For my first birthday with you, you gift me The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. You know I’m a poet and have been reading each little missive I send you with careful attention.
I hold the smooth, hard blue cover lined with gold letters. The pages are thin and I can see my skin through them. The words are the weight. In “Children,” I read: Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. In “Houses”: But you, children of space, you restless in rest, you shall not be trapped nor tamed. Your house shall be not an anchor but a mast.
***
That same month, when it is hot where we are in Texas but not so hot where your family lives, just miles away from where Khalil Gibran once lived in Lebanon, your hometown in the mountains is bombed by an airstrike.
You tell me in the car on the way to lunch. It is already night where your parents and sisters are, your nieces and nephews. The strike flattened a building in Aitou and blew apart the trails nearby where you once walked with your friends as a kid. The people who died, at least 22 of them, you don’t know. But in your mind, their bodies could have been your body and the bodies of family.
It’s the first time I’ve seen you like this. Hands holding the wheel so tight they turn white. Lungs refusing the air. A day does not pass without the throb of distance, of uncertainty. You’ve chosen this life in Texas, this path to your ambition, this story of becoming for a hardworking neurology resident born in a country thousands of miles away. But you spend nights with your eyes shut, deep in life’s longing for itself, conjuring the faces of your parents, your sisters so you will never forget.
If anything happens to them, you say, the rest of the sentence hanging in silence.
***
When you hear the news a few months later in a voice note from your sister on WhatsApp – Dad fell in the garden and hit his head. We’re at the hospital – you are also at a hospital 7,000 miles away, knocking on the knees of a veteran. Reflexes, good, you inform the man who has lived through a war. But your chest is pulled the tightest it can go. You excuse yourself. You tell your sister to send the CT scans to your phone.
In the end, you confirm what your sister passed on: The CT scan shows no brain bleeds. You breathe out. But you note something you’ve noted a thousand and one times before: age-related reduction in mass.
Why does the fact bowl you over? Time is passing, like water, through the bodies of the people you most love. And water, as every scientist knows, is both life and erosion.
***
At the last minute, the visa appointments open again at the American embassies in Beirut, and the ceasefire holds. The future changes: You can return to Aitou now this August, and you can take me.
The car ride north from Beirut to your house takes two hours, and we drive in the dark after the plane lands. We stop for Kaak Abou Arab on the side of the road, biting into the crispy warm bread covered in sesame seeds, sumac and cheese bursting on our tongues.
As the highway narrows to two lanes, and the steady line of buildings turns to tall pine trees, we approach a red and white cement booth with a tin roof blocking the road. A military checkpoint, you tell me.
A man with an army cap and a gun sticks his head out the open side of the booth. Under the bright lights I can see his thin brown hair, his hazel eyes. I think of your grandfather, who pulled up to a different kind of checkpoint when the civil war had split the country apart, and someone lifted their gun and killed him.
But tonight the army man who looks like you gives you a nod. As we pass on toward Aitou, I have the strange feeling that I’m entering a land I’ve been to before.
***
The house you grew up in is at the top of a mountain, with a garden in the back with tomatoes and figs and cucumbers and zucchinis, and a balcony at the front, that looks down and down, all the way across the valley, until land fades into sea fades into sky.
In the morning, I step out onto the smooth tile of the balcony. A blue sky stretches all the way overhead, and somewhere deep within the mountains a rooster is crowing. You are already drinking three-in-one Nescafes beside your parents, speaking your language I am learning. Kifkun, I ask, how are you. Khalile albik, your father tells me, may God protect your heart for me.
A horn honks and your two sisters and their husbands pull their cars into the driveway next to us, dust blowing back behind their tires. The children throw open their doors, running to you and bounding into your arms, then mine. Your sisters unwrap manaeesh flatbread with zaatar and eggs and cucumbers and tomatoes, and we eat on the balcony and talk and chatter. They have plans for the week: your niece’s first birthday party, a trip to the sea, dinners and hookah, brunch at your uncle’s.
But first, you take my hand and lead me from the balcony up along the rocky dirt road that curves behind your house and into the thick pine forests of the mountain. You tell me how often you walked this path, these stones. You tell me of the campouts and the hikes. And you tell me, when we reach a break in the trees and step out onto the peak next to a giant metal cross that juts into the sky, as you point a finger toward the top of the mountain just across from us, on the other side of your house, That is where another airstrike hit twenty years ago.
You and I stand there together with the wind against our cheeks. Sun beating down on our skin. Forested valleys and tiny red-roofed houses rolling out below us, tumbling toward the blue abyss that is both sea and sky. I turn to you, but you’re not yet looking back, eyes still on the land that is your home. I want to tell you, I know what it means to love something that feels like it’s slipping away. Instead I take your hand. Feel the weight of it within my own.
***
On our last evening, after a week of splashing in the sea and eating figs and nuts and cucumbers on patios and walking under cedar trees, we return to the balcony. The entire earth is lit by the sun, the orange orb that dips further and further into the water until it vanishes. We are joined by your mother and father and sisters and uncles and cousins and neighbors, crying and holding each other in our arms. All of us sitting there together looking out across the mountains are touched by the golden light. B7ebkun ktir, I’ve learned how to tell your family, because they’ve told me first, I love you so much. They pull us both into their arms.
Our car to the airport pulls out onto the road and curves around the back end of the house, down the side of the mountain. We wave to your family, who stand with their hands raised in the night, as if frozen there. A dull ache spreads in my chest, pulling me closer to the earth, rooting me in place, too, asking us to stay here with them.
***
In October, on your mother’s birthday, two weeks before my own, we can’t reach her. By the time you are out of the hospital in Texas, she’s asleep. Her today has already passed into tomorrow. You picture us sitting between your parents on the balcony 7,000 miles away, looking out at the sun. You feel yourself swimming in the sea, your nephews splashing you with the warm blue water, your sisters laughing behind them, their smiles stretching their cheeks so far that, it seemed, they could almost stay that way forever.
I don’t know when I will see them again, you cry into my arms. Every time I see them, they look a little older.
Something is lodged in my throat. I tell you how I hold it.
***
When I was 17 years old, and my mother died of breast cancer, and my house in the woods of Vermont split apart. When I packed up each room with my brother and dad, put the things into boxes, threw out the candles she’d lit in the winter. When we drove away for the last time and watched the red brick disappear in the mirror. When I ended up, alone, in Texas, where there’s no winter like I knew it.
When I think, what can ever be home to those who love with everything inside of them, when time and war and human nature, inevitably, fracture all things?
When even I, who have never been religious, ask God to keep those I love safe?
When I borrow your words, your parents’ faces pressed together in the screen on the phone, my dad’s voice on the other line – khalile albkun?
***
When, on our third day in Lebanon, you took my hand and led me from your niece’s first birthday party, down the bumpy steps of a staircase carved into the side of the cliff, out onto a terrace in front of a little stone church that rests over an endless loop of green valleys, covered that night in a thick, unrecognizable fog. When you held up the ring you had gone with your sister to buy.
When, instead of saying what I’d always been prepared to say, I sat down on the rocks under the tree by the church and told you about the monsters that appeared before me: my mother’s ghost, the red brick of the first home I ever knew, the debris of a trail with your footsteps still on it.
When you sat beside me and made your promises anyway, with the promise to keep promising.
When I watched the monsters disappear back into the fog. When I raised my left hand.
***
To live with the wound. I’ll never leave you, each of us tells the other. Maybe what we are really saying is: I will be your home.
Beside you, against the walls of the apartment we have just moved into, I open the book you gifted me a year ago almost to the day.
The author may be buried in the mountains just east of Aitou, his body slowly turning into bone, becoming the soil that gives rise to the figs. But here, now, I read the words that still pulse with life.
For that which is boundless in you abides in the mansion of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the songs and the silences of night.
The words fill the space between us with something even I can’t name.
Image by Laurent Tironi on flickr.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
