The Map of Salt and Stars

by Zeyn Joukhadar

Baba is the ghost we don’t talk about. Sometimes I wonder if Mama and Huda and Zahra want to pretend his sickness never happened, that the cancer never rotted out his liver and his heart. I guess it’s like the spinning game: sometimes you’d rather be on any magic level but your own. But I don’t want to forget him. I don’t want it to be like he was never here at all.

I try to picture it like it was once, the paint smooth, the stones polished. People make such beautiful things, I think, even though they destroy so much.

Does it make it easier to live with loss if you don’t name it? Or is that something you do as a mercy for other people?

I look up at Huda, but she won’t look at me. I wonder if almost can cost you as much as did, if the real wound is the moment you understand that you can do nothing.

I start to think that maybe death is in us all along, that it doesn’t stick to us at all. Maybe it just seems like death clings to us when we notice it inside us for the first time. Maybe, like Mama said, we are all born with a wound that needs fixing.