notes of a non-combatant

nameless

The sound echoes off the tiled walls, sitting in the air and resonating across the entire bathroom. Standing naked in the shower, I stare down at the porcelain tub and watch the stubble fall like black dust, slowly making its way to the ground at my feet. Scraping along my skin, first across my face, up my temples and around my ears, raking up the back then skimming along the crown of my head. The trimmer turns off with a loud click and it’s only a minute before I have the entire apparatus cleaned and packed away in the cabinet. Following the electric trimmer comes the razor blades which trim back the hair underneath my chin, the metal blades shearing the stubble along my neck.

It is a new routine, as are many that now take place in my life. It’s hard to remember when I would walk into the bathroom to grab a brush, working tangles and styling my hair as I always had since I was a child. There was a routine then too, to place each portion of hair in its proper position, so that all my hair would flow across my head like a halo of cute, brown curls. That routine ended in a crowded bathroom in Beit Sahour, as I sat in solitude over a bucket of water, shearing off locks until the hair stood short, ready to be taken to the scalp with a razor.

Cut and cropped, family and friends comment on the new look, not used to the extremely short hair. In many respects, I don’t look the same at all, and it is part of the large disconnect that comes with returning to my old life in America. People who used to know me now have difficulty recognizing me. When speaking, seldom do friends even ask the right questions, or venture at all to inquire about my experiences. I omit what is truly on my mind during most conversations, though sometimes I speak my mind and the great disconnect manifests as an empty silence, as most people are devoid of enough knowledge, experience, and understanding to respond, to keep the dialogue alive. One after another, conversations cease in hollow silence, and I retreat into the perspective I have of this world, with my eyes open to events taking place elsewhere, empathizing and opining alone and from afar.

Some people don’t even know what to call me, by which name I prefer to go by. These are the most perceptive of friends, as they recognize the mental shift that I have undergone, and they make efforts to accommodate. They tend to ask the right questions, the ones that a part of me finds humorous. To the uneducated ear, the correct questions sound like silly blunders, faux pas in their entirety. A portion of my old self still fights to exist, hearing these questions and laughing at the conversations, thinking it ridiculous to be speaking about such mundane events as water, sewage, and education. There is still a part of me that feels trapped in shared spaces, uneasy with bare minimums and cut corners, and resistant to challenging social norms. Day by day, I feel the side of me that conforms keeps shrinking, becoming an insignificant and marginal part of me. I feel the old me disappearing.

It makes for awkward situations. Smiles turned crooked when longtime acquaintances are forced to accept the changes that have taken place, struggling to recognize the man that now stands before them. Introductions in social settings by the name of Ibi, three letters which most struggle to grasp, only to be followed immediately by old friends calling me Avi, injecting overwhelming confusion into struggling smalltalk. Conflicting facets linger and confuse, hanging around me like a thick, dirty cloud, difficult to navigate through and partially incompatible with the society I have returned to. I only hope the winds of change that have stirred this situation into reality continue to blow, clearing the air and everybody’s minds.