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Nostalgia

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Dubai at dusk

View from the Burj

I’m lying on a sofa bed on a high floor of the Burj Khalifa, staring out the windows at the sprawling metropolis at my feet. Here in Dubai, as everywhere else in my month away from Afghanistan, I am haunted by the same question: “What would it be like to live here?”

I was tempted in Philly, as I have never been before, when a friend told me that he used to rent a downtown 1 bedroom for about $750/mo. It was unheard of in any other major city on the East Coast, and since all I really need for my home base is the hustle and bustle of a large city, I momentarily wondered if Philly could be it.

I asked myself this also in Cambridge, MA when I met another friend at 1369 Coffee House, an old favorite of mine during college. What if I had stayed in the area after graduation? What if coffee with this friend could have been a weekly, rather than annual, thing? But it was an idle thought, since staying in Boston had neither been a real possibility nor a real desire for me.

I looked forward to it in Manhattan, which I had decided was the only U.S. city that could keep up with me. Manhattan was home to some of my oldest and best friends, and as we wandered the streets, stopping in at any coffee shop that caught our eye, enjoyed evenings at the Met and late nights in Meatpacking, I felt like I fit in the city. It was as if Manhattan and I were kindred spirits and our energies matched, or something. 

And yet, no place invoked that line of questioning more strongly than DC, where “What would it like to live here?” became “What would it be like had I stayed?” And so it is – nostalgia for the past trumps nostalgia for futures imagined, no matter how bright those futures seem.

DC caused such a strong reaction that I literally cried about it. Luckily, it wasn’t the snot-filled, red-faced, bawling type of cry, but rather the silent kind characterized only by a few fat drops that roll so slowly down one’s cheeks as to make you wonder if even the tears are too sad, too lethargic, to make any real effort.

It had been building for a while.

As our plane descended into Northern Virginia, we flew over lush green fields of farmland hedged by thin, winding slivers of interstate, nearly empty at this early morning hour. I thought of other early mornings on the Interstate after weekends away from the Beltway, listening to NPR, coffee in hand, feeling just as care-free as those car ads always promise. How long ago it all seemed now! I felt my breath catch and a knot form deep in my chest; in that moment, I could not remember why I had ever wanted to leave the United States. 

But the tears didn’t come then.

No, they waited for a more public space to make an appearance: the baggage claim. Carousel number 4 at Dulles’ International Arrivals Hall, to be exact. As the carousel hummed to life, I could feel that tightness dislodging from my chest – slowly, slowly, slowly – until finally one tear and then another spilled out of the corners of my eyes.

I was thinking of something my mother had once told me. Before I went to Afghanistan for the first time, she said, “You know that you can’t go back to a normal life after an experience like this.” At the time, her prediction was premature, and I brushed it off. I didn’t want to “go back” anyway. I didn’t want the normal life. In fact, much the opposite; many my life decisions have been driven largely by a deep desire to avoid normalcy.

But in that moment, in front of baggage claim, I no longer knew what I wanted, and the thought that I could not go back scared me. As was recently written in a blog post widely shared by expats…

“…you look at your life, and the two countries that hold it, and realize that you are now two distinct people. As much as your countries represent and fulfill different parts of you and what you enjoy about life, as much as you have formed unbreakable bonds with people you love in both places, as much as you feel truly at home in either one, so you are divided in two.”

I was hit by a deep nostalgia – for the life that I had lived before I left; for the life that part of me still hoped to return to; and for the lives that I would be missing, now, no matter what country I was in. 

Dubai

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It is morning in Dubai, and I have been up since 04:30. I watched the sun rise over a sliver of marina, the light hitting the deep turquoise of the water, the gleaming white of the yachts, and the glittering glass of the tall buildings on both sides. I’m on the 16th floor – out of about 30 – in a luxury apartment building that belongs to a friend in Kabul, and even from “down here” the views are spectacular.
I’m in Dubai for just over 24 hours to get my visa back to Afghanistan, and then I head to Baku, Azerbaijan for the UN’s Internet Governance Forum.  I didn’t expect to like Dubai. Everything about this city is the antithesis of Kabul. I love history and culture and localization and even chaos, and Dubai is modernity, efficiency, globalization, and consumerism.
That Dubai is so close to Afghanistan – and to all of the other headline-making conflicts in Africa and the Middle East – is incredibly disorienting. A short 3.5 hour flight, and you leave the endless dust and fecal-matter-coated sky of Kabul; the burqas and the distinct discomfort of being a woman; the pockmarked roads and the ditches (I fell into another one on Saturday); the crashed cars from all over the world that get a second life in the streets of Afghanistan; and the constant presence of cheap weapons and the cheap men that wield them.
 –
On the way to Kabul International Airport, I felt incredibly sad to be leaving. It was silly, since I’d be back in Afghanistan – Kandahar, to be exact – in a week. But I missed this strange place, and it did not help that I was leaving in the dark of night.
But the flight from Kabul to Dubai is always in the early morning, and so the leaving of Kabul is almost always done while the sky is still dark, the streets are empty, and your only companion is the haunting melody that floats over the mosque’s loudspeakers. That, and the armed men, though even they seem less threatening in the sleepy pre-dawn.
I regretted my last-minute decision to attend the conference in Baku. As great of an opportunity as the IGF will be, there are still so many places in Afghanistan to visit, so many people to meet, so many interviews to conduct. Besides, I had just started Dari lessons, and finally was beginning to pick up on conversations around me.
–
My first impression of Dubai was of the heat. I was wearing a black turtleneck sweater dress over black jeans (jeggings, to be precise), a black coat that skimmed my knees, and a blue floral headscarf that an ex-boyfriend’s mother had brought for me from Kashmir. Appropriate outfit for Kabul, not so much for muggy Dubai, where women from all over the world descended with their 4″ heels, designer bags, and tight, tight clothing. Is that cleavage, really? Her ass is hanging out of her jeans! How is this still the Middle East?
It was not until I “acclimatized” a little that I realized how much I actually missed all of this. That feeling came as I was walking through the food court of the Dubai Mall with a new friend from the Afghan Embassy, though it had been building as we drove through the new freeways past villas and skyscrapers and a remarkable amount of green space for a city that rose out of the desert.
“Do you want Pizza? KFC? Burgers?” He asked.
“I want something local,” I responded. “Is there a local fast food?”
He laughed. In a city where the population is almost 90% foreign, what could I expect? We settled on Iranian fast food that was not very fast at all. It tasted just like Afghanistan’s, though my kebab was of shrimp instead of lamb.
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I feel guilty that after just a month in Afghanistan, I could want all of this. I thought I was tougher. I have always prided myself in my ability to adapt and to get off the beaten expat path. But sitting here now – in the most comfortable (and the largest!) bed I’ve slept in since leaving the U.S., in this apartment with its full wall of windows, in this city that is global in every sense of the word – part of thinks that I could get used to this.
But at the same time, I can’t shake this growing suspicion that I am just an outsider looking in, and that this world – this normal world – no longer belongs to me.