Maesia Farah
Bio
Stories (3/0)
An Ode to Mothers
Like many other little girls in the early 2000s my sister and I had fallen victim to the Jonas Brothers. Whether it was spending way too long in the magazine aisle at Duane Read reading teen magazines and deciding if the ones with the pull-out Jonas Brothers magazine were worth the $4.99 or sitting in our room listening to songs we illegally downloaded on Limewire, we were obsessed. Of course my sister went for the bad boy middle brother, Joe, while I was more into the younger sensitive type, Nick. Kevin was also part of the band but I’m convinced he was just there for optical symmetry. I’m not quite sure how my sister stumbled upon the information but she found out that on a random October day the Jonas Brothers would be performing at Six Flags of all places. Six Flags was in the state over and about a two hour drive from our house. This was before the smartphone, google map days. It was during those days that any road trip meant the risk of taking one wrong turn, casting the printed out Mapquest directions useless and subsequently trying to make sense of the contradictory directions collected from random pedestrians. With none of this responsibility to bear, my sister ardently begged my mother to take us to six flags on the day of the performance.
By Maesia Farah3 years ago in Beat
Public Displays of Grief
I remember all the family was meeting at my grandma's house for a special occasion. Must have been a holiday or just a random Tuesday in the little town outside of Damascus where nightly family gatherings in the courtyard were the primary form of entertainment. A majority of the folks were outside but all of the women had congregated in one room and I wasn’t sure why. When I went to inspect, I saw Khalto (Auntie) sitting on a chair sobbing. Her eyes were crying so hard they seemed like they wanted to escape her head. All the other women gathered around, consoling her. Immediately I walked out of the room and started to joke with my cousin who was playing it off like her mother was being ridiculous. She herself was probably experiencing the same pangs of hurt but didn’t want to feel the blow at the moment since, after all, it was her younger brother who had died when she was just a kid. I later found out through some murmurings that on the walk over Khalto had seen a child run into the street and get hit by a car which sent her into a flashback of her own son getting hit and killed by a car nine years earlier. The pain was so raw, so ever present and there was no hiding it.
By Maesia Farah3 years ago in Psyche
Boldly bald
For as long as I can remember the second thoughts in my head became too overwhelming to handle, I'd dig out a piece of my hair and hold onto it for dear life. I would take a strand like it was a flotation device thrown out to me at sea and aggressively start twirling. This type of self soothing was something that happened subconsciously and I never seemed to take notice until a classmate of mine pointed it out to me. We were in seventh grade and she asked me ‘why I twirled my hair like that’. I distinctly remember telling her I do it when I'm thinking. From that point on when she saw me twirling she'd ask me what I was thinking about more as a rhetorical question to point out that I was ridiculously twirling my hair again.
By Maesia Farah3 years ago in Viva