Abdul Jabbar

The apartment smells different after eight weeks away. Dust has settled on surfaces nobody remembers leaving exposed, the air conditioning is straining against heat it hasn’t touched in weeks, and there’s a pile of mail wedged under the door that nobody sorted before departure. This is what returning to Dubai in early August actually looks

You’ve been in Dubai for three years now, and your rent has gone up twice. Somewhere between the first apartment and this one, you kept upgrading to a bigger unit every time the boxes and spare furniture stopped fitting, and each upgrade cost you thousands of dirhams a year you never actually needed to spend

Your old lease ends on the 30th. Your new one starts on the 5th. Nobody at either end seems particularly worried about where your furniture, boxes, and everything you own is supposed to live for those five days, but somebody has to figure it out, and it’s you. This gap shows up constantly in Dubai,

Wood remembers everything. The guitar left leaning against a wall near an air conditioning vent in a Dubai apartment through July and August is experiencing conditions it was not built for not the heat outside, but the dry, cold air blasting across its surface for sixteen hours a day, followed by the warm, humid air