Aftershocks

by Nadia Owusu

I asked my father what an aftershock was. He said they are tremors in the earth that follow an earthquake. They are the earth’s delayed reaction to stress.

How do I tell her that a day that begins with pancakes for breakfast can end in disaster; that, in an instant, an earthquake or a mother can arrive and change everything? How do I tell her that even when the earth stops shaking, cracks in the surface spread silently? Pent-up forces of danger and chaos can be unleashed at any time. I don’t know how to explain any of this, so I tell her I am afraid of the aftershocks.

Grieving, I learned, was a process of story construction. I needed to construct a story so I could reconstruct my world. There were decisions to make about what to put in and what to leave out.

I believed the door appeared because of George. But I know now that George was simply the last in a long line of people and places I tried and failed to belong to.

“There is nothing wrong with seeking truth or grace or light,” he told me. “The problem with organized religion is the assertion that all questions have already been answered. I don’t want you believing that. There is more to life, and to the universe, than what is in a single book.”

I ached for lasting connection, for a place where rejection was not inevitable.

Those letters taught me about longing. Reading them in front of my father taught me to hide it, often even from myself. I know now what a dangerous kind of denial that is. It leaves you ravenous.

The idea of roots setting a person free is counterintuitive, but deracination from the past, from land, from family, from mothers, makes for an unstable present. We must have, or we will always search for, a place to bury our bones.

But still: a pattern. The trauma had been diluted by time. But it was present, still discernible, in my blood.

An earthquake is the ground breaking and the heart breaking. It is frictional forces and literary device. A fault is a weakness. A woman’s

body is a weakness. A wound is a weakness I can’t help but pick at. Some wounds never heal. A story is a flashlight and a weapon. I write myself into other people’s earthquakes. I borrow pieces of their pain and store them in my body. Sometimes, I call those pieces compassion. Sometimes I call them desecration.