i keep thinking the future will swallow me

between warm milk and honey, my dysregulated nervous system and a city that does not stand still

Abu Dhabi is the city where I grew up. Returning means I confront its restlessness and my own.

I have been circling a wound I would not name. Some days it throbs at the back of my neck, in the shallow breath of my anxiety. Or I see it reflected at me in the mirror. Other days, it appears in my silence, in my inability to produce, the way I measured myself against the pace of a world that does not stop moving. My nervous system has synced to algorithms and the demands of the market.

My mind mistakes rest and stillness for failure. My nervous system, accustomed to its own precarity, no longer knows where the energy of its unrest is meant to go. The precarity does not dissolve into thin air; it permeates every fiber of my being. Shame became the scaffolding of my life as I became ashamed of my anxiety, the way it holds me upright as it presses downwards. And so, I first felt the wound in time, or rather its absence. The calendar that held me together dissolved, and I found myself staring into days that could not be filled, no longer knowing what day of the week it was.

This is not a confession, nor a search for redemption. It is an excavation of how shame has become a backbone, a hum, an inheritance. I want to pull it from the soil, strand by strand, to ask what kind of afterlife can grow in its place.

And I am back in Abu Dhabi. Returning here has never been simple. That is why I can never write this city. I do not return as if I never left. I meet Abu Dhabi in the confines of its ruptures. The restructuring of streets, empty plots of land where buildings stood, new landmarks that seem to have appeared overnight, and the absence of familiar faces that have moved away. I spent almost a year researching and writing about the disorientation of living in a city that changes faster than memory can settle, culminating in my master’s dissertation on urban nostalgia in Abu Dhabi. That work, although not strictly personal, deepened my wound. Every time I wrote about belonging, something slipped. And every time I write about memory, something burns.

I did not think my arrival would be easy. But I am unable to retrieve the dreams I once had here. And is that not what cities are made of, an overlay of dreams and memory, superimposed one on top of another, until they forget what they were meant to hold, or hide?

And what is a city without a dream? A possibility made impossible.

Perhaps what I hate most about this city is that it mirrors me in its own restlessness, in its constant urge to become, and refusal to simply be. This city is a map of tomorrow or a memory of yesterday, never a moment of today.

The city builds and rearranges as if permanence can be forced into existence, as if the next tower or development might anchor what is always slipping, be what was always missing. I, too, have lived this way, measuring myself by what I may produce, by who I might still become, by the scaffolding of imagined futures, and futures foreclosed. This city is never finished, and neither am I. We are both afraid of obsoletion and finitude.

Why do I ask for recognition from cities? Why do I stand still on street corners expecting the pavement to know my footsteps? I do so, hoping that a place remembers, and perhaps then I would feel less transient. But when a city refuses to be my witness, the very proof of my existence, in its fracturing, razing, constant, daily, reinvention, I feel untethered. The darkness which follows is not a disappointment; it is a private indictment. If this city, which once was the city of my dreams, does not hold me, then perhaps I am unworthy of being held at all. That thought, too, is the root of my shame.

I feel this way even if I am still here. I behave as though I am in exile, when the only exile I have ever known is from my own memory. I act as though there is no homeland to hold me tightly, when it is not the case. I stopped asking my native Tunisia to remember me. I do not know why that is. Maybe I accepted its memory as intact, sealed, slouching towards a past that continuously distances itself from me. Abu Dhabi, by contrast, agitates my nervous system through its constant speculation. It promises a future that never seems to arrive, in which the city and I might finally have reached satisfaction with whatever it is we have become.

I live suspended between the fixity of memory and the instability of speculation. The wound flourishes in this suspension. Abu Dhabi’s future encroaches on my personal dissatisfaction. I keep thinking that if I cannot keep up with the speed of change, I too will dissolve into the architecture, become a dream embedded in a wall, saying nothing, imbuing warmth. I will never be content with feeling this way.

it is on days like these that i feel deeply troubled.

my dad makes me a drink with honey and milk to ease my anxiety. the panic attack came the way it wanted to, suddenly and with no apology. i ask my parents and sister if i am dying. my father asks if i am afraid of death. i answer truthfully and say yes. we drive to the emergency at half past midnight on a weeknight. we say nothing and listen to Quran on the radio.

“i think he is a sudanese man,” my father says.

they do maintenance on the highways at these hours of the night. the lights are yellow and fluorescent. the men are at work, though i cannot quite understand what exactly they are maintaining.

we cross the bridge to enter the mainland. many people are taking walks at almost one in the morning. there is no joy in me to enjoy the liveliness of this unlikely hour.

in the emergency room the lights are white and piercing. a man is hyperventilating. “give him panadol,” a voice instructs.

meanwhile, the doctor asks me if i am stressed. he says i may be experiencing muscular pain on the left side of my chest.

am i stressed? i am in transition. i do not know if my body is failing or staging a rebellion.

he checks my irises. a nurse comes in and takes my pulse. administers an ekg and a blood test. i wait forty-five minutes to get the results. i watch my father sleep uncomfortably on the chair.

the man’s hyperventilation turns into groans, growing louder by the minute. he says it is getting worse.

“morphine, 4mg,” the doctor orders

the man is crying. the sound of it fills the room. my father tells me to close my eyes and try to sleep. but i am thinking of the pain of a man whose face i cannot see.

he sighs, “that feels so good”

i wonder what it means for pain to leave so quickly, so thoroughly.

my chest keeps aching.

my father starts pacing around the room. the forty-five minutes of blood test result is coming to an end. another man comes in, occupying the space between me and the morphined man. he tells the doctor he came in because his heart was beating too fast. he says he drinks seven cups of coffee a day and vapes. the doctor tells him to cut down on his caffeine intake.

i want to tell my father i am sorry. for my panic. for my fragility. for who i have become.

walking out of the hospital, i hear the man hyperventilating again. the air is thick with humidity. the city hums quietly at this hour. moving slowly as i recollect myself.

we get home a bit before four am. my father tells me to go to sleep, i have work in a few hours.

and i wake up feeling as though my muscles are sliding off my bones, embedding me with the mattress. but i cannot let the bed pull me. and i do not.

i don’t know why it is the root of my shame that i feel as though i am in a perpetual struggle. i am trying to grow accustomed to the bouts of anxiety that take over my body at random times of day, in which i feel myself trying to escape the very flesh and bones that contain me. my heartbeat accelerates but my body lags behind. my thoughts are sharp but my movement delayed. my chest hurts. i readjust my back, trying to convince myself, for the fifth time today that i am safe.

and then i wonder - what was it that broke me? what was it that irreversibly changed the way in which i live my life? every word on this page feels like a laceration. i don’t want to tell you about this, but i have to.

i miss myself more than anything. i miss my sharpness. i miss not being afraid. I met someone who reminded me of myself from a few years ago. she made me long for that version, one that felt lighter, easier to love, more dependable for those i love.

and i think about death all the time. not as an end, but a pause. that, too, is a root of my shame. i am ashamed to live in a time where human life means nothing. i cannot separate that from the grief of witnessing a world that enables genocide, of watching entire lives disappear while i remain here, attempting to stay afloat with my dysregulated nervous system.

i do not want to be seen like this. but i cannot disappear when all i feel is guilt, for no longer showing up, for never becoming the version of myself i promised to be.

these days, if you ask me what i am afraid of, i will say death. but what i mean is that i no longer know how to move forward. my body lags behind. this is an exhaustion i cannot claim as solely mine.

---

So much of what it is I am trying to convey is about living in a body trying to survive its own intensity. Some of it is habit, some of it is inheritance, and the other is trauma, and the body carries all of it. I am learning to write while still holding a trembling thing, before it slips again. These days, I am wondering if belonging is not the small mercy of being able to name what can still hurt us, as opposed to the certainty of being known. I know how much mercy I draw from my heartbreak fora home that is irretrievable, whose past version is of another time. I do not know if that same home remembering will yield the same sense of belonging. There is more mercy in my remembrance. But nostalgia can no longer be the cure to my ailment; it is the ailment itself. I realized that my rumination on memory has become its own kind of stimulant, another veil I lay over reality to make it more bearable.

Lately, I have been withdrawing from the intensity of my own life. From the rush to produce, to perform calmly, to keep up. I’ve been cutting out stimulants: caffeine, nicotine, noise, the endless scroll, hoping that quiet could cure me. And I try to stop remembering, and to focus on the silence of the present. But the silence only made me see how my body had become a vessel for rupture, for everything I refused to feel. And then I realized my body was mirroring the ways the world insists I keep moving. The pressure for constant productivity is a product of capitalism and our neoliberal world, and I had internalized this way of life so deeply.

All it is that I have written to you is what remains after the chase of something that comes but never satisfies: a body that still trembles, a city that keeps moving, a mind that has forgotten how to slow down. I am trying to learn stillness without calling it failure, while watching cranes erect new buildings on vast expanses of sand. And I want to believe that stillness too is a kind of dreaming, one that believes that something whole can be made from all of this trembling.