I am sitting in the cafe courtyard. It is 4:23pm. Ambient music plays softly from speakers inside. There’s almost no one around. A guard sits idly cleaning his gun by the gate and French-Afghan women at the table next to me quietly curse the weak wifi signal.
I pour milk into my tea, watch it swirl.
My mind drifts to the pretty, probably doomed girl who writes angry songs and the colleague who came to work with the imprint of a rifle butt on his face. And then to what Qiam typed to me last night:
“You don’t know how many days I was kept in a dark room with no windows reading the Koran while Heckmatyar’s rockets were crushing my neighborhood.”
The music changes.
It’s not the light, oh no/I’ve changed my mind/I take it back/Erase and rewind.
Transitionland 