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Mama used to say stories were how Baba made sense of things. He had to untangle the world’s knots, she said. Now, thirty thousand feet above him, I am trying to untangle the knot he left in me. He said one day I’d tell our story back to him. But my words are wild country, and I don’t have a map.
EVERYBODY KNOWS THE story of Rawiya. They just don’t know they know it.
“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.”
“We may never understand,” he replies, just as quiet. “In times like these, it’s the small people who suffer.”
That wondrous journey fixed in my mind the idea of a wide world, full of dangers and beautiful things. I loved that world, in spite of its crushing vastness. I loved it in spite of the terrible weight of its hope.”
“You are the stories you tell yourself,”
People make such beautiful things, I think, even though they destroy so much.
It used to make me wonder whether the most important things we see in God are really in each other.
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.
“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. Okay? No matter what happens. Your family still loves you, and you can get through anything if you know that. You’re safe with me. With Mama. With God. Nothing can take that away.”
And I think to myself how many people have created beautiful things here, how many people go on creating beautiful things even when life is full of pain.
