My ear hurts. There is a stabbing pain in my ear; stab, stab, stab. I have explained it in Dutch and English; received sympathetic looks. I have had my ears washed out with warm water, pressed a hot water bottle to my ears. Stab, stab. This would be perfect in a novel: the girl woke up one day, and her ear hurt. I remember that I’ve read a novel in which the character has an ear that acts up, it is set in Dublin. I look it up. (Sushi for Beginners, by Marian Keyes.) Throb, throb. Stab, stab. I look up the book on the library’s website. I have a memory of an earache, a waiting room at the hospital, my head on my mother’s lap; trying to somehow find some comfort. I rest my head now against a hot water bottle. Stab, stab. Ineens, a word from a Dutch vocabulary list, comes to mind, and I tell it to everyone: ineens. There’s a day of relief; then the pain comes back, now as a persistent dullness, a reminder that something hurt(s?) here. I bundle my head in a scarf and earmuffs. Have I ever told you about my earmuffs? They come from a store in a mall in Amman; not the fluffy ones I see everywhere; no, these are functional, they are pretty though, there’s some embroidery, and surprisingly, they’ve lasted for seven years now, maybe even longer.

There’s something about an earache that feels particularly debilitating. I can’t examine my ear, can’t diagnose myself, can’t explain why it makes my face pinch slightly, why I am wincing in the street, scurrying away from a loud horn, why I feel compelled to say in the middle of conversations, that I’m sorry, but my ear hurts.

Perhaps this is phantom pain; a series of things, unconnected, that I am trying to link together: a headache, a tense jaw, another day of clocking in at the sad factory. In Elena Ferrante’s The Story of a Lost Child, Lila points out that Elena has adopting her mother’s pain. ‘Nothing hurts, Lenu. You’ve invented that limp in order to not let your mother die completely, and now you really do limp, I’ve studied you, it’s good for you.’ Perhaps the pain is a phantom, but not one of my creation; perhaps it is a ghost from the past, here to provide a service: a memory that you’d forgotten, that exact hour in the waiting room, the pain. I should be thankful.