All My Rage

by Sabaa Tahir

“If we are lost, God is like water, finding the unknowable path when we cannot.”

I 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.

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

One day my ama will die. Everything that she ever was will die with her. The way she walked quickly, and flour in her hair when she made roti, the lines in her forehead when she yelled at me for doing something stupid. Her Saturday morning parathas and her smell, cardamom and Pine-Sol and lotion.

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’d forgotten how crying hollows you out, drains away all the shit, and leaves everything clearer.

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.

What’s the word for when someone drinks so much, they are ruining your best friend’s life? Or the word for a man so vengeful about his own past that he wants to destroy your future? What’s the word for a woman who was sick for months, but refused to go to the doctor until it was too late? The word for the girl at school whose personal mission is to mess with your head? Anger’s not the right word. Rage. That’s what this feeling is, eating me up.

A name could make a person. It could make a place, too.

Grandmothers who threw their grandchildren out. What a strange country America was.

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

He sobs, this fearless man who buried his parents and crossed oceans, who fell in love with a woman he barely knew and built a life with her in a desolate place.

You were my world. But to you father, Salahudin? You were the solar system. Bigger. The universe itself.

Sixty seconds are endless when spent in silence with a dangerous animal.

This is the type of shit they don’t teach at school but that we need to know. What do you do when your best friend is bruised and bleeding, and she refuses to go to the hospital? What do you do when you want to help, but she won’t let you?

Who my child becomes is not the sum of what happened to him.

Ama taught me that saying thank you to your own parents is unnecessary. Akin to thanking your lungs for breathing.

“Why does God do it?” I say. “Why should we pray? Why believe at all?” “Because what religion—many religions, really—offers is comfort when it’s all too much. A reason for the pain. A hand in the darkness if we reach for it.” “What if it’s not real?” I say. “The hand? What if you reach for it, and it disappears?” “I’m not going to tell you what’s real and what isn’t,” Shafiq says. “That’s for you to decide. But I do think that the hand is what we need it to be. Not what we want it to be.”

She was not of my body or my blood, this child. But she was of my soul.

“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.

A mother carries her child’s innocence in her memory. No matter who they become.

Oh, my children. My little ones. I have such dreams for you both. The world is right, finally. For here, in this sweet, deep night, I see now that you were always two halves of a whole, two hands interlaced, two voices raised to a melody sung in time.