, it is even more incredible. Worthy of a post on its own, I will add it to insta later this weekend, inshAllah.

Ottawa | June 7, 2019

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