شكرا, thank you, my dear Arab friends for helping me survive this night. From Jordan to Egypt, from Tunisia to Mali. Even my Mauritanian friends Muhammed Muhammed, شكرا , just for posting your comment around 6:15 am. Otherwise my high fever wouldn’t let me stay awake and edit that article. I knew it wouldn’t be particularly good, but I was writing it with an only intention: to let them know that the whole ‘Muslim world (what’s that? as if somebody apart from the Pope still uses a term ‘Christian word’) is not set on fire because of the stupid movie.
شكرا for responding me around 2am though a day or two later. I admit I was cheating telling my deadline was supposed to pass a day ago. Yet شكرا for your after midnight responses, for the long night Skype calls simuntaneously from Cairo and elsewhere. شكرا for answering being already in Berlin: ‘Hey, I’m sorry, isn’t it too late to comment?’ شكرا for an opportunity to ask for a clarification in between 4:30 am and 5:30 am. شكرا for sending the father’s biography late at night from Palma de Mallorca. Friends do such things even when they’re on holidays. It’s never too late.
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شك for your support, inspiration and most importantly music which kept me awake. شكرا for the Yemeni blues, the Berber-Celtic melodies mixed with Israeli bassist Avishai Cohen
شكرا for my beloved Tuaregs. They usually remind about themselves exactly few minutes before an old friend from Mali, who contacts me regularly twice a year, writes: ”What’s up? Are you still awake?’
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شكرا for reminding me how the desert sounds there, where the water already starts.
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شكرا for the moment when my old laptop stucks and all the above mentioned melodies play at the same time creating a tune of already our common world.
شكرا for the late morning warning that the best Tunisian web-page www.nawaat.org, the web-page of my dearest friends was hacked, and the news “One of the Nawaat reporters is killed. # Ben Ali” was fake. If I believed in that even for a second I would not make it to write a word more that night. شكرا for giving me this opportunity to have you somewhere online – so far so close
شكرا for writing me close to 5am a thankful note for the ‘captured moments silent and nice as a stingray’. Doesn’t matter what it should mean. .
شكرا for not letting me fall asleep asking to help to find a cheap flight from Amman to Cairo (cause I supposed to have more experience in that). Apparently I do. Though the cheap flights from Amman to Cairo do not exist. Yet I concealed and didn’t tell about a common friend who knows a hacker (the one who is on our side) able to hack a web-page of any airline company in the world. Let this dream hacker be my own dream.
شكرا for the Michel Foucault quote that “As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of a recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end” posted around 6am.
شكرا for not letting me stop laughing at 7am at the sad news that ‘Pakistani man dies after inhaling fumes from burning American flags at anti-Islam film rally’. The Chinese are to blame for producing flags for all the countries from synthetic fabrics.
The next time I would live according to yours schedule.
Especially because I love to listen to the pray at 2:45am and wait for another one at 4:30am when the mosque is on the hill in front. Though I’m not a drinker I love to look how whiskey glasses dance being accompanied by voice of a muezzin.
The next time there wouldn’t be a need to accuse me of being ‘too lazy’ for going to bed and not watching a movie about an air shuttle explosion at 5am. Nobody cares I know it’ll take another 2 hours to set up a projector cause your artistic eyes can’t stand watching a movie without every single shade of red. I know nobody cares that it’ll take another hour to make the weird strangers get away from the sofa behind the wall which is supposed to be the screen. I am falling asleep not because I am tired, but because there are two absurd movies playing simultaneously in front of me. None of them I am able to comprehend. As well I do not understand which of them is real.
The next time I’ll again live according the rule we kept repeating every single day since early August: “I will sleep when I am back home, while now I am at…’
Doesn’t matter nobody else is aware that since then ‘back home’ means after September 25th. While back home there is somebody waiting whom I’d like to tell all those night stories with their colors, tunes, tastes and most importantly smell of anise.
The only think I’ll make differently next time – in order not to worry about my modest honorars – I’d ask the Red Bull for a sponsorship. Today I as well need a can in order to write a long awaited confession explaining what’s going on with me in Amman that even the taxi drivers here/there refuse to take money. My friends tell that ‘I put too little of myself into my writing’. I think I do too much. However I’ll give a try tonight.
By now I just can tell another شكرا by playing this melody with the most beautiful word I know in Arabic. ‘Leila’ means ‘the night’.
So Far, So Close 
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