A Short Walk Before Yemen

I felt my black wrap skirt swish against my knees and noticed the rhythmic bounce to my step as I walked through an unusually mild January night. The sky was pitch black and rims of delicately molded architecture met the night sky. New Hampshire Avenue was unusually bare.

I was going home, as I had so many times before. I lugged the weight of the day in my two bags, and I walked one step in front of the other, passing stragglers until I reached my door, turning one key and then another. My journey home tonight to a near-empty apartment made me wonder how to feel different. How many times had I walked to this bounce in my step, up and down New Hampshire Avenue? How many thoughts have run through my head -- feelings of independence, dependence, loneliness, claustrophobia, satisfaction, anger, guilt, frustration, bliss. Yet every walk up and down New Hampshire blends into another. I am giving my walk tonight a name, so that I will always remember it. I am memorializing it. It is called "a short walk before Yemen."

Because tomorrow I begin my journey across the world. Another one. The prospect has already rejuvenated my senses, something travel always does.

Tonight, I began my journey as I felt my skirt going back and forth, swish, swish, against my knees, and realized how foreign this feeling will become to me in the next two weeks. I will be covered from head to toe, so that nothing but my hands peak from the cloth hiding my body. I will try to fit in, although I never will. The women in Yemen -- I won't be with them -- because they will be swimming in large black cloaks. I won't be able to tell one from another, with only the slits of their eyes meeting mine. I won't be able to decipher one woman's swagger from an other's, or one's long arms from an other's short. They will be walking black enigmas, seldom seen.I will, no matter how hard I try, be their antithesis.

Or will I? If I cloaked myself, hid out underneath an oversized Niqab, could I understand more? I think I would just feel hot and irritated. But maybe I'd also feel repressed, imprisoned. Or maybe just the opposite. Maybe it would free me from the leering eyes of men who never see a woman's flesh, a woman's face, in public. Animals.

Whatever I wear, I will take from them this experience of putting myself somewhere totally foreign, and trying to identify, in some way, with what I see. I hope by being able to go to Yemen, I can bring back not stories of a failed state, harboring the world's most wanted "terrorists," but a story of women. I hope I can speak with some of these women -- through an interpreter, of course -- and begin to realize how it might feel to never have a skirt swish against my knees, to never freely walk by the ornate buildings on New Hampshire Avenue. Or much worse, to be married off at age 15, to have no access to contraceptives or a say in whether or not I want to have sex. I am picturing some of Yemen's most unfortunate.

But I digress. I will never understand this. As I much I see, as many people as I talk to, this is not something I will understand. But, inevitably, no matter how different we are, I'll understand something.

At least, I hope I can fit in just a little bit. It is only by melding that one can observe, and learn and grow. I am so lucky to have the chance to meld, to decipher one day from the next, by going somewhere else. Once again, I invite you to join me. Yemen.