I Have Iraq in My Shoe (33 page)

She began telling me things she saw ahead for me, but I was impatient to get to the Awat issue. She finally pointed to his photo and said, “You have a very special connection with him, but it is not romantic. It is almost as if you want to take care of him, to teach him things.”

She was really good.

“I’m not saying this because of the age difference, but it’s as if you want to mother him.”

Ew, no.

“This is not the man for you. He is very special, yes, but you need someone who has had more life experience; someone who is more spiritually…you see what I’m saying?”

I actually did. She was making sense.

She continued, “You have a very old soul, with a lot of life experience in your consciousness, and although you connect with people, and you’re busy, busy, I’m also getting that you’re very popular, but there is a sense of loneliness. There is a theme within your consciousness, which is lonely. You haven’t found anyone on your mental, spiritual, intellectual experience, so he could be younger or older, but no one is on that wavelength, because you’re a very old soul; you need someone who has depth.”

She asked me what I did to unwind, to have me-time, and I explained, “Well, I actually do a lot of me-time stuff. I write…,” and here she said, “Perfect, we’ll come back to that, because I know you said you were a teacher, but for me you are a writer, you write, you are published, la la la la la, everything. The first thing I saw when you sat down, there was a book over your head.”

I had not said one word about writing. I didn’t mention my copywriting, I didn’t mention my blog writing, and I didn’t mention the book I had begun to write about the Iraq experience.

Holy crap.

She would say “la la la la la” either as conversation filler or when she could sense I wasn’t really fully understanding what she was talking about. Like when she said I was a time traveler, and my eyebrows involuntarily raised a bit. She went through the rest of the hour telling me intriguing things and making suggestions on how I could clarify issues in my life, but I was still fully hung-up on the love question.

If not now, when?
When will this happen for me?
Tish Durkin met her great, glove-fitting love in Iraq. Why couldn’t mine be there too?

Sahar went back to Awat’s photo and said, “This is not your guy. I don’t mean that he’s shallow, but when you play a piano, you want to be able to play all the keys. With this man, you would just be playing one octave. I don’t think you have met your match yet in this lifetime.”

She paused and said, “Here, help yourself,” and handed me a box of tissues. She said she saw me being “completely settled” in life (career, love) in the next eight years.

Eight years? God, that was so far away.

I believed Sahar and was completely on board and had no doubt she was right when she said I would meet The One in the next few years.

“You have nothing to worry about; I don’t see any conflict as far as religion or culture. He will be very grounded, a very old soul connection; you’ve missed each other through several lifetimes…”

I was sobbing uncontrollably at this point. She was right; there had been a sense of loneliness, for quite some time. Before I met Awat I had doubted I would ever meet anyone I was both attracted to and felt a strong connection with. I had probably piled all my expectations onto that thin thread of a connection, without stepping back to ask myself if it was really all I was imagining it to be.

“There will be a beautiful man for a partner, you will want for nothing.”

Could you maybe give me a little more information, though? A hint, like what color hair does he have? Or, what city does he live in? An email address?

I had arrived at Sahar’s out of breath and apologizing and was leaving the same way: out of breath from crying and apologizing for using an entire box of her tissues. I later discovered I had been PMSing, which excused some of the crying. Not all of it, just some.

I exited Sahar’s flat in the dimming light of the late afternoon and turned south onto Edgware Road to walk back to my hotel, breathing and moving slowly, trying to absorb everything I had just been told. By the time I reached Oxford Street, my emotions had wrung themselves out, and I was able to laugh at the fact that Edgware Road was almost entirely composed of Middle Eastern businesses and restaurants, including one called Slemani (yet another spelling of Sulaimani). Now that was cosmic humor at its best.

For Christmas, I gave British Airways $150 in luggage fees. Now
I
am Santa. How was it possible that, after all my research and planning and weighing and packing and weighing and repacking
and my Balanzza
, I had to pay overweight luggage fees on my way back to Iraq yet again? How, I ask you!

Remember when I was all excited about Viking Air, the far more reasonable alternative to Austrian Airlines with their outrageous $1,400 round-trip flight and stupid incongruous twenty-kilo maximum allowance? The sticklers at the London-Gatwick Viking Air counter made certain I did not travel unscathed.

And I try to give Stickler my small Tumi duffel that most certainly does fit into the overhead compartment:

Stickler was telling me that the purse I was carrying, the one that was slung over my shoulder in purselike fashion, was “too big to be a purse.” I wanted to tell her that her teeth were too big to be teeth, but there they were, sticking out of her gums, barely being covered by her lips. I was fuming, as not only was I struggling with the mild language barrier of the American “carry-on luggage” versus the British airline parlance of “hand luggage,” but Stickler was now dictating what constituted “purse” versus “hand luggage.” If I had my druthers, and a decent Internet connection, I would have directed her to the online website where I purchased my “hand luggage,” and she would find it listed under “purses.”
^*

So I had to check both my overweight suitcase AND my small Tumi duffel, which should have been my carry-on bag, or hand luggage. All in all, my extra baggage weight totaled ten kilos (twenty-two American pounds). I was instructed to go over to the now-all-too-familiar counter, where I would pay the airline extortionists. I should have at least received some sort of frequent-overpacker punch card.
One more punch and you’ll receive a Balanzza luggage scale! What? You already have one? Then how…never mind.
The nice British man, who was not employed by a particular airline and therefore was not a legitimate candidate to bear the brunt of my rage, checked his computer screen, then my slip of paper, and ruefully informed me that each extra kilo costs 10 pounds sterling. So, I had to pay 100 pounds ($150) because my purse was apparently not really a purse.
Chloé doesn’t make hand luggage!
I wanted to scream at Stickler and her mouthful of piano keys, while I was simultaneously screaming at myself:
Oh my God, when will I learn to travel light?

Probably never. This just continued to happen, and yet I persisted in packing heavy bottles of “special” mouthwash (Crest), which I could not get in Iraq, and heavy bags of “special” trail mix (Trader Joe’s Sweet, Savory & Tart Mix), which I also could not get in Iraq. Not to mention the shoes I had been partial to lately were of the platform variety, and the platforms weighed roughly three times what normal shoes weighed. Heavy shoes. BLAAT! Gatwick didn’t have an Xpress Spa.

On the flight into Erbil I had the aisle seat. The middle seat remained unoccupied, and a Kurdish man sat at the window. As usual, I was polite but not friendly to the other men. Friendliness was too often mistaken for wink-wink, wakka-wakka, and I preferred to be thought of as slightly bitchy as opposed to the hooker alternative. The flights were mostly men, with the occasional hijabed wife and screaming child thrown in for good measure. I had been polite to my seatmate, had reminded the flight attendant that neither of us had received dinner rolls like everyone else, and had helped him pass his garbage to the flight attendant after the meal.

My shiny, new
Elle UK
magazine was resting in the vacant middle seat as I stifled cackling laughter while watching an episode of
30 Rock
on my iPod. I was interrupted by a finger poke from the seatmate and looked over in his direction. He was looking at me expectantly and motioning to my
Elle
magazine, which had a heavy-lidded Kate Hudson gazing at us from under pastel-hued eyeshadow. I finally understood that seatmate was asking if he could look at the
Elle
magazine.

There was little to no chance that this guy was at all interested in celebrating “25 Years of British
Elle
!” Or “Fashion Graffiti!” Or seeing how Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana create sartorial magic in their Milanese studio.

I immediately soured; our prior pleasant airplane olive branch was thrown out the emergency exit. He wanted to perv on my magazine. I shot him a disgusted look, spat “No,” and shook my head violently before grabbing the
Elle
and tucking it safely into my purse under the seat in front of me.

I was being unfair. My American male coworkers had also asked me if they could have the fashion magazines when I was finished. I had laughed and called them perverts. My tolerance did not extend to the Middle Eastern men. I just knew they had been raised differently.

Women were all whores. Never trust a woman.

A week before leaving Iraq to go back to the United States for Christmas, I had planned out my return and prepared (or rather, tried to prepare) Dadyar for my airport pickup. I was to be arriving at an awkward time, just after midnight, in the early hours of December 31. This would have been confusing to the average bear, which meant I needed to take extra pains to explain it to Dadyar.

I printed off a page calendar of the month of December and drew a circle in the space between December 30 and December 31. I held the page up in front of Dadyar and said, “I am arriving
after midnight
on December 30, so technically
very, very, very early
on December 31.” I also printed out my flight details, which listed the flight number and flight arrival time, as 00:20, December 31. Dadyar glanced at the papers and, with a dismissive wave of his hand, said, “You call me, I come.” I said, “Yes, but it’s important to me that you understand
when
to come,” and I went over the calendar and the flight details again. I did not feel confident about his comprehensive skills.