My Memory Is an Editing Room That Never Sleeps

Sometimes the film begins before I wake up. I open my eyes and find someone standing inside my head, in exactly the same place they stood a year ago, or five, or ten, saying the same sentence, moving their mouth in the same way, while I watch them again from the angle of my own eyes. We reach the moment when I went silent, and this is where someone in the editing room interferes. The footage is pulled back a few seconds and I am given another chance, one that life never gave me. This time I say the right thing. My voice is steady. I do not hesitate. Every word lands where it should, like a chess piece moved by someone who already knows how the game ends. The scene finishes and I feel nothing, so I play it again. I change the sentence. I raise my voice slightly, then lower it. I become sharper, crueler, more dignified. By the fifth version I am angry with the other person; by the sixth I am mostly angry with myself. Eventually I remember that the conversation ended years ago and the person on the other side has probably forgotten it completely, while my brain is still producing a Director’s Cut of a scene nobody asked to see again.

I may have been doing something similar since I was very small, long before I understood memory, editing, or even time. I carry images from when I was two or three that are so clear I have sometimes suspected I invented them. I can see my mother carrying me and buying me biscuits. I can see the weekly journey to the doctor when I had severe pneumonia, with an injection waiting for me at the end of it. I remember walking into the chicken coop in our village, taking an egg, and carrying it to my grandmother. For years I assumed this scene had somehow been planted in my head by a story someone told me, until I asked my mother and she confirmed that I really used to do it. My memory has kept an egg I carried more than thirty years ago, yet a person can introduce himself to me three times in the same week and, on the fourth meeting, find me smiling warmly while desperately waiting for someone else to say his name. My memory has its own filing system. Faces, colours, gestures and eggs appear to have priority. Names are often still under review.

My second image of my grandmother is much quieter. She is lying on a bed in the middle of a room in my uncle’s house, covered in white, and I think she is sleeping. We leave the room and I see my mother crying for the first time in my life, so I cry because she is crying. I do not know what has happened to my grandmother. I do not yet understand how a person can be there and then suddenly become part of the past. Later, my mother and I sit on the side of a hill. The day is hot, the sky intensely blue, and the plain stretches below us like a vast green piece of fabric. She tells me that my grandmother will not come back. I cannot remember what I said, or whether I understood the sentence at all, but I remember the sky. Perhaps this is why I have always trusted images more than words. Words slip away; a blue sky can stay inside the head for more than thirty years, even when the thing that happened beneath it was death.

I watched everything. My siblings, my parents, the neighbours, the street. I stored tiny changes as if someone had secretly employed me to monitor the entire neighbourhood and expected a weekly report. I knew who had bought a new shirt, who had received a good mark at school, who had repainted the front of their house, who had married, who had fallen in love, who had hit his son, who had entered a house and come out wearing a different face. Perhaps this is why I loved *Bridgerton*, and Lady Whistledown in particular. I recognised the occupation immediately: moving quietly among people while nobody quite understands how much you see, collecting stories, glances and small scandals, then disappearing somewhere to write them down. My version was considerably less elegant. There were no gowns, no aristocratic balls and no secret printing press; I had a street, houses pressed against one another and a memory that did not know when to stop recording. Had I known how to write then, I might have opened a notebook with **Dearest Reader...** and announced that someone had bought a shirt that did not suit him, that someone else was in love long before she admitted it, that there had been a fight in the house across the street, and that my mother was angry even though she insisted she was fine.

I watched our home in the same way. I knew how the walls seemed to change when we were alone, how everyone became slightly more civilised when guests arrived, how voices shifted when people became aware of another pair of eyes in the room. My eldest brother usually began his fights with sound. A voice would rise, then rise again, and I would know that something was coming. Sometimes I left for another room; sometimes I froze and watched. I was never afraid that anyone would hit me. I was loved by my parents and my siblings, and I knew it. Still, standing outside the centre of a storm does not necessarily keep you dry. I kept watching, letting one scene after another enter my head, and years later I discovered that the archive I had been building was not nearly as silent as I had thought.

The brother whose voice frightened me eventually became a peaceful man who played the oud. His wife became one of the closest people in my life, someone in whom I sometimes found the outline of a second mother. I like the way memory keeps contradictions without asking us to resolve them. A person can shout in one room and play music in another, and both versions remain true. Our house was more musical than I understood at the time. My sister sang with a naturally sweet voice she never trained, and I remain convinced, with the shameless bias of a brother, that she might have become famous if she had. My father played the rababa and the shababa, my brother held the oud, and the rest of us ate fruit and sweets while nodding solemnly to the rhythm, wearing that particular expression people acquire when they are so moved by music that ordinary smiling suddenly seems insufficient.

During Ramadan, the house seemed to multiply. The light grew denser, the colours brighter, and the smell of food began travelling through the rooms long before sunset, announcing that the day was almost over. My mother made kibbeh nayyeh and soup so consistently that I sometimes think the month itself would have failed to fulfil its religious purpose if either dish had been missing. I remember the clatter of spoons, the television, hands moving around the table, then that instant when waiting ended and noise returned to the house all at once. Afterwards came music and television dramas. I was about four when I watched *Hijrat al-Qulub ila al-Qulub*, and somehow I believed I understood love, pain and injustice. I felt genuine joy when the weak won and genuine sorrow when a character I loved was hurt. The theme music can still rebuild an entire room inside my head, complete with my sister’s voice, the smell of food, and a light whose intensity may never have existed outside my memory. Childhood had apparently set the saturation far beyond anything nature normally permits.

My father was a storyteller too. He told us about his adventures in Lebanon during the civil war, and inevitably arrived at the Christian woman who fell in love with him, whom he loved in return, before realising that his family would never allow them to marry. The story was good, but my mother’s reaction was better. The moment the Lebanese woman entered the narrative, something changed in my mother’s face, while my father continued with the artificial innocence of a man who knew exactly what he was doing. After roughly fifty years of marriage, with my father now in his eighties and my mother nearing seventy, they can still irritate each other with surgical precision. Some romances depend on flowers. Others depend on knowing exactly which button annoys the other person and pressing it occasionally just to make sure the system is still functioning.

Somewhere else in my childhood there was an entire world made of colour. Beautiful creatures, bright hair, impossible clothes, horses travelling across rainbows, mines from which colours were extracted, and dark moth-like beings who wanted to ruin everything. I was terrified of them and never told anyone. Whenever they appeared, I picked up a nearby toy and began playing with it, remaining in the room and listening to the television without looking directly at the screen, waiting for the scene to end. Then I would look up again, see that the colours had returned, and feel a relief my body still remembers. Many years later, when I was released from detention in 2012, one of the first places I wanted to see was the Old City of Damascus, perhaps because some part of me wanted to check whether the colours I had known before prison were still there.

I entered through Bab Sharqi and walked along the long street, stepped into the small mosque, then continued towards Tal‘at al-Zuhur and Bab Touma. Even now, writing the names of these places makes something move inside my stomach and intestines. I cannot decide whether it is fear or longing, and perhaps the body does not need to choose. I remember a shop selling handmade leather sandals, and I remember the location of a room belonging to an American man I knew when I was nineteen. He had come to Damascus to learn Arabic, while I wanted to improve my English. We each carried a small notebook for new words. We met through a dating app and eventually discovered that occasional sex could be a practical addition to language exchange, a pedagogical model that, as far as I know, Damascus University never formally accredited.

I cannot remember whether the café where we first met was in Bab Sharqi or Sarouja, but I remember his smooth pale skin, his strong arms, his blue eyes, and the two sugar cubes I dropped into my tea. He looked at the glass, then at me, and said, with sincere surprise, “You like sugar.” My memory deleted the address of the café and carefully preserved the sugar cubes. I have stopped questioning its editorial decisions.

The Damascus I found after detention had become pale. Security men everywhere, checkpoints, armed men, faces stretched tight as drumskin, every unfamiliar passer-by turning into a question. Fear had entered the bones and altered the way people walked, looked and spoke. I had gone looking for a city I loved and found a city looking suspiciously at itself. Later, when I left for Lebanon, I felt the colours begin to return. Then they disappeared again, sometimes for long periods. When I came to Germany, I wrote a piece in 2017 called *A Passing Wardrobe*, about a small grey room, the smell of mothballs, cold air entering my nose like needles, and a sky without sun. I summoned the sun of Damascus into that room and wrote about my body losing its weight, gravity changing, myself floating like a piece of cork in an ocean of thick oil. I did not know then that I would spend years returning to the same images: light, fog, colour, weight, floating.

Even in my dreams, I try to float. I jump and do not return to the ground when I should. The jump stretches, everything slows down, and my body becomes light, as if gravity has briefly forgotten my name. I love those dreams. Sometimes I miss them while awake, especially when thoughts and feelings arrive all at once and my body begins to feel too small for everything happening inside it. In waking life I often do the opposite of floating: I watch too closely. I sense people’s unease before they admit it, sometimes their anger before it appears, and my mind begins editing the future before the future has even arrived. A hand moves differently, an eye avoids mine, a silence lasts half a second too long, and suddenly I am building scenarios. Certain confused people remind me of children holding kitchen knives. Their intentions may be perfectly good, but one second of confusion can still leave blood on the floor, after which they stand there genuinely astonished, asking how it got there.

I have changed. These days, when I sense that someone is angry or upset, I ask them directly. What remains much harder is knowing what has happened inside me. I can read another person’s face in seconds, then need several hours to understand what one of their sentences did to my body. I leave the conversation and take it into the editing room. I place it on the table, turn up the sound, replay the footage, remove what I imagined, search for what I actually felt, and eventually I write. Writing has become something closer to a necessity than a hobby. Life rarely gives me enough time to understand myself while I am still inside the moment; the page waits. It does not interrupt. It does not change its expression when I say something embarrassing. It does not demand an explanation before I have one.

I think a great deal about love, friendship and desire, and I try to separate them the way one separates clothes after washing, only to discover that the colours have bled into one another. Sometimes I enjoy reading about hormones and neurotransmitters because there is a strange satisfaction in it: all the poetry, songs, jealousy, promises, triumphs and emotional collapse, and then science arrives and begins assigning chemical names to parts of the experience. For a moment, love slips from its throne. Then I remember a friend who disappeared from my life and find myself wondering how many kilometres he walked today through the fields of Normandy, what game he is playing now, what photographs he takes, whether grey has begun to appear in his hair, and the throne quietly returns to its place as if nothing happened.

There is also a melancholic part of me that follows me like a shadow, and shadows have the irritating habit of appearing only when there is light. When I become very happy, a small part of my mind begins anticipating the bad thing that will eventually arrive to restore some imagined cosmic balance. I know perfectly well that the universe does not maintain an Excel sheet tracking my weekly allowance of happiness, but the body is not always impressed by what I know. Hands become cold, the stomach tightens, appetite disappears; at other times the opposite happens and the body grows so warm that I feel capable of heating the person standing beside me. Hormones, neural signals, chemistry: knowing their names has never given me the control I once imagined knowledge would provide. Knowing the scientific name of the monster does not make its teeth any less sharp.

After the fall of the regime that had inhabited my nightmares for years, the dreams stopped. I used to dream that I had returned to Syria, lost my passport and documents, become trapped there, or been arrested again. I did not notice their disappearance immediately. One day I simply realised that I had not had one of those dreams for some time, and I felt that the colours had returned. Perhaps that is why I am still afraid of losing them. The child who looked away when the dark creatures appeared on television and waited for the rainbow to return is still somewhere inside me. The man I became knows that colour can disappear from a city, a room, a relationship, a body, and somehow, in ways we do not always understand, it can also return.

I write because I do not know what else to do with everything I have seen if I leave it piled up inside me in its original form. Writing lets me arrange the scenes into an order I can tolerate and give words to the versions of myself who did not have enough of them at the time. I do not know whether the person hidden inside a particular text will ever read it, and perhaps that is no longer the point. Someone else, a stranger in another country, might read a sentence and remember a conversation in which he remained silent, a mother he once watched crying, a room he was afraid of, or someone he loved without ever knowing which category that love belonged in. For a moment, his memory enters my editing room and the images overlap, and perhaps, on one of the screens, he recognises something that belongs to him.

The room is crowded now. On one screen my mother is preparing soup. On another my grandmother lies under white fabric. My father plays the shababa, my brother holds the oud, my sister sings. A brightly coloured horse runs over a rainbow. A man with blue eyes stares at two sugar cubes. Security officers stand in the Old City of Damascus. A child watches an argument and does not move. A cat called Sahm lifts his tail when I open the front door. A plant by the window has pushed out a new leaf. All of these things are happening at once, and I do not always know which screen to turn off and which one to let continue.

This is why I write: I choose one screen, turn up its sound, sit in front of it until I understand what I was looking at, then try to leave it where it belongs before I return to the world outside. The problem is that my editing room never completely closes its doors. Sometimes, while life is happening somewhere beyond them, I discover that I am still sitting inside, watching it.