On my way to class, a drunken man swung his fist at me. He either missed or was aiming for the air in front of me.

The people around me made nothing of it, and I crossed the road to campus. The man was white and wore a hoodie in summer.





I got dirty, dirty looks from my neighbors. They were old, white, and their wrinkles looked like ballsacks.

I won one of them over by the time I left Paris. I held the door open for her and we exchanged bonjours ever since.

Bad people are easy to impress too. They just want to feel appreciated.






Every day and every night I left on foot to a cinema house. I either walked the way or took a metro.

There was a homeless man I passed every day. I saw him regardless of where I went. If I took the right-hand side of the street, he was there. If I took the left-hand side, he was there.

Across the street, too, I’d see him. I once saw him coming up the stairs from a metro. He carried always a plastic cup filled with some sort of liquid. I know it wasn’t piss because I saw him once cross the road and urinate into a garbage bin at midnight.

I vowed to myself that I’d hand him a handsome 50 Euro note on my last day in Paris. I never did. I used the money to call an Uber to the airport.

I looked out the window and I never saw him again.




Around this time I wrote a short story about a man who beats up homeless people every night. And after the beating he takes them to a hospital and pays for all their expenses.

I don’t want you to think I wrote this because I hated my homeless man. I saw many homeless people in my time there, and I thought of this idea not out of hate.

I will say this, though, one time I tried to initiate eye contact with my homeless man. He pretended not to see me. I gathered he was altogether not a very pleasant man.




Around this same time I thought of writing a story called “I Want to Fall Inside a Tiny Fucking Hole.” It was about someone finding a hole in the middle of the ground and trying, through several days and with great effort, to fit themself into the hole. After a great deal of time the person manages it, submerged well inside the ground, but then they realize: that a hole isn’t a hole if something fills it.




I never wrote this story. In that same month there was a Kiarostami retrospective and I watched Taste of Cherry. The film follows a man searching for someone to bury him in the dirt after he kills himself. The movie made me cry, and I never felt so seen as a brown, and Muslim, face in the crowd. There was no point anymore in writing “I Want to Fit Inside a Tiny Fucking Hole.”






On my way to class, a drunken man swung his fist at me. He either missed or was aiming for the air in front of me.

The people around me made nothing of it, and I crossed the road to class.

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