Spiritual Stations

Station of home

Home is like a memoir; the thoughts I dread disclosing make it valuable. I wish sometimes that I could uproot my home, then hold it before me in the air and describe it. Yet how could I? In that place, I keep my ink from drying and my desk stands like a throne. Home is also my center of gravity; once it floats away, I disappear along with it. Time is truth’s archenemy, yet I can’t pretend lucidity without it. The past cripples itself time and again, snowing memories that dissolve once I try to seize them. I can’t brush away the bitterness of the past without salting the present. The closet is full of coats, faces and grim colors, and drawers where my mom hid sweets, jewelries and dim memories. I can’t try them on; they don’t fit me anymore; nor will I taste them, since they won’t taste sweet. I have changed so much that I fear the prints of my fingers would dent the surface of those memories. The ghost of the past raises its finger mightily, excommunicating the present and barring my path toward the future. The past! It was always coated with rust and old age. So where does my past begin, and when? When I hoped for the first time to merge into my memories, I wished I could draw a line before which the present ceases. I thought that through the creative use of tenses and conjugation, I could heave vivid images onto the unformed present. I failed, yet I remember well that my mom succeeded. She managed to create slots of time even in the tiniest space. She parted home like Moses parted the Red Sea and sewed her present in the past tense. I can still see her hiding events under her bed, memories in the drawer and arguments under the pillows. She cradled a gentle sword that nevertheless could slice time to its core. I can still see her waving that sword like a wand, hardening the heart of our space and then cracking it open so she could slide in another bitter memory. She battered time even while I was trying to pierce the present with the ungodliness of my dreams. There wasn’t much space from which one could spirit a second out of the flowing of time. My mom took it upon her to redistribute the core of life. There wasn’t much space; hence hiding became her art, an art or the art. How about such hide and seek in a room with neither furniture nor curtains? How did she manage to conjugate the moment that never was into every possible tense? How did she splice the braids of an ungrateful past, combing into those tresses the petals of a flower that she had never seen? She was fond of windows. Did she look out or was she waiting for something to come in? I don’t think she knew what could lighten the grayish neighborhood where I grew up. Yet I know for sure that even in rest, her arms were struggling to hand a new lamp to Aladdin, while she gently shook her finger at Ali Baba. I peeled the skin off my fingers, but the jinni never leapt out of the lamp. The closet was full even though I had just emptied it. “Go to sleep, Karim” she said readying herself to mop the floors, “It’s morning.” Morning! When did the night end? “It can’t be morning again! Mom, can’t you extend the night eternally?” But on reflection, how could she extend what has never started? I was the night grooming darkness with uncanny thoughts that I had the habit of discarding the following morning. Right in front of our home, the god of my mother was unfolding a new morning, peeling darkness off the skies and uncorking unsettled urns of desire and hope. I walked out cursing him for not letting the hidden mosaic of untold stories rest in peace. Why wake up, if my eyes are still peeled open? The morning proved bright, almost as bright as the eyes of Queen Elyssa. That Queen of Tunisia sliced the skin of an ox to form the first boundaries of Carthage, while my mom sliced a French-style baguette so it could feed a large family. Even though my mom cooked the same meals time and again, she endowed them with a different name each day. When the trace of a moustache wounded my face for the first time, my mother said, “The meal is still the same, Karim but now you can name it.” Sinless, I named the food around me as well as the world. Adam was born in me and though I haven’t seen my mom since, I began to decipher my reflection. Queen Elyssa took my hand and showed me a window, one similar to the one through which my mom used to gaze. “Look out,” she consoled me, “And you might come in again.”