"do not walk by without pausing to attend to this rather ridiculous performance"

Letters to the Ether: S2, E8

I have been meaning to write you, but not much is coming in this confusing time of life. Here is something I meant to send you but completely forgot to leave in the mailbox. I wrote this the week of February 11, 2025, and revisited it the morning of June 13, 2025, as I listen to the sounds of war cross our skies… thinking of safer, less fearful, more loving times.

---

Dear whomever,

I’ve been Ubering to and from work these days. The last few months have been a series of nothing but disruptive life events, and I have grown oh so tired, in every sense. The human psyche can only handle so many small pinches, until it breaks. What a tiring year. What a painful collection of days.

At first, the Ubers were the result of an ear infection, a continuation of the illness that first took me early January. My doctor said it was better I didn’t drive, what with the dizziness. Even without the nausea, I’ve grown to enjoy the backseat of a strangers car, and especially the wait for him to arrive.

It goes like this: At 5:00PM, I leave the office and find a secluded enough place where I can let go of whatever mask I held onto throughout the day. I light a cigarette. I order the Uber. As my music plays in the background, I think about how cold it is, and how stupid I am for not wearing a jacket. I notice how the sky looks, and realize the clouds are back - obviously - and how stunning I find them to be; somehow there is always a renaissance painting, just upwards, waiting for you to notice it. The people passing by smile or laugh or frown or argue, and I remember that I am people, too. That I am human, as well. I often get caught up in the routines, in the upkeep that comes with being alive, that I forget: I am breathing. What a miracle.

I need to get out more. Not to restaurants, not to parties, but to the world. It seems that I have simply been picking and dropping myself into different, enclosed sections, and forget to realize I am a small, tiny particle inside a forever-moving myriad of cells. House - car - office - house - car - office. I need to trip on my laces more, I need to bump into others more, I need to be forced to converse with strangers about stupid, nonsensical things.

I hate big talk, my friend once tweeted, years ago. It has stayed with me. Talk to me about the weather.

Once the Uber driver arrives, we may talk. About the weather, yes, or the traffic, or whatever comes to mind. Often, we do not, just hellos and thank yous and pinched smiles. The other day, my driver parked quite far away from where I was waiting and left his car to inspect something. I checked the license plate, the color, looking up down and down, up and down, phone-car-stranger, phone-car-stranger. Eventually, I stepped closer, and just blurted “Uber?”

He startled at my voice, and covered his face with his hand, both frustration and embarrassment painting his features. He nodded.

“Did someone hit your car?” I asked.

“Yes, and he left. He ran.”

“I’m so sorry,” is all I managed to respond, and he laughed, in that way you laugh when something terrible happens, you know, when the world has been so horrible to you, it almost feels like a practical joke. An episode of Prank’d. I could feel his frustration in the air between us, and decided in advance that I had to tip him well.

We discussed the situation during the ride, joking a bit together. He’d just gotten a new side mirror a few weeks ago, and the runaway car had hit it. His mannerisms were just like anyone’s who would have to get through a work shift while experiencing an onset of sudden emotions. I didn't think the mirror looked too bad, but he was bummed, and rightly so. I told him my high school friend had the same car, and the side mirror was consistently hit, destroyed, mangled. Maybe something about the design? Maybe they are too wide, too susceptible to damage.

“It doesn’t matter.” He shrugged. “I could get proof he hit me from the cameras, but the problem is he’d go to jail, and I would feel bad.”

I thought of how small, in the grand scheme of things, a side mirror with a slight dent in it was, though for him, in that moment, after whatever series of events he has been through, it was the cause of a terrible day. What was most painful was the lack of acknowledgment: “I was ready to forgive him,” he’d said to me, nothing but a boy man not-much-older-than-I, with a clean beard and buzzcut hair. He was handsome, well-dressed - just doing his job. “I would have just let him go. I don’t get why he ran.”

What he wanted was an apology, in the end. An admission: that a pain was inflicted, that a mistake was made. The stranger ran off instead, fear overtaking whatever bond keeps us humans connected. It made me think of myself, of so many of my actions, and how my first thought has always been to flee the scenes of my destruction. I am always logging the location of the escape route, always scanning for the emergency exit.

Would I apologize to someone, after hitting their car? After disrupting their day? I try to put myself in the other drivers’ shoes. Maybe this habit of mine is the most disruptive to my psyche, the seeing-things-from-their-eyes. I remember once I backed into my neighbors car, resulting in the loudest thud but no palpable damage I could see. I rang their doorbell three times with no answer. I sat on the steps, in the hot sun, not knowing what to do. I inspected the cars, again, and the clock kept ticking. Eventually, I left, with the knowledge that I would run into them soon and explain myself: just let them know. To be honest, I never have gotten to it.

“I’m sorry,” I said once again, to the person to whom I’ve inflicted no harm, though the words meant nothing, coming from me, because they were meant for someone else. Maybe this is why I apologize for things I shouldn’t apologize for: to make up for the times I haven’t.

---

It’s been nice to be a passive spectator of the world, rather than someone adding to it. To be driven instead of driving, to watch instead of commenting. The small acts of human kindness bring me back to life, and these days, I need the electricity. I suppose this is why I like walkable cities, trains, bus stops. I get to see humans interact with one another - I love to see couples holding hands, or running their palms against each other, I love to see toddlers paddling after their mothers, I love to see people trying to smile and say thank you to passerby’s while also taking a phonecall. I don’t know. Just do.

The illness has stayed with me. My body is tired, and occasionally, my ear bubbles or itches or gifts me with an onset of pain. Like everything else, it reminds me of a past experience - of a long-ago time, and that flashback to what-once-was is what hurts the most.

I’ve struggled with my ears my entire life - I’ve been on more series of antibiotics that I can count, having been prescribed with relentless inner-ear infections, which felt never-ending, until eventually my aunt taught me something that finally brought me more relief than any doctor, or any painkiller: a few drops of warmed olive oil.

I cannot explain to you the torture of the ear pain. It began as an itch, which grew stronger with each moment, and it went on for years. It felt like an insect was moving around in my head, taunting me on a never-ending loop. Specialists, doctors, you name it, they would look in with their little light and say, “There’s nothing.”

My mother often philosophized that the ear pain was just a physical manifestation of my inner turmoil - of my sadness. To this day, she still claims, “You get sick when you’re stressed,” and though it could be true, it still doesn’t explain why the pain would linger, even through my good days.

I would stay up with this itch that turned, slowly, into a burn: I would have to dig my nails into my skin to keep from the urge to poke some sharp thing into it, to just finally pull out whatever it is. There are times I’d beg the exhausted ER doctor that I woke from sleep at 3AM, for anything other than their usual Nothing, but no one was ever able to give me an answer, just shrugging their shoulders at my mother, who tried once again to convince me I was overthinking it through a yawn. Just try to relax, Amal. Nothing in the world is worth your anxiety.

Thankfully, the pain itch which danced around my brain has been absent for while, until I put off my flu shot a month ago and, like clockwork, like karma, caught some airborne virus. I was bedridden for two weeks, the first series of antibiotics failing, and then I was to and from the clinic for 3 IVs and 10 (!) shots in my ass, and then I was alive - briefly - for my birthday, luckily, until a few days later the nausea came to me. I was sitting at my desk at work when my ears closed, as though they’d suddenly imploded, and all noise ceased for a moment. You can’t imagine the fear I felt in that moment.

Back at the doctors, for the millionth time that month, I found myself pleading, in the same tone I’d used countless of times when I was younger: “Can you clean them?” there was a desperation in my voice, a sort of childlike edge to it. Fix it. Just relieve me of this pain. There’s something in there, I know it.

I have always been certain my ears are dirty, clogged, ruined, filled with little insects that have made it a home. I wonder, sometimes, if the pain hasn’t gone but I have simply gotten used to it. But this doctor - a young man with a beautiful smile - says what they have always told me: “Your ears are clean.” This one, noticing my frown, adds, “It’s actually impressive - how clean they are.”

Another IV - I can take it like a champ, now - and then I sit back on the sterile bed, and feel the cold enter my veins. He comes back with a series of advice and another needle for a blood test, blabbers some doctor things about white blood cells and low iron, and then I’m home again, moving only from the couch to the bathroom to the bed to the Uber to work, and the cycle continues.

---

In the backseat of my chosen strangers’ car, I can really see how the city has changed since I was a girl. What I missed most about Amman during my stint in America was how small it was: how cozy: how familiar. I remember looking up in the States, and feeling, somehow, that the sky was further away than it had been - I felt smaller. In Amman, the sky feels the perfect distance away. And everything… everything reminds me of something else.

These days, the way I think tires me.

The office I work at is across the street from the place I bought my car from: I can still see my 20-year-old self’s wide, shocked smile at how my mother managed to make it work on one lone paycheck. The street leading to my apartment is the same as the one I walked across with my best friend in ninth grade, I can still hear her laugh echoing through the streets. There, a memory, here, a memory, though these days I’m tired of remembering and wish I could just snap out of autopilot and start living. I am only ever comparing backwards. There is comfort there. There is familiarity, you see: the ear pain is the same as before to me, the city is the same, the streets signifying one thing and nothing else, nothing new. The only thing that reminds me the world is an endless line forward and not a circle, is strangers. I keep forgetting that there are strangers, that there are people I am left to meet, that there are plenty of things I still haven’t seen.

These days, I am beginning to feel claustrophobic: there is no space left for new things. There is no room for newness. I begin to understand why everyone was so against my coming back to Jordan: it is a dead-end. Perhaps a combination of the thinking and the people and me.

But I had to realize that for myself.

And it was easier to do so in an Uber, with a new, fresh person to study. Without the confines of my car, I wait for them in various areas. Before arrival, I buy cigarettes from an outgoing man, who gifts me a lighter. I pull cash from the ATM, waiting behind a smiley woman.

I do not regret my decisions, no, though so much of the rose-colored tint has lifted. I guess, sometimes, you must go back to where you were to understand how far you’ve come. You see, the supermarket I used to visit with my best friend was also the supermarket I used the bathroom in before her funeral, and now it is the supermarket I buy groceries from. It is changed, aisles are different, they’ve added extra square footage, the check-out lanes have moved. But despite all this, I still see us, young, bright, and giggling, as we make our way through the store.

Often, I get lost in it: in the memory: in the past. But now, I try to see how far things have come. The bad, and the good. Amman is a diary entry I’ve rewritten time and time again. Maybe it’s masochistic of me. But maybe some part of it is beautiful, too.

Until next time,
Amal

---

Things I consumed whilst writing this:

• A YouTube video, by the beautiful Emmy van Deurzen: Growing strong in times of disenchantment and despondency.

• My well-loved playlist breath of fresh air.

• Invitation, a poem by Mary Oliver

Thank you for reading, for being here with me. You can email me at amaalkis@gmail.com anytime to really become my penpal.

You can also support me more than you already to by buying me a coffee, or upgrading to a paid subscription.

<3