"Just let him play, honey", the words I said to my wife rang through my ear seconds after I ran outside upon hearing the sounds of an explosion. I never thought that letting my son Yazan go out on his bike to ride around to the local supermarket at three in the afternoon would end up like this. My wife, Laila, and I ran toward the supermarket not because we knew that it was the target, but because we wanted to eliminate that possibility.
As we arrived we saw the horrific scene of remains of the building, the sight of blood mixed with cheap colorful popsicles. Among all the fallen rocks I saw my son's red bicycle he begged for months to buy, fallen to its side. The bicycle got up like a loyal guard dog to help us search my son through the smoke, remains, and body parts.
The entire street was closed for the next three days for all the funeral tents we needed to put together.
"Do you see that?", Laila said while looking toward the sky "It's raining feathers"
I looked up and saw nothing, but I couldn't muster the courage to say anything.
"Yazan learned the word 'pigeon' two days ago", Laila explained "He is probably still saying it".
Time went by, and we started the process of pretending to be trying to move on with our lives. But Laila must have gotten her copy of the script lost because she had very little to say since. There were only the occasional sentences, none of which seemed to make sense until I put them together now.
I don't know if she had a dream, a vision, or what exactly, but the first thing she told me was about Yazan and the angel who took him. I don't remember much of it as she was mostly mumbling.
"Then Yazan asked the angel", Laila said in the part I remember clearly "But how did God learn that I am from Iraq. Then the angel wiped his forehead and said that it was the soot"
We became rather two estranged people. I couldn't help her dig her out of the pit she was inside, I was always afraid of the conversation going toward the question of whether she blames me for what happened to Yazan, I was terrified that the answer is yes.
I was staying at work for as long as possible. And she, well, she spent a lot of time in her head. Every time she heard a speech about hope she would get exhausted and bored, so she would dig an illusion for herself using the people's words. Then she would ask about whether there would be a scale for her to weigh in her illusion. Then she would look in the closet, drawers, and nightstands for any sort of proof that she tried. But she didn't find any documents to prove that the nights she spent pondering under the rain existed.
All that Laila found was Yazan's notebooks and all the homework he's done in his five months as a first-grade student. The distance increased between her lighter than ever body and wisdom burdened heart. She never came to the living room whenever we had guests to share the question "Who am I now?", as it went against the room mood, and didn't fit in with the smell of mercury and the neighbors' loud music.
I came to her one time while she was staring into the thin air in what became a daily habit. We stood by the balcony and spotted two kittens playing with a puppy in a narrow street. Above them, the roof of an abandoned house, a pigeon was building a nest.
"Hope isn't the opposite of desperation, you know", she said calmly "Maybe it is the faith caused by God not giving a fuck about us. Leaving us to count on our abilities to explain and ponder what is behind the fog wall. Hope isn't a concept or an idea, it is a talent."
I stared at her in silence trying to carefully decode what she just said.
"Is that it?", she asked while looking at the tablet of antidepressants "Give me that"
She then took two pills and went to Yazan's old room to sleep.
In preparation for Yazan's death anniversary, yesterday I went to ask her how she was doing.
"I wish I was a rock", she said "I don't yearn for anything. Yesterday doesn't end, tomorrow never comes. My present hasn't gone forward or back for almost a year now. Nothing is happening to me."
"I wish I was a rock", she repeated while looking into my eyes, a look of hopelessness "So the water would shape me and stamps colors onto me. Green, yellow, and I'd be put into a room in preparation for sculpting students to shape into something. Or just any matter that serves as a Launchpad of what it is necessary, out of the absurdist unnecessary. I wish I was a rock, just so I would look forward to anything."
That was yesterday, and today, I am accepting condolences at the same damn tent, for my son's death, and my wife's suicide. All of my past silence has transformed into anger. I am angry with you, Laila. You too didn't stick to the order in the long line of death, or at least how it should have been.
You didn't care about the order, or the people standing ahead of you, cutting in line in front of all the old men, ones whose loneliness residues in their blood to slowly form a nightly stroke. Or those grandmothers who whenever ask about the whereabouts of their grandsons, are shocked by the answer; he is no longer with us. The names of their grandsons pile up in their wombs like swallowing and tumors.
You didn't care about these children, who we try so hard to use the blood they left behind to add letters in the hope to write ourselves an explanation for this country that doesn't make sense.
Now, honey. You can go back to your place with your long rope. Await with all those children hanging from the ceiling of depressing rooms surrounded by secret trees like a rare cluster of grapes, that would have, had it not been picked before its time, created a glass wine. One sip of which, would have been enough for us to forget about the pain of standing in that long line.
The unbearable pain of losing a child is captured in that phrase. There are other phrases that place us in the reality of a universe where fairness and kindness are absent. A universe with no natural order. For Laila, pills are not enough. Only absence, her absence, will assuage the suffering.
A powerful story, @amirtheawesome1.
Thanks, this was pretty much the feeling I was trying to share with that phrase by paralleling the phrase "Rock heart" as to some it feels like rocks have more feelings/life than they do.
Thank you for your nice comment.
Hello @amirtheawesome1,
You use the particular to create a universe that lacks guidelines, order. There is no empathy that can save a child. No scripture that can explain a death. No science that can protect flesh. Hope is not a telant, it is a folly, and Laila will have no part of it.
As always, a beautifully written, affecting story.
Thank you. Whenever I approach writing these stories I have certain fear that suicide or death might serve as a highly-suggested solution rather than a fatal result. But I have also seen people whose only reason to live is because they don't want to go to hell (It's an Islamic teaching thing), as offensive as this may come off, but they look like zombies more than they do humans. No words get through, every hopeful sentence you share with them is shared by ten hopeless ones. I was hoping I could share that feeling here.
Thank you for your comment. It really does mean a lot to me.