Fragility
By Saga Hamdan
Translated by Ibtihal Rida Mahmood
I arrived at the memorial hall, my legs trembling, my body cold and withdrawn. My heart still clung to the feelings I had the first time we met, at a crossroads in life, when you told me you liked my presentations. A girl at reception greeted me with a smile. I smiled back as if this were routine. She handed me a rose, and for some reason it reminded me of the first rose you gave me. I walked down the corridor leading to the hall, which was lined with your photos and those of your comrades, one after another. I began searching for yours among them; yours was the first, although it took me a moment to notice, just like all the times when I looked for you everywhere while you were right beside me, living in my heart.
They didn’t assign me one of the honorary seats. Perhaps, at your memorial, there were things deemed more important than a heart that had never fluttered for anyone else. (To be honest, it was better this way. I didn’t want to show my tears to the cameras and the press, those masters of commercial sentimentality. In the back rows, my tears found shelter and more sincerity.) Everything was drained of color, and my attempts to breathe became pointless, both in form and in function. I could have just chosen not to go. I could have declined the invitation. But I came on purpose: I wanted to set my soul on fire, hoping that the burn would finally cure me of this longing for you. Your mother sat there among them like a dove with broken wings. I didn’t run to her. I didn’t want us to press down on each other’s incurable wounds, bursting our memories open into tears.
The speaker went on with his presentation about you. He seemed to have memorized you in every detail, even more than I had, so that he could do this job. He didn’t pause between sentences. He didn’t, as you used to tell me, hold the emotion of one sentence and prepare for the next. Your photos kept coming up on the big screen. I avoided looking at them, not because I had already learned them by heart, but because I never could resist that smile, those dimples that always mocked life and all its calamities.
My throat tightened as if it had been caught in barbed wire. I could feel tears welling up in my eyes, despite every effort I made to hold them back.
I left before the end of the ceremony, in the middle of your father’s speech, just as his throat betrayed him and words abandoned him. Right then, we realized he had been crying, unknowingly, behind the podium.
I walked out with you still tucked up inside my sweater pocket, the one closest to the heart. Love doesn’t die when the beloved departs. The heart refuses to make room for any new sorrows or further accidents, and that is the beauty of love—and its ordeal and its stranglehold, all at once.
My feet carried me outside, perhaps following a signal from my brain, which was trying to keep me sane. The place was filled with your presence. You didn’t simply have friends or relatives or companions like the rest of us; only then did I realize that you had a people, and no cause with a whole people behind it could ever die.
I went out into the streets where we used to walk, back and forth, so many times that the stones must now remember us more than we remembered them.
Since you’ve been gone, places shout into my ears like a madwoman, refusing to be without you even when everyone else is still around. Instead of carrying my steps, the streets crush my heart. They still hold the echo of your footsteps beside mine, even though I cannot find you.
Places pass by me instead of me passing by them. Don’t you think it’s crazy how the universe plods on, business as usual, as if nothing extraordinary has just unraveled?
I walk into the same cafés, only to find them dark inside. I wonder how it was that your presence alone that lit them up and broke apart their gloom.
How could sadness paint our faces with such skill? Have you ever noticed how walls grow solemn? How doors lose their shape? How small details break down at the departure of their carrier? I won’t go back to me, I simply can’t. Don’t try to convince me to get over what’s happened and move on because life goes on. Life surely does go on, but we are the issue, our hearts are the problem. Our minds lag behind, frozen, while life sprints forward. We stand pale while the sun is followed by the moon, and the universe keeps spinning, unstoppable. After the darkness of the night comes the sunrise, fruit peddlers push around their barrows, people go out into the streets, each to their own—students to their studies, employees to their jobs. Children play. Elders pray. But can you imagine how people still manage to laugh? You’re the only one standing still, and everything around you rushes towards its marvelous demise.
How does one even begin to describe what rages inside, all these storms of the heart, all these shifts in one’s inner weather? At what depth of sorrow do even the richest words—with all their letters, languages, poems, and rhymes, and rhythms—become too small?
Didn’t you once tell me that some things are simply indescribable, too deep and too grand for analysis and description? That day, we were talking about home, as we sat by my favorite beach.
You wore my favorite blue shirt. Today, you’ve left for a home I couldn’t possibly describe, leaving me behind, speechless, at the doorway of loss.
Back in my room, my eyes dart to the corner where a box rests between two walls, carrying everything I have gathered with your name on it—a failed attempt on my part to move you out of sight, forgetting that the eagle-eye of the heart never misses a thing, tangible or otherwise. The bottle of your cologne still sits in the middle of your stuff, half full. I remember giving it to you on the first anniversary of our love. I hold it close to my nose. Perhaps when you used up half of it, you had made a deal to pour your essence into the half that remains. Then I thought: Could the shortest sad story ever told be the cologne bottle of a departed lover, half-full and half-memory?
Saga Hamdan is a Palestinian author and social health researcher from Gaza, currently based in the UK. Her work centers on memory, survival, and life under siege and genocide, and has received multiple local and international literary awards.
Ibtihal Rida Mahmood is a Jordanian American writer and translator based in New England, USA.
Image Martina Stokow.