I am beyond split-brained at this point — split-hearted? Split-souled?

These are the words I write to my friend in our text chat, trying to explain the overwhelm of conflicting feelings, the overwhelm of conflicting states of being that have settled inside me as the genocide continues to unfold.

I keep searching for a word to articulate this and falling short. Simultaneous doesn’t feel accurate. Simultaneous is when you do two, maybe three things at once. But this is not about juggling or multi-tasking. This is about a deluge. About trying to wrap my mind around one awful thing when another hits and another and another and another until I am buried beneath a blanket of suffocating layers of horror. Multiplying. Compounding. Accruing interest.

An exhibit of the my split-hearted state:

I finish reading Maggie Smith’s book, You could make this place beautiful. Or more accurately, I start reading it, cannot stop, and finish reading it within 48 hours. I want to dog-ear every second page and highlight every word with thick yellow marker, except I’m reading on my phone.

I want to tell you that this book made me cry, but it didn’t. Because of course I can’t seem to cry anymore.

My tears have been giving me the silent treatment for about three years now. Partway through the pandemic, my whole emotional coping system broke down, but since the genocide, this struggle has reached a whole other level.

I am dry and shriveled, like the pit of a prune, not even the flesh of it.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, so I try the things that have always brought me tears — cheap tricks, but they’re reliable.

I play Castle on the hill by Ed Sheeran and my eyes water a little at “singing to tiny dancer” but as I try to catch the crescendo, the lump in my throat disappears and I am dry.

I am a drought, papery thin and ready to set alight. I am the beginnings of a forest fire.

So I go searching for my tears in the songs that used to get me when I was younger. I search in To Sir with Love, in Adia and Joey and One Sweet Day, but my sobs stay trapped inside me.

I go searching in a book of poetry called Water & Salt by Arab-American Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. Her poem, Immigrant, catches in my throat, the way she describes America as,

“…the place where the planes are madeand the place where the presidentwill make the call to send the planesinto my storybook childhood..”

I can feel my tears trying to awaken, but the numbness gives them a sedative, shushes them back to sleep. No. It’s not time for you yet, the numbness tells the tears. She won’t be able to cope if you show up today.

Letters from a Muslim Woman Demystifying the Western Muslim Experience

I read Sharon Simmons words about keening. I discover that to keen is to wail for the dead and I think yes, I want to keen. Please God let me keen but I don’t keen, can’t keen. Instead I load the dishwasher. I fill out forms for endless field trips. I winterize the basement and change the settings on the furnace.

I read a poem that Amal Kiswani shares called I translate the names of boys killed in Gaza. In her Note, Amal calls it “a beautiful poem that made me cry.”

I read it and I still don’t cry, but I feel the feelings that would have made me cry before. I share it with my sisters, with my friends, because sharing poetry is a gift.

Sharing poetry says, I read this and I felt something and I want you to feel it too. I want to tell my sisters and my friends that these poems made me cry because that is the highest compliment, and the most accurate description. Except that they haven’t.

When I say I want to cry what I mean is that I want to be spent, is that I want the relief. What I mean is that I want for the the dam to break and the well of emotion to escape instead of sitting, trapped on my chest. Trapped and building pressure along the walls of my temples. Trapped behind my forehead. Trapped in my lungs each time I try to take a deeper breath.

What I mean is that I want the catharsis. I want the sleep of the dead that comes after crying for the dead. The sleep that sucks you down down down away from visions of boys on fire, visions of babies taking their last breaths, visions of men in a line, walking to their open graves.

What I mean is that in a movie, you cry at the climax, and that every day I’ve seen another horror and thought to myself this must be the climax Dear God this has to be the worst it’ll get Dear God let it get better let this be rock bottom let it end.

How do you deal with hard things? Do you shut down? Do you cry?

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