I had waged a long battle to gain these writing utensils. But now I wondered what to write. A letter? A story! A journal! Maybe poems? As soon as the metal door slammed shut, and I was unlocked from the wall, I picked up one pencil and opened the notebook.

I stare at the blank pages now, trying to tell my story—everything I confessed to Bilal and everything after. I want to tell it as story-tellers do, with emotional anchors, but I recall emotions in name only. My life returns to me in images, smells, and sounds, but never feelings. I feel nothing.

DANCE, RUBY RIVER

I DON’T REMEMBER the first time I danced. Women of my generation were born dancing. It was just something we did when we gathered. We’d form a circle, clapping and singing as each of us entered the middle to roll our hips. But I knew early on, by the way people watched me, that the way I danced was enchanting.

When the music plays, my body moves as it wishes. I never tried to control anything. It was complete surrender to music and all the unseen, unknowable forces it inspired. I let rhythm rub against my body and wrap around my breath. Maybe that’s what people saw, because dancing is the nearest I’ve ever come to true faith.

Eastern dance, what people who don’t know better call “belly dancing,” might look like controlled, orchestrated movement, but it’s exactly the opposite. Our dance is about chaos and anarchy. It is the antithesis of control. It’s about relinquishing power over one’s body, bestowing autonomy on every bone, ligament, nerve, and muscle fiber. On every skin and fat cell. Every organ.

I suppose this is true of every form of native dance, but all I know are the rhythms of the Levant, Babylon, el Khaleej, and North Africa. This is the music that rooted in my body as it matured from infancy, then settled in my bones. The lyrics of Um Kulthum, the plaint of a ney, the melody of a qanuun or the rasp of an oud are the sounds of my life. They echo inside me, through time and with the stories those ancient instruments made. As much as I love the sounds of India—the complex resonance of the sitar or the high-pitched strings of a tumbi—or the deep percussion and multilayered rhythms of African drums and the piercing precision of a xylophone, though they move my body, they do not reach the depths from which music transports me, because they are the sounds of other peoples and stories I only heard as an adult.

Music is like spoken language, inextricable from its culture. If you don’t learn a language early in life, its words will forever come out wrinkled and accented by another world, no matter how well you memorize or love the vocabulary, grammar, and cadences of a new language. This is why foreign “belly dancers” have always bothered me. The use of our music as a prop to wiggle and shimmy and jump around offends me.