How to miss Abu Dhabi
When I fly away I never look back but these past few months I've struggled to shake the desert’s soft sand and tough love.
There are 10 ways:
At your desk six months later, tender with longing for the white heat of a UAE afternoon. You loved touching your bedroom sliding doors in August to feel the sun cooking the tinted glass.
In memories of your garden and the cucumber plant that crawled out of its planter and onto the astroturf. Its tentacles searched for real Earth and you marveled at how fiercely life resists death in the desert.
While swiping through photographs from that rooftop pool where you listened in on a group of Irish school teachers sharing Tinder gossip. You wondered if they were talking about someone you knew.
On the floor of your kids’ bedroom in East Melbourne. Sitting in a fortress made of LEGO you asked what they recalled of Abu Dhabi. They told you it was hot and there were theme parks.
Whenever it’s wet, windy, and menacing. The rain makes you think of your Abu Dhabi year without rain. You miss wearing heels to dinner and laughing under dim lights, surrounded by women.
At the park outside the Docklands library next to a group of moms speaking Arabic. You think of the Syrian family that invited your husband and children to break bread with them at a downtown park. It felt like you all belonged there.
Along the raw fabric edges of the Abaya you got as a goodbye gift. If a fire broke out, you’d grab the passports, immunisation records and birth certificates, the wristbands your newborns were given at the hospital, and your Abaya.
In the daydreams you’re still holding on to, because you love to move around but hate to move on. You’ve lost count of the number of breakups.
At sunset, which is beautiful everywhere but also aching in the Arabian Peninsula. You saw yourself in its big orange glow. Towering over the highway every day after work, the sun refused to be ignored.
In suspended thoughts that haven’t landed yet. Like how the first sweet thing you ate there was gelato after James went forehead-first into a pole somewhere along Dubai Marina. The first thing that made you cry there was a man in a bad mood. The last sweet thing you ate there was dark chocolate soft serve from Mirzam at Qasr Al Hosn. The last thing that made you cry there was leaving.
This incredible call to prayer was filmed at Grampians National Park in Victoria, Australia.