N eating homemade granola: a glimpse from my forthcoming illustrated essay about food + family, for Issue 38 (EASE) of Chickpea Magazine
A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:
MONDAY
After spending a year with her at home, I drop F off for her first day of daycare. I told myself she’d be screaming and crying, but she leaps from my arms into her teacher’s without even a wayward glance. I disappear quietly, as we’re instructed to do. I shut the wooden fence behind me and walk home.
There were many times over this past year when I wished for nothing more than to be alone. To feel the pulse and thought inside me, to see if there’s any brilliancy left. Any original thought. Today’s sky is my favorite sky: overcast, a rumbling heat-stricken white, a beautiful nothing. Open and waiting. I still don’t know this city, not really, but I know my neighborhood, and I feel lucky to have a 6-block radius that feels like home. Beyond familiarity, which comes with time, there’s a sense of belonging. Self-declared.
I watch wieldy dandelions sway from street traffic, their seeds blown off one by one and wished upon. N is learning about thunder and lightning, how it forms when frozen raindrops bump up against each other. I feel like that now—bumpy, knotted, pushed and pulled. Electric. The scent of space follows me.
I once read that love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost. For so long I’ve been convinced that I’d lost this half to many places: childhood, adulthood and its suffocating responsibilities, marriage and its many compromises, my young children and the intensity of care required.
As I walk, it occurs to me that I’ve been thinking about it all wrong. Half of me isn’t lost, buried somewhere out there waiting to be found. It’s been slivered and sprinkled, each piece tucked away in the dearest of places—for when someone might need it most. A sliver of myself to care for my childhood self, a sliver to help my present self carry on, a sliver for my marriage and its growth, a sliver left with each of my girls. Many still have have disappeared or lost themselves, forever, in people and places that didn’t pass the test of time—but they exist somewhere still, as ghosts and memories, within pages and paintings for someone else to find.
If I could take find and take them all back, these tiny splinters and slivers would make a half and that half would—could—make me whole once again. But aren’t I lucky to have half of myself carried around in so many others? Part of me is with F, covering her small shoulders should a slight breeze come along. That small part will stay with her all day, and the rest of me will follow when collection time comes.
I walk the rest of the way home. The tiny fingers of her absence prod me along, catching me behind the knees, hugging me close. I am only half alone.
TUESDAY
One of the tiny books I made for graduation school was about leaving N at daycare so I could work, attend class, and do homework. It’s been two years since I made this little book, but it’s been circling my mind repeatedly this week.
My favorite thing about art + literature is that it’s a vehicle for transportation. Books can take you anywhere you want to go—and places you’d be afraid to go otherwise, including further into yourself.
You can read the rest of this tiny book in my journal.
WEDNESDAY
“So many of us are thinking about love specifically because we are thinking about sorrow. How to hold it. How to survive the deathgrip of capitalism’s man-made chaos. How to bear broadcasted genocide(s), white supremacism, police brutality, our government’s incessant, deliberate dehumanization. How to stay human in the face, the grinning lustfulness, of empire. Several times a day I think, witnessing ordinary people do extraordinarily loving things, isn’t it incredible? All of these people for whom sorrow is leading them to love?” —from Shira Erlichman’s Freer Form
THURSDAY
Why creative labour isn’t always seen as “real work” and how to write the unbearable story (via Nicole Donut).
FRIDAY
When I left, I left my childhood in the drawer
and on the kitchen table. I left my toy horse
in its plastic bag.
I left without looking at the clock.
I forget whether it was noon or evening.
Our horse spent the night alone,
no water, no grains for dinner.
It must have thought we’d left to cook a meal
for late guests or to make a cake
for my sister’s tenth birthday.
I walked with my sister, down our road with no end.
We sang a birthday song.
The warplanes echoed across the heavens.
My tired parents walked behind,
my father clutching to his chest
the keys to our house and to the stable.
We arrived at a rescue station.
News of the airstrikes roared on the radio.
I hated death, but I hated life, too,
when we had to walk to our drawn-out death,
reciting our never-ending ode.
—Leaving Childhood Behind by Mosab Abu Toha
xx,
M
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