Ammanophile

I’m back.
Home, more or less.
And I love it.

All the little things you neglect to notice after a while of living in one place, are all apparent again, giving me a strange feeling of belonging and making me smile.
First and foremost (just in time for my first waking-up this morning): the ever-repeating melody of the gas-van, sometimes annoyingly loud and close, then again soft and distant, as he makes his way through the neighbourhood, selling his highly subsidised, bottled gas. Then, once I had unpacked, showered, dressed and opened my front door: the cold gentleness of Amman’s winter and the cool of its sunshine; wind-torn clouds in a sun-bleached sky and the omnipotent call to prayer, giving regularity to the passing of days, like a giant clock set not to Greenwich Mean Time, but to a world-wide religious rhythm emanating from Mecca.
And as I go for a stroll in my neighbourhood: the sprawling housing projects everywhere (all looking nearly exactly the same) and the wastelands between them; the sheer randomness with which these housing projects seem to spread over the bare, rolling hills of Amman; the near-total absence of trees in between the blocks of houses, giving it a kind of Wild West look; giant and ugly black water containers on every rooftop; children chasing each other in the street or throwing stones at a cardboard box; two people next to a building site arguing with raised voices and mighty gestures, hands up in the air, periodically pointing to the One above, only to embrace each other in agreement minutes later; the nosiness of three young lads, who halt their stroll in the middle of an empty suburban crossing only to stare at me unabashedly, their heads turning nearly 180º as I walk past; the fear of burglary that makes people bar even their 4th floor windows; and again – the wastelands in which you will always find – among huge boulders spread over rubble, rubbish and dust – a lonely, single shoe, forever separated from his other half…
…though after seeing a dozen of those within a few hundred meters, one does begin to imagine that maybe one day, when a bulldozer bulldozes over the wasteland that has become their involuntary home, to turn it into yet another 4-storey apartment block, that maybe then – as masses of rubble and dirt are moved and re-moved – a lonely left half of a pair of fake adidas trainers will – for just a second – be reunited with its forlorn right half, and their laces touch in the midst of this earthquake between layers of waste in motion – until a rotting cardboard egg-tray and a half-empty sack of Saudi cement come between them, separating them again, maybe for the rest of time.