Tabula Rasa

None of us could really remember a time when the three of us hadn't been sitting in one straight line staring out across the street. We had been sitting like this for so long that we no longer spoke. Everything to say had already been said; anything we saw we all saw; every thought we already knew. We sipped atay as the tides of humanity rose and fell before us. We sipped atay as regimes waxed and waned. We sipped atay as the world ebbed and flowed. Rocks impervious to the froth and surge of life which washed by, ignorant. The worlds gaze, worn dull by our ubiquity, no longer saw us. But we saw them. We watched the first sermon of the false prophet Zayd al-Hadi, who shouted defiance. We watched the sultanah, on the morning of her wedding, slip quickly from the house of her servant. We watched a young man die, bleeding in the gutter as the sky blackened from thick smoke. Then, one day, the world stared back. She was the daughter of the bookseller who had left the city to study at university. Her gaze, sharp from study and honed by absence, caught and snagged on every piece of the scene. She locked eyes with us and smiled warmly. It started with her mouth, curling upwards at the edges, then spread to her nose which began to wrinkle before reaching her dark eyes which radiated compassion and love. We did not smile back, we had forgotten how. --- The next day, when we arrived at our seats, there was a small basket on the table covered with a cloth. Inside was a small mound of Kaab el Ghazal. We each took one, gingerly. They were warm and radiated compassion and love. She left the shop at mid morning to run some errands and looked over at us, smiling again. Something tugged at the corner of our mouths; hairline cracks progagated across stone. --- Each day we came to our seats and each day there was a fresh basket of pastries which we chewed ruminatively as we observed the world. We saw young children run excited to their schools and teenagers meander in love. We saw the baker slip some extra khoubz for the woman carefully counting her change. We gazed at starlings murmurating against the evening sky. Each day she would smile, warming our petrified bodies with her love. --- Eid came and we sat and we watched as decorations were put up and fires were started and lamb turned slowly on spits. Evening fell and the fast was broken and there was music and there was dancing and we watched. Her hand slipped into ours, cool and soft, and she raised us from our seats and we remembered we were men and we danced and we danced and we danced.