Foreword
{مَا وَدَّعَكَ رَبُّكَ وَمَا قَلَىٰ}
{Your Lord ˹O Prophet˺ has not abandoned you, nor has He become hateful ˹of you˺}
Al Duha, Aya 3 – The Holy Quran
That’s all I know.
I know that.
Even when I don’t see how. Even when I can’t see a path.
Even when I can’t see at all.
Act I
Looking out over Istanbul, the city and the sky, filling my eyes… my chest is full of quiet.
Too-bitter-to-be-sweet, lukewarm stillness.
For once, I’m at a loss for words. For even the desire of them.
It’s just… quiet.
Is this how it all ends? Again?
The real question is: why am I not used to it yet?
Do we love just to say goodbye? Is there no way to avoid this?
Do we stay just long enough to begin to acclimate, begin to build this into our bones too, begin to let it become a little bit of home, just in time to have to let it go?
How is it always so different and so the same…?
Act II
Here’s the irony, though. We do have a home of our own. Did you know?
My family and I, with all our branches. My friends and the loved ones I haven’t met yet.
We share a country we can’t live in. Isn’t it funny?
The kind of funny that makes your heart break.
That makes tears stream down your face.
That makes your head spin for generations.
We share a country we can’t live in. Isn’t it funny? Isn’t it silly? That for the life of us we can’t stay put long enough to plan a future, but that we all come from the same place?
Our grandparents were born in the same land. Our blood is made of the same soil, our skin of the same sand.
Isn’t it strange? How the continents and seas seem decreed to scatter our lifelines so far out of reach of each other when we all originate from the same plot of earth? When we share the same nation? When we ache for the same home?
We share roots that we can’t reach. In another world, we would be neighbors. But in this one, we share a country we can’t live in. Isn’t it funny?
Act III
My daydream dissipates before my eyes, and my train of thought screeches to a halt, interrupted by the sound of the intercom. I’m on the train, on the way back, gazing through the window, unblinkingly, watching the picturesque city I’ve called home for years fade from view.
How am I supposed to trust reality when it keeps shifting before me? What am I supposed to believe is real, and what am I supposed to believe is not?
Shape-shifting. Shape-
shifting. Shape-
shifting.
All my surroundings. Streets and paths and signs and maps.
Never the same,
never the same,
never the same.
My GPS is broken. I guess it always has been. I guess it makes sense: why I was never good with directions. Funny, I guess. Funny that this sky is always the same one. That the moon follows us everywhere. Funny, when nothing else is the same. When, after every move, if it weren’t for the moon, I could swear I’d traveled through space to a different planet.
I once wrote about an ache that never goes away. This is another kind, another one of those. Every time it’s time to pack, all the cracks become visible again. They flash, pulse, suddenly fresh in their pain. An ache that never goes away…
Is it the shifting earth — us flitting around endlessly above it, that causes it? Or is it me outgrowing this home that I’m realizing I was hiding all along in? Fighting the urge to run away, not knowing how to repay all that it’s given me despite the discomfort?
Could I even find the answers? Is that even in my hands? But before that: where do I start?
What is it that has my head spinning so —
that has my heart dropping,
dropping,
dropping?
Where do I start?
I’m out of my depth again and I don’t know how to stop this.
I barely know how to swim. I can’t even manage to stay afloat.
Act IV
I’m a few steps from the front door when my attention snags on her. She pulls me out of my sinking thoughts. I pause to admire her greenery, in her blazing summer glory.
This grapevine is displaced too. Uprooted and re-rooted, just like us. Just like me.
She keeps reaching, this daalye. Vines curling, new and old, over everything she can touch, she can hold. She has no eyes but easily adopts her surroundings as home.
This daalye is only a few years old. She stems, literally, from her parent plant: the vine in my grandparents yard, in a town that falls mere kilometers from our Falasteen, but malignant borders and parasitical paperwork make our lands seem lightyears away. She lives even further from her origins now; but she’s come so far in such a short time.
The way she bursts into season every year brings my heart joy. Lush leaves creating a cooling canopy and magical curtains hanging from the trellis Baba built with his bare hands. With a smile on my face I trail my fingers along her soft bark as I stroll between her swaying branches, saying salam to her and her sisters, every time I come home, before I even knock on the front door. She welcomes me before anyone else does. How then, can I not rush to greet her?
Today I found myself telling her:
”مش جاهزة أودعك على فكرة… تنخدعيش بتجهيزاتنا للرحيل“
‘I’m not ready to say goodbye to you, by the way. Don’t be fooled by our preparations to move’
I never am, am I?
And where did these tears come from suddenly, dripping into my smile?
The way the daalye keeps reaching out with her vines, endlessly, keeps finding ways to latch onto her surroundings, keeps finding ways to hold on, as if never giving up hope, makes my heart ache a little. Makes it ache a lot.
I wish I was as sure as she is… as tenacious, as confident. Sometimes I think I am. Sometimes I think I’m getting there. Then all of a sudden I’m falling, flailing, again.
What do you do when you reach out once more but this time find nothing to hold onto and nothing to hold you? What do you do when you reach out and find nothing but air?
Act V
No, not air.
That’s what I thought it was, at first, because I could see nothing there.
I reach out once more, and find a barrier.
It’s breaking my brain. This barrier that I can’t see, but that rules our lives. Making strangers of those of us strewn against our will away from our homelands. I look at you, and you at me. We have the same skin and the same eyes. Our names sound the same too. My tongue may trip over our mother while yours embraces her confidently, but it’s okay, I can practice, I can get her back. But it’s not enough.
The barrier still stands in the way. Like after I leave I can never belong again.
Forever condemned to foreigner status. Visitor. Tourist. A guest in my own family.
A little ‘white’ somehow. Bearing semblance to the forces that invade, separate, and hunt us.
Maybe not in my skin but in my passport, my accent, my currency. My chances.
Foreigner. Stranger.
Why does it sound so much like ‘traitor’?
Why do these barriers stop me from coming home? Stop us from being family really? Pull apart our circulatory system into stranded strips and shredded ribbons? It’s breaking my brain. This privilege I didn’t ask for. We’re told it’s a blessing to have, it’s a good opportunity, that we’re lucky to have peace, to have safety.
But what kind of luck is it when my hometown stops recognizing me? When I forget what ripe olives look like — when I don’t know how to pick them? What kind of luck is it when sumac trees don’t know the sound of my voice and the daalye forgets my touch? What kind of luck is it when the weeks I’ve spent with my grandparents I can count on my fingers, when I don’t know the names of my cousins’ children, and when I can’t pool my blood with my kin to protect our earth against those that seek our extermination?
What kind of luck?
It’s breaking my brain. This invisible barrier that seems to rule our lives.
This invisible barrier condemning hearts apart. Trumping the power of the strongest love.
Trapping us in cycles of leaving, settling, and leaving again.
In transit, always, but never on the way home.
I don’t understand it, Yaa Rabb. It’s breaking my brain.
Afterword
Oh Allah. Yaa Rabb.
This earth is Your creation, and nothing is out of Your control.
Pave our path for us through this dunya Yaa Rabb, with Your Wisdom, with Your Mercy.
With whoever is real. With whatever is true. With Your pleasure.
Use us for Your sake, wherever in this realm we’re decreed to go.
However long our lives will span, one day they will seem undeniably short.
Make Your paradise for us our ultimate home.
Where the purest comforts unite, converge and finally become whole.
Filtered free of all the bitterness, all the thorns, all the illusions.
Where it’s only beauty, sweetness, and justice.
Yaa Rabb.
