This is to you, whom I’ve devoted every ounce of my critical thinking abilities and leisure reading towards for the past five months. I’ve only gotten to really “know” you recently, and it has been a hectic and tiring ride. You’re demanding, you know? The moment I met you on that warm summer morning in an Amman conference room, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy.
I have some news that may seem disappointing. For the next few months I shall resume my over-privileged New York liberal-arts-college-life. I will sit in wood-paneled classrooms and listen to ramblings on postcolonial theory. I will spend my afternoons in a ventilated dance studio trying to get back into shape rather than hunched over my trusty laptop in a smoky café. I will do something that defies my previous expectations of myself, with the hopes of refining my ideas of what it really means to “take care” — which, ironically enough, was often the last note in emails from friends, family and faculty while I studied in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
But I promise not to abandon, and never to forget. Please see this as a temporary pause of my physical presence in the midst of your chaos, rather than as an act of running away. I won’t do you any good if I don’t feel completely ready to pay you a second visit, which will come soon — maybe this summer? You only deserve the best of me.
And, to be honest I-P.C., you too have some shit to sort out while I’m gone.
I’ll keep writing and see you soon,
Daniel
