The Map of Salt and Stars

by Zeyn Joukhadar

My words sunk down like seeds, my vowels and the red space for stories crushed under my tongue.

Mama once said the city was a map of all the people who’d lived and died in it, and Baba said every map was really a story.

“Every place you go becomes a part of you.” “But none more so than home.”

“Stories are powerful,” he said, “but gather too many of the words of others in your heart, and they will drown out your own. Remember that.”

“You have to weave two stories together to tell them both right.” She presses her palms together, then opens them. “Like two hands.”

Things change too much. We’ve always got to fix the maps, repaint the borders of ourselves.

Shrapnel is a red word. To me, it sounds like metal and anger and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It sounds like the red and yellow things inside of people, the fear and rage that rot a person out until they rot out somebody else.

“stories ease the pain of living, not dying. People always think dying is going to hurt. But it does not. It’s living that hurts us.”

“The world is so much bigger than I expected.” “And filled with tales.” Khaldun tucked his knees into his chest. “But once you’ve heard too many voices, you start to forget which one is your own.”

“People think that stories can be walled off, kept outside and separate. They can’t. Stories are inside you.”

“You are the stories you tell yourself,”

“If you don’t know the tale of where you come from,” he said, “the words of others can overwhelm and drown out your own. So, you see, you must keep careful track of the borders of your stories, where your voice ends and another’s begins.”

“Then stories map the soul,” Rawiya said, “in the guise of words.”

‘People don’t get lost on the outside. They get lost on the inside.

“No one sees the future,” she says. “No one knows what’s planned. But safety is not about never having bad things happen to you. It’s about knowing that the bad things can’t separate us from each other.

“The land where your parents were born will always be in you. Words survive. Borders are nothing to words and blood.”