Sparks Like Stars

by Nadia Hashimi

The Book of Fixed Stars was written a thousand years ago by an astronomer named al-Sufi.

Arg, the name for the presidential palace.

Genghis Khan’s

the never-ending fight for our country’s independence from foreign invasion.

bespectacled British emissary with aspirations to colonize Afghanistan.

Was it envy, vanity, or just a surfeit of love to want to be as beautiful as one’s mother?

Ai-Khanoum, in the northern part of the country, was one of the farthest reaches of an ancient Greek kingdom.

But they are just soldiers, I’d once said to my mother. We are all soldiers of some kind was her obscure reply.

Sometimes it’s when people are silent that you hear them most

clearly, Boba had told me.

Let people serve you information, he had said mischievously, but never let them serve you your opinion.

“It’s an inside-out world, isn’t it? Sometimes the world turns inside out and we’re in the center and it’s oh so dark and we think we will never, ever see the sun again,”

Allah does not deliver your fate fully formed, my father had said. It is up to you to shape it. But fate doesn’t bend easily.

Think of a blacksmith bending a rod. He cannot, without daring to hold the rod to fire.

“Have you read Siddhartha? Amazing, really.”

“God gives people children without confirming their credentials first. I

Love and war are two ends of a single rope, Boba told me once. Poetry comes from the tangling of the two. Deep into the night, high in the hills, warriors would gather around fires, strumming lutes and singing songs about love as old as the mountains, with their swords tucked under one leg.

People are God’s cruelest creations. They’ll step on the smallest of backs to feel an inch taller.

Don’t expect him to bow at your feet because you saved him today. He’s saved himself every other day of his life.

When pain retreats, when skin repairs, when a broken bone becomes whole again, it is a miracle. It is grace, he explained. But you would never feel this without the hurt. I would never wish the wound for you, sweet, mischievous Sitara. But I certainly wish you the light.

voice—corruption doesn’t happen without cooperation.

She’s a twenty-something-year-old with the personality of sunshine but none of its brightness. She’s gone before I can complain.

Sons rarely accompany parents to their visits. Typically, it’s daughters and spouses who help navigate appointments and medical care.

Sometimes I find out a loved one has chosen to sit in the waiting room and needs to be invited in, because there’s no way they won’t be involved in the care.

Books are a tiny string connecting me to my parents. To be a reader is to be like them. To be around books and readers has brought me comfort too.

Now, courage without fear? That’s just bravado.”

“The United States has always been willing to slip money and guns to anyone fighting the commies. Anyone. The U.S. didn’t meet the Taliban after 9/11. That’s just when they became the enemy.”

You miss them, she said. That’s grief, and grief is nothing but the far brink of love. Love is the sun, grief is the shadow it casts. Love is an opera, grief is its echo. You cannot have one without the other. But if you follow that grief, you’ll find your way back to love. You haven’t let yourself do that yet, and you need to—in your own way. So cry, scream, run, sleep, pray, or write love notes in the sand. But grieve, so you can get back to love, because love is a better place to be.

Mothers lie on stretchers next to hospital beds, drinking in their children’s faces while they can. Husbands sit in waiting rooms holding cups of coffee that went cold long ago. Brothers show up with gift-shop teddy bears, wishing they could rewind the years. Grief starts before anyone has gone missing. I roll onto my side and squeeze my eyes to shut out the light of the pale moon.

I’m not looking for revenge. I’ve not fallen for the myth of closure either.

If a tree falls in the forest, but no one posts about it on Facebook, is the tree even real?

People are curious creatures. We forget to skip our medicine almost as often as we forget to take our medicine. We hate to exercise. We feel good when we exercise.

Necessity isn’t just the mother of invention. She’s the mother of faith too.

The wound is where the light enters, my father used to say, quoting Rumi.

Warriors don’t wage war dreaming of immortality.

“They were just happy I’d stopped complaining about being stuck in our town. But the thing is, I wasn’t all that angry at our town. It just didn’t give me a way to see how I was going to fit into the world.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Mom insists, her face pinched. She wraps an arm around me. “You know, we’re so damned afraid that talking about the ones we’ve lost will hurt us as much as losing them did. So we just stop talking about them. But that’s when we truly lose them.”

“When I was a kid and I lost my dad, people told me I had to move on. They made me think grief was like a cold,” she continues. “If you don’t act sick, you’ll get better. And if you don’t get over it in a week, then you’re weak or there’s something really wrong with you. But I think it’s okay to mourn people out loud for more than a few days. I never said that to you. I’m sorry, I didn’t know better.”

What if I forgive myself and nothing changes?

“People have an easier time kissing their elbows than believing war touches kids,”

I take comfort in knowing he is surrounded by love. That might be all I can salvage from what we once were.