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Her absence was too heavy to be surrendered to dreams.
How hard the believers make it to get into heaven, I thought, when they have all this right here.
We were like a thrift-store tea set, there was always one piece missing.
I had noticed this before about Americans—they always want to take action, they have a hard time staying still, or allowing themselves to feel uncomfortable emotions—so when I shook my head no, the man seemed disappointed in me, and after a moment he left, the door jingling as it closed behind him.
Perhaps memory is not merely the preservation of a moment in the mind, but the process of repeatedly returning to it, carefully breaking it up in parts and assembling them again until we can make sense of what we remember.
A day passed, then another. I tried to go back to the routine of ordinary life, but I was unprepared for the brutality with which it greeted me.
Growing up in this town, I had long ago learned that the savagery of a man named Mohammed was rarely questioned, but his humanity always had to be proven.
Meanwhile, the civilians who died in American wars would receive only silence. National memory was built from such erasures.
In other words, I had been trying to hold on to the past at all cost. My mother knew better; she didn’t try to fight her feelings of pain or fear, but accepted them as she might accept unwelcome visitors, knowing that someday, even if it was very far in the future, they would leave. It was a strength she derived from her deep faith, and in that moment I envied her for
Grief demanded surrender. I had to let go. I had to learn how to live with just the memories, nothing else.
The present could never be untethered from the past, you couldn’t understand one without the other.
Love was made of echoes like this, and now that I could hear them, I knew we could figure it out,
All we needed to do was to keep talking.
Only now, after my father’s death, did I come to understand that love was not a tame or passive creature, but a rebellious beast, messy and unpredictable, capacious and forgiving, and that it would deliver me from grief and carry me out of the darkness.
