Take What You Can Carry

by Gian Sardar

Her best friend says her eyes are less green. Some days Olivia sees it, that they’re not as vivid, that before they were filled with something that on good days she calls hope and on other days calls ignorance.

A low-flying airplane, she hears its rumble and instantly is there, teacups shaking and glass rattling in window frames, feeling confused at the panicked reactions around her because to her, in her life and where she was from, an airplane had only ever been an airplane.

It’s shocking, his world. And splendid. But also, she realizes, possibly incorrect. Because when he speaks of home, he speaks like someone in love, someone blind to faults and entranced by the mundane. Someone whose heart has learned to lie. This is a hazard she’s familiar with: when you love, you see what you love, not necessarily what’s there. The artful blur of affection.

The fact was, she realized, he would tell her tales of mountains and wildflowers, but there was a chance he would never talk about the rest. The rest: the space between them. The weight of his past. Is it possible to truly know someone if you cannot comprehend that which made them who they are? Can one truly love another without that understanding?

“It’s hard, facing what you’ve left.”

there is an illogical worry within her that what’s to come are days that were never meant to happen.

All of Baghdad is a work in progress and a collision of centuries, with unfinished buildings and white houses, everything seeming to move but against itself, the whole city caught in different, conflicting currents of motion all at once.

“A small key opens big doors,” he says. “One of our sayings.” Then he smiles. “Everything, always, is the beginning.”

In the distance now, there is something. At this point, it’s just a promise, a shape that slowly sharpens.

One second of true fear beats hours of anything else.

Catherine Leroy and Dickey Chapelle, female photographers who wore fatigues and trudged through rice paddies right alongside troops, who crouched beside men in combat not only to capture the human side of war but to prove themselves in the

Again, the scent. This mix, it’s the bits and pieces of his family’s world and of his past, what marks his own memories.

You love them for who they are, sure. That’s the easy part. But you also love them despite who they are. That’s the important part.”

“You overthink. You are happy most of the time. I see that you are, even if you don’t. Maybe you’re afraid to be happy when you realize it. Afraid that it will be taken.

You think to be an artist, to be taken seriously, you must suffer.”

I’m an artist, too, and I have suffered, and I would rather not keep suffering, so I smile. And if I am happy, I don’t tell myself not to be.”

“Liv. Stop. Enjoy where you are. Nothing is wrong until it is.”

To leave is to admit this is just a trip, while for them it is a life.

You don’t move on. You move with. Even if the other night is not found in her every conversation or thought, it lives with her. Tucked away.

There is no choice, Olivia tells herself. No choice but to meet people and fall in love and live and lose.