All My Rage

by Sabaa Tahir

Wondering how someone who filled up a room could fit into a box so small.

I’ll survive this. I’ll live. But there’s a hole in me, never to be filled. Maybe that’s why people die of old age. Maybe we could live forever if we didn’t love so completely. But we do. And by the time old age comes, we’re filled with holes, so many that it’s too hard to breathe. So many that our insides aren’t even ours anymore. We’re just one big empty space, waiting to be filled by the darkness. Waiting to be free.

I realize as I cry into his shirt that I feel rootless. Pakistan isn’t home anymore. Juniper never was. But Salahudin—Salahudin feels like home. So I stay.

I think of the way denial can weave its way through a family, whisper gentle lies, and make itself at home.

I had never been closer to heaven than I was then, when the fabric between this world and the next was breached for one ineffable moment as I gazed into my child’s eyes for the first time.

“There’s more to life than the things in front of you,” Santiago says, and now, finally, I listen. “Sometimes we hold on to things we shouldn’t. People. Places. Emotions. We try to control all of it, when what we should be doing is trusting in something bigger.”

Rage can fuel you. But grief gnaws at you slow, a termite nibbling at your soul until you’re a whisper of what you used to be.