Between Soil and Sun
In this version of the story, we stay.
*
I grow up with handfuls of barley in my hands during the fall. This view, the expanse of softness over an infinite horizon, is boring. It is every day. I am not surprised when pomegranates fall out of trees, because I know that is what pomegranates do. I can run my hand over the rough rind of any citrus and tell you how it became itself. I can lie on a concrete slab of a front porch and the sky opens to me in passivity.
*
Shoes, obviously, are not allowed in the house. We eat while sat on the ground at a low table and everything on it had been something else only a moment ago. My grandmother’s hands had tended to these meals. My mom had learned how to mimic the same movements and I am devoting my life to studying them again. We are all proud to have the same fine lines etched into our palms from the constant folding and holding and wrapping and serving. It is an honor to learn these things. To not lose them between the decades.
*
There are no corrections to my name. The “a” is a gentle roll into the way the “r” comes out from the back of your throat in order to land gracefully onto the last “m”. My last name is spelled right on every legal document. I am not a person who has to worry about legal documents. The very concept of a citizenship is foolish. My bed has always been in this house, what else would I be? I am vaguely aware that another world exists in which I should be more careful around those words. But there is too much work to be done to worry about the people of that world and their frivolous arguments. They are occupied with strange and foolish things.
*
There are still no baby pictures of my parents, but there are traces of those later days. The stories I hear from their youth are grounded in real soil and stone. I can go there and relive them like I was starring in a play. The stage is set for every single tragic and beautiful thing that has happened to them. I point at the tallest tree in our orchard and ask my dad to explain its deformed shape. He puts his hand down on its roots and I watch. They intertwine like fingers of two open hands. I can’t decipher where he begins and where the roots end. This is how he explains everything.
*
At some point, I must look in the mirror and see a young woman for the first time. I gape at her newness and familiarity. My own hands find the curves of her features and try to make sense of owning them. Fitting into them. She is almost my mom, with her dark eyes and tired feet. And she is almost my dad, with his wide palms and serious stare. This woman can put her hands and feet in spaces where her family has always been. She can shove her whole face into the humid summer air and come out with a mouthful of memories that are not her own.
*
There have always been graves. But now I am there to visit them. I tend to those grounds with a type of worship I cannot explain now. There are mounds of dirt grown over with grass and ivy. I lay carnations there. I wonder if we afforded a gravestone. Maybe I only trace her name into the dirt and maybe that is enough. My father uses a scythe to keep the area trim. Proper. Mourning is not an alter-less worship. It has place.
*
On long weekends, we take trips to the coast. These are my mom’s stomping grounds. She bursts out of the taxi and it is as if age has left her body entirely. She and I are twins in the way we run wild and free across the white sand, leaving my dad and sister bent over in laughter. There is nothing else to talk about besides how wonderful this evening is. How hot the fire feels. How delicious the sandwiches taste. How cold the ocean is. How lucky we are. I cannot stop watching this scene. She is so beautiful that I could cry.
*
But I know that even there, there would be the horrible things that follow people like hungry cats. That night where the ground shook us from it, just to remind us that it could. My dad would be awake for it. He would grab us all from our beds in one arm and be out the door before we broke out of our dreams. I am still so scared of the dark. That endless, shaking dark.
*
There would still be the raging hot beast that ate at the infinite horizon. Until the divide between land and the open air was finally clear. We had lived on so little for our whole lives. And now we had less. But my mom would make sense of it. She would tell me how to stretch a single harvest of last year’s grain into a million wonderful meals. There is no version of my life in which my mom would allow us to go hungry.
*
And then the men decorated with holsters and caps, crushing my fallen pomegranates with the heel of their boots. The boys I grew up with would be replaced with weapons of a new world. I would learn how to wrap bandages for more than scraped knees. A fierceness grows in me. I don’t know where to place it yet. I don’t know who to hold it against and ask for answers from. I feel all at once hopeless and full of an inspiring rage.
*
I continue to worry in new and devastating ways.
*
My steps into adulthood would be wrecked with the nervousness of unpromised survival. I would be familiar with the streaking light of falling bombs. Their sharp whistles coming down to pierce the silence.
*
I hold my breath. I cannot stop holding my breath.