take care of the fire that burns the heart. take care of mother whose too grown to change. take care of sister whose too young to understand. take care of herself when she gets the chance. my dreams are crippled. paper dreams as they say. my dreams are meth under dirty headboards, like a motel room with a young child hiding so mother could do her job. i think euphoria is trying to be modern day shakespeare and it’s a thought that creeps amongst the rattle of snakes and strippers and striped-leopard-wearing people. mapping my life like a mind map i begin to see that i’ve been chewing on these words like a gum yet to be on the ground, filled with spit-sweet teeth marks.
sunny skies are angels in disguise. my grandmother said i saw jinns in the daylight and would wake from them in the night. she said i spoke to them lightly and played with something only i could see in the courtyard. there’s an orange jacket i refused to let go of and sucking my thumb beyond years that were acceptable. there was hugo cabaret in the ‘lucky’ classroom for kids with developmental difficulties and kids who came from government schools and kids who didn’t have english in their peripheral vision. there’s nothing. they’re blotches of sweat and tears and hiding. lots of washing and then telling someone for the first time while they braid your hair and they start pulling at your hair the hardest they can with their adult fingers as they yell at you that it’s your fault. then there’s jumping on a bed with said braids, plaited into two sides, and not stopping. jumping and jumping and smiling to avoid the pain. i’m not too sure i’ll ever forget. there’s oprah replying to my email and other anecdotes. there’s the tiny house with the two bedrooms and mismatched tiles in the bathroom walls and a too large of a tv. then there’s the huge land bought with investments made from a lucky guess one time. the house built on it was equally as small but has the most beautiful, red sands outside. it was our playground.
i wish i didn’t go through it sometimes.
then i remember that wishing is a dangerous hobby. it turns people into historians of alternate universes. i sit there tracing roads that don’t exist. mother who healed sooner. mother who never touched it. mother who chose us over whatever was calling her from the other side of the door. sister who inherited something softer. soul who arrived without a mouth full of questions. i build these people from dust and they collapse when i touch them.
there are photographs somewhere. i know there are. proof that we existed between disasters. proof that there were birthdays and plastic cups and someone standing behind the camera. i study photographs like crime scenes. everyone’s smiling. there was a time where it meant something to have cakes and gatherings and family. i wonder if photographs are evidence or alibis.
sometimes i think healing is humiliating because it resembles ordinary things.
the women in my family carry stories in their bodies the way old houses carry heat. walls remember things. tiles remember things. mattresses remember things. entire bloodlines become storage units. someone cries in 1988 and the echo arrives in a granddaughter thirty years later, disguised as anxiety, disguised as caution, disguised as taste.
what does inherited grief look like in practice? does it look like:
marrying carefully?
saving money obsessively?
collecting (hoarding) objects (until the wall is no longer visible)?
loving horses?
distrusting happiness?
documenting bruises?
building houses?
leaving rooms early?
there are days i feel ancient. older than my grandmother. older than the jinns she swore visited me in daylight. older than the courtyard itself. i’m older and wiser when i tear open the wounds. then there are days i am six years old again, thumb in mouth, orange jacket zipped to my chin despite the weather, waiting for someone to explain what exactly happened here. nobody does.
instead there are houses. one small. one smaller. stretches of road between them. red sand gathering against concrete walls. television light flickering across sleeping faces. sisters becoming women. mothers becoming myths. the lucky guesses. the unlucky certainties.
and somewhere beneath all of it, a child still jumping on a bed.
jumping and jumping.
convinced that if her feet leave the mattress enough times, she might miss the moment where her feet land altogether.