"Between Steam and Stories"

My face is red, but I’m not embarrassed.

It is the heat. The suffocating one, the unbearable one,

one that matches the steamy Hammams

where naked women share their stories,

curse their mothers-in-law,

flaunt their cheap purchases,

and exchange bottomless buckets of boiling water.

The steam clings like gossip,

thick, hot, always lingering.

Walls drip with years,

and the zellij beldi,

those imperfect tiles,

each one a cracked mosaic of memory,

start to lose their color beneath the fog.

Like how old women fade into one another,

names forgotten, stories not.

Inside, women undress

their bodies and their hearts.

They talk loud,

like the heat has boiled their patience.

Some bring oranges in plastic bags,

and hard-boiled eggs wrapped in kitchen towels,

as if they were staying the whole day,

and some do.

They eat between scrubs,

peels sticking to wet fingers,

juice slipping down their chins,

unbothered.

We go to the front gate,

get 250g of traditional soap that smells like liquorice,

then hire a muscled woman

whose name is most likely to be Fatima or Fatiha.

Her role is simple:

rip off your skin under the excuse of exfoliating it.

Kids run through it all,

girls in plastic slippers,

boys too old to be here.

But no one says anything.

You might as well see an eight-year-old boy in the women’s section,

mingling between droopy breasts and slurred words

seeing as a certain woman thought her boy to be just a small child

when in fact you can see traces of his growing mustache.

The Hammam is chaotic.

Warm, yes, but not soft.

It’s loud and open

and absolutely personal.

It knows your body,

and sometimes more.

It is not quiet.

It is not clean.

It is holy in its own strange way,

not because it saves you,

but because it strips you down

to what you’ve always been.

I leave lighter.

Skin red.

Mind foggy.

But there’s something left behind in the steam,

an old version of me,

half-washed,

half-heard.