All My Rage

by Sabaa Tahir

don’t know if I believe in hell, but if it had a sound, it would be the strangled howl of your father finally realizing that the love of his life is being put into the ground.

But my arms don’t move. Tears don’t come. I stand still as a statue, freezing because I forgot my jacket, staring at the coffin. 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.

But 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.

Sometimes, I feel like the language of my body is equally unfathomable. I’ll die being the only person who ever knew how to speak it.