Nothing

It's so peaceful here right now. I've eaten my dinner, watched a few episodes of the West Wing on Netflix, and am lying in bed, listening to the ticking of the clock. I'm bored. Yet in a few weeks I will be back in Reyhanli, back to sit with Syrian refugee students who come from a very different reality. They are the lucky ones, in a sense, because they escaped from a strange, dark world that frightens me. I don't pretend to understand it, unlike many people. I am not interested in experiencing it either. Not directly, anyway, but I will be asking them to write about it and in that way they will be taking me into that dark heart with them. We will talk about things for a bit, discuss what they've written and pretend we'll all be going home next year and make tearful promises. We might even attempt to make sense of all this.

Then, when the course ends, I will most likely be back on this same bed. I will have watched something mildly interesting, eaten, and then fallen asleep after trying to read. Then I will post a few messages from my phone and listen to the ticking of the clock.