It was raining the day she passed away. My parents sat by her side, constantly reciting Qur’an verses that she tried to follow with all her remaining energy. I watched her letting out a long breath, then everything went quiet. The next thing I heard was my mother crying out loud, and the sound of my father stepping out of the room. One of our relatives entered the room to pull me up to her embrace and took me out to the living room. Rubbing my back to console me she said, “take a deep breath, dear. It’s okay. It’s okay.” I didn’t realize I was crying. I was still trying to grasp the name of the throbbing pain that felt alien to me. Everything hurt so much to the point where I started to feel the air slowly being sucked out of me too. Until the sound of a table being punched hauled me back to reality. It then followed by screaming and whimpering. For the first time I witnessed my father in such state of devastation, I knew things wouldn’t be the same after that.
I was only ten years old when she left. I didn’t understand much about that kind of grief from losing someone and not being able to
see her again forever. So I just moved on. Little did I know that later in my
adulthood I would continue thinking about her. Images of her searching for me
in the neighborhood every lunch time, preparing a warm bath for me every
morning, or taking me to the market were playing on my mind like old movie reels.
It was unfair that she was in my life for such short period of time, when she’s
the one who exhibited the kind of love that’s reassuring; the kind that
established a safe space for me to run to. The love that I could feel in the warmth
that radiated off of her on that cold December morning when I was swallowed up
in her arms as she attempted to keep me off from hearing my parents fight. The
warmth that I'd been struggling to discover ever since, in every person that I met and places that I went – only to no avail.
I often wondered if things would have been different if she were still here. Or even when the destruction was inevitable, I would at least feel less lonely. She would have saved me like she always did. She could be the rope that tied all of us together. Now each one of us is slowly slipping away, and we can't figure out how to hold on to each other. And I might have been running away for too long I just can't find my way home.