Behind You Is the Sea

by Susan Muaddi Darraj

all I can think about is how I’m going to use these feelings I’m having now. I need someone to love, the way I love Baba. I can’t love Mama because she’s a ghost, and my sister is so young that . . . well, I can love her, but she may not always want it from me.

And if his grandchildren grew up feeling lost in the world, unattached to anything, he wanted them to know that, even before their birth, he had anticipated this, and he had been sad.

He then returned home, broken, so Mama could reassemble him slowly, carefully, with a cup of tea, by rubbing his temples, by putting her arms around his shoulders while he drifted off in a chair before dinner.

That her marriage was over. Because she’d married a man who believed people could be ruined.

You never know if these people will feed you, even though you’re giving them ten hours of your day.

But he was laughing, and she laughed too. It felt so strange, how much they laughed. They didn’t have cable or Netflix, or goddamn Wi-Fi, but they told each other jokes and laughed all the time.

I think you’re beautiful. Your gray hair like steel, the wrinkles at the corners of your eyes, the shuffle in your walk—it’s the purest beauty I’ve ever seen.

“Why would you want to remember? If they were such bad days.” “They were terrible,” Sits said, nodding. “But it’s good to remember. So you can look at your life now and say alhamdulilah.”

There was nothing hostile, nothing angry, in this beautiful place he’d created.

now was a time to lie on the weak surface of water, to trust that its fragility could nevertheless keep her afloat. It could even, despite its transparency, carry her great distances.

“Sorry, ya ’amti,” Marcus said when he heard her voice on the other end of the phone, “but my father has given you his remaining years.” Bad news sounded kinder, almost generous, in Arabic, as if the dead had decided to bestow a gift upon the living.

The Arabs were a people that knew life could be horrifically unjust and unfair—and yet they cherished it.