Against the Loveless World

by Susan Abulhawa

Abandoning the imposition of a calendar helped me understand that time isn’t real; it has no logic in the absence of hope or anticipation.

Although those had been happier times, I recalled them now with a sense of tragedy and a desire to assure my younger self of her worth and intellect; of her capacity to learn, to believe she was not dumb, as the world had convinced her she was.

I want to tell it as storytellers do, with emotional anchors, but I recall emotions in name only. My life returns to me in images, smells, and sounds, but never feelings. I feel nothing.

I listened, realizing I was hearing something from the silent depths of my mother. We were a family with secrets, things that lurked in the corners of our lives, unseen, unspoken, but felt in the texture of arguments, the extra length of a pause, the focus of a stare.

I look back now on so many moments in my life when I instinctively took responsibility for the actions and feelings of those around me.

I had not understood until then how humiliated my mother had felt by her life. The simple dignity of a “desk job,” as she called it, had transformed her. I should have said it again, that her embroidery was more special than any “desk job” could be; that she was an artist; that Western images of professional women don’t have to apply to us; that concepts of respectability and modernity are manufactured. Instead, I just congratulated her. She added, “They’re also training me to use a computer soon. Can you believe it?”

No one had ever kissed me with such love, and it occurred to me that happiness can reach such depths that it becomes something akin to grief.

The smells of a loving home waiting for its son wafted through the house.

but I knew I could never again be complete in one place. This was what it meant to be exiled and disinherited—to straddle closed borders, never whole anywhere. To remain in one place meant tearing one’s limbs from another.

“Morning of goodness,” he said, a smile in his eyes. “Morning of light and jasmine.” I joined him with coffee and a kiss.