Hope

 

"We suffer from an incurable malady: Hope." - Mahmoud Darwish

I returned to the house six months after it happened. In those six months, I pretended that you were just away, that I’d find you waiting for me at home when I got back. I imagined your little giggles as you extended your arms for me to pick you up, how then you would order me to put you down so you would show me another one of your little creations, perhaps this time you would show me a drawing of us all, Happy, and alive.

 

They say it’s the absence of the person, the loneliness, that kills you. I think it was your heavy presence that killed me, the toys that you left scattered around the house, the permanent tomato sauce stains on my pajamas with your little handprints, It’s the chair that was set for you at my parents’ house, it still has traces of the last meal you had before we left, the last meal you ever had, carrots, and you hated carrots, I thought about that every night. Perhaps If I gave you something you liked you wouldn’t be dead.

 

The house was still half blown, half intact. The half with your room was as perfect as the day I first set it up. If I hadn’t clawed my way out of my room to you that night, you’d have been safer in your own bed. I’d be dead, but you’d be alive like you ought to be. A parent should never bury their child.

 

They told me I’d have another, that I was still young, I could still remarry and have more children, enough children that I’d bury your loss as well. I do not believe I would recover if I saw your face anywhere else but in my memory, I wonder if, had you grown enough, you would have my face. I sometimes look in the mirror and seek yours, but I do not find it. You were everything good that I wasn’t.

 

They’re asking me to rebuild since we’re finally free to do that. But who do I rebuild it for? They say the children are our future, mine was murdered in my arms. They told me to walk away and leave you behind, I should’ve stayed and died next to you.

 

 

 

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Our graves did not grow flowers, they were usually blown up before they could. This time I found a daisy growing on my father’s grave.

 

We’re free. A bittersweet thought. for many a happy ending, for some salt on the already infected wound. I had a family to go back to, as small as it was, I had a victory to celebrate with loved ones. Some had empty torn homes to return to, and only mass graves to break the news to.

 

My neighbor had sworn she’d only marry the classmate who kept proposing to her if we were freed, and now he’s on her doorstep again asking her to not break her oath, she secretly confided in me that she would not, she loved him, but she did not want children out of fear to orphan them as she was orphaned, now she could finally allow herself that happiness.

 

She asked me what I would do now. I’d always dreamed of this moment, even had a list hidden back at home, filled with what I thought would be forgotten dreams, something to be shared on a Twitter account after my passing, to remind people that I was perhaps human, that I deserved to live.

 

‘I’d like to mourn,’ I answered, I had never mourned my father, only waited to join him, I never expected the need to recover, because I thought I would not live long enough to do so, so I just kept trudging through life, hoping that one day it will be my turn. But now I can, and as laborious as it will be, I want to do it, to feel the pain of a loss that cut through me so deeply that I thought I would die before the knife finally made its way through the other side of my body.

 

 

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I booked a plane ticket today. A one-way ticket with no detours to my desired destination.

 

I never thought this would happen in my lifetime. I could put my nationality on my work account, as well as my flag, I even wore mine on my shoulders on the way home. I wasn’t stopped, to be thoroughly searched , not even once, nor was I humiliated or scared. And I made it home without the feel of a gun pointed between my shoulder blades.

 

The house was as glorious as I imagined it would be, as my father and grandfather before him described it. The olive trees were not there, but I’d like to plant my own, hopefully, they’ll live for ages after my death, like my grandfather’s love for this house, like his trust in his people’s power to claw their way through destruction to return to their homes.

Lamyae Laaroui