Three Migrations
A woman stands in God’s alley for 20 years, and each time he passes, the woman says, “If you have a minute God, I’d like to …” But God raises his hand politely, says he doesn’t have time to talk. Any other woman would have bowed, thanked him for his time, and left. But our woman is stubborn and won’t leave. The years pass. Her lover dies without her, the others who loved her once children grow tired of searching for her. One by one, they leave her city. Winters come, summers too. She loses an inch, then another.
After two decades, God is walking back from the bakers when he turns to the woman and says, “Follow me.” They reach his office with the cedar desk, the mosaic windows, the cigarettes, the coffee. God says, “Sit.” The woman sits, runs her thumb over the frayed hem of her coat. “Tell me,” God says, “what was it you wanted to say.” The woman lowers her head. She wants to leave, wants to return to her studio in the city, lay beside her lover, read her novels. God asks again, a little gentler this time. The woman shakes her head. She can’t remember anymore.
Instead, she rises from the chair, takes out a thick stack of papers from her bag. She ties it with a piece of string, hands it to God. “Just something to prove I was worth the trouble.” God says nothing, so the woman adds, “I spent the better half of my life writing it.” He opens the door, and just as she is about to walk out into the rain, God, as if embarrassed, says a little too loudly, “But I can’t read!”
A Life, Divided by Three
Over the course of a few years, and in no particular order, three migrations take place.
One is made for love, one for an urgent will to repair it, and one for the sake of etiquette when it has failed, like the half-bow a fallen dancer offers to the crowd’s forgiving applause. Our migrant owes it to love for what she has given, which she, the least deserving of them all, has taken.
Our story begins at the foot of a white stoned mountain, the valley obstructed by new buildings, the frogs, the snakes, the little pond gone. In a blue bedroom, a white cat walks over the bare arch of our migrant, who shifts her head, sees a man beside her. She remembers, without wanting to, their wedding from the night before. She rises carefully, neglects to kiss him the way she always has. Forgive her for her honesty. She doesn’t love him anymore.. She removes her ring, opens a box of pudding, splits half of it with the cat.
They leave for Italy tomorrow. She, being twenty-one, settles the matter easily. She decides her love will return to her there. She considers packing, glances over the gifts in the corner, then lets her mind wander to the question of curtains. She hates them, thinks they violate the purpose of windows. But they live in the mountains, with neighbors who watch. A pair of curtains would spare her the effort of clothing herself so early in the morning.
In another city, a woman changes the dial on a radio she found in a second hand shop at the border between Virginia and Tennessee. She searches the kitchen for a paint brush that hasn’t hardened. She brews coffee, watches a couple sitting over a rooftop. She wonders how much money a woman needs before she can quit. She opens the cigar box, counts. Not enough. Their apartment is missing something, a table, a shelf, a cat, or him. Maybe it’s just him, gone in the morning, and gone in the evening when he’s back.
In our final city, a thin figure lies under the weight of two concrete blocks—not there, not something you would see were you to part her door slightly and check on her, but something she feels anyhow. She studies the effort of rising. In her tiny bedroom on the outskirts of town, the television is always on, for company. There’s not enough noise here, not in this part of town. Her window looks out onto a pair of train tracks leading in and out of the city. There’s a traffic light where the double deckers pause beside her. She looks to the passengers at eye level. One elder man returns her gaze.
You’d never believe she wanted it—this extra morning she begged God for when her heart flustered suddenly and lost its rhythm. But there she is, beneath the window, bent over the page, the words not coming, not coming. Maybe, she thinks, something’s not quite right about my mind either.
***
At the end of three migrations, a woman is greeted by a stranger who shakes her hand briefly, sets her bags aside, takes her out of her body, settles her into another.
At the end of three migrations, she is the she we have followed, the one we have read about, and the she who is no longer she.
At the end of three migrations, I learn that each woman is a terminal I have passed through to arrive where I’d never intended. And like the traveler who misreads a train schedule and finds herself, through no will of her own, in a town she’s never heard of and decides, after all, to remain, I, touched by the same coincidence, have arrived in the harbor of a stranger, though the choice to stay or leave is not mine to make. I remain in the body of a foreigner whom I call by another name, and who insists on calling me by my own.
Many other migrations have happened before and in between, some of which I remember, others I am reminded of. Each person carries a fistful of memories to explain their arriving at a particular place, a particular job. I give you what I carry, what I’ve rehearsed, though I’d have thought after months of rehearsals, I’d have figured out a way to tell it right.
I believe half of a traveler’s story, the half that matters, is the one that gathers dust in the places they’ve left for “reasons that are nobody’s business.” A traveler can write all the pretty essays she wants about where she’s been. None of it matters if she can’t stand to write about the place she’s left…the cul-de-sac at the end of a long road of oak trees, the Sundays, the Mondays, the two schools she’s been to, one abandoned, one converted into a church. She travels with one eye on the road, the other on the father she meant to say something to. She leaves without resolution, without peace, and because she insists on it, she never truly leaves. One foot wanders through a market in Belgium, the other stands in the airless room with the thrifted couch, the goat that wanders in, the red carpet…
For you, who listens, I give you the unglamorous half, the half that is more I than the other half that flatters me. I give you the half that disappoints.
Sometimes I wonder if the gap between who I am and who I was meant to be is all imagined, a narrative forced over the one already written. Imagine this, a man strumming his guitar, singing by the harbor, a little bucket by his foot, and you with good intention, saying, That voice belongs someplace else, not here by the fishermen and the blood and the butchering. But he’s perfectly happy there. We’re the ones troubled and seeking justice for someone who doesn’t feel its absence. We can’t help it. We want to walk him, step by step, towards something else.
I tried to walk there too. I tried to be as I was in their mind when they’d look at me a sort of way as a child and say grand things about who I was going to be. There was all this talk about writing, about poetry. Nobody warned me about love, or that it could, with one sweep of its arms, toss me to the margins of this world’s single-spaced pages with its doctor-like handwriting.
And maybe I am happy here, with one pencil, two poems, and no name.
The Prelude
In my first years of traveling—when the road’s native language was something I couldn’t understand yet, when the memory was still raw, when each day I thought of my father’s farm, his wife, the awful billy goats, the mad peacock—any step I’d take in favor of the past, any effort to hold it down on paper would push the memories further. And when I was ready to rebel, to forget it all, those same memories would come running towards me over the sea breeze, more real in the present than they ever were in the past.
***
I would have had little hunger for the road were it not for the years I spent in captivity. And while the memory of one night is enough to send me into another bout of rage, I also believe those years gave me what I needed to travel well. It makes all the sense to me now—to experience a sort of freedom that’s unlike any other is to have suffered through its antonym.
It begins like this, one night my mother walks into my room, tells me to pack all my belongings, which wasn’t much at all. Later, from the front seat of the minivan, she explains her plan. Tell them you have to stay there until they pay. And if they don’t, I asked. They will. She flicks her cigarette, rolls the window up. They will.
That night, I stood outside my grandmother’s door, holding a plastic bag filled with underwear, my school uniform, two shirts, a pair of khaki pants torn at the knee. The maid opened the door, looked at the minivan driving away, then at me, then at my grandmother who had suddenly appeared behind her. And on this night, at the age of nine, another migration began in the sea of larger, more remarkable ones, first out of circumstance, then out of habit, and finally, out of addiction.
***
Suppose the conductor of an Amtrak were to suddenly neglect the 27 stops along the way, what delicate harmony of passage would be disrupted? And how long would it take to mend his error?
Then imagine an adult whose train has passed through the vast, untouched country of her childhood. The train arrives instead at an unknown station far before its time. She is angry, furious even, but all she can do is gather her bags tidily around her, wait for a cab, extend forgiveness to the conductor who has never bothered asking for it.
Still, there’s a sort of pleasure reserved for the adult who has never known her childhood. And this pleasure...how to describe it? Is it that I have not figured out a way to tell it, or is it that it can’t possibly be told?
It’s that silent tenderness I feel when I part my door at midnight and wander out into the street. I can walk into a joint that fries chicken 24 hours of the day. I can sit beside a man on a street drawing a woman in her sleep, wander into a bar, order a coke, sit on the stairs, listening, no calls, no warnings. Maybe I just want to buy some ice cream, sit at a bus stop. Who’s to tell me I can’t anymore? And you, in the body of an adult who has been well cared for, well loved, could you understand when I tell you I am lucky, so lucky to be able to walk to the corner store whenever I feel like it, to drive and drive just because? Would you believe me if I told you that to park by some forest I wasn’t allowed to walk to as a child and sit for hours is as pleasurable to me as hiking the most striking mountain in South Africa?
I am free.
It is still hard to believe it. Somedays, I fall into the same habit of watching the world behind a window, listening to it through a stuttering radio. Even now, with all these countries in my body, I have to remind myself, each day, that the door is open.
***
In those years, I was only free in transit, when I was being transported from household to household, city to city, country to country. I was free for as long as it took to arrive at another house. Once I was there, there was no going out.
Tell me how it’s like, this part of life that I’ve missed. What’s it like to be a kid, one hand on the door knob, the other holding a snack, maybe a sandwich with the crusts tenderly cut, not one you made for yourself, but one made for, what’s it like? Do you tell your mother you’re going out with the girls, not for the sake of permission, but just for hell of it. Does she lift her head, turn your way, or, with hardly a shift, tells you something sweet and nice and you go off your way and she hers? Does someone stand beside a window, watching you? Does she part it each time you wander off the circled cul-de-sac or too far to the edge of the garden? Or does she forget that you’ve left, who, her daughter, whom she loves, and in loving, lets you go?
There is no gentle way to say this. There is no love more loyal than the Arab kind, there is also no love more binding. It comes to you with salvation dangling from its fingertips, and with it, an ever growing list of commandments.
And we, the women of Arab families have two options, to be loved and obliging, or free and hated for it. We could stand firmly, our backs to the door, and say I love you therefore I obey, or we could start the car in the middle of the night, leave a letter by the kitchen, and wander off unloved, unclaimed. Abandon could look that simple, that tidy.
How could I have known then what I know now? There was, after all, a chance to return with the crumbs of my rebellions and be welcomed. The question of forgiveness is another matter, something I’m not sure I want to tamper with. But love is another matter, and I was growing weak on the roads without it.
In the end, it was as simple as showing up unannounced, opening the side door, the one reserved for family, and finding my grandparents on the couch. I tell them simply, I am here, I do not know for how long, I do plan to leave again, you must know that. And my grandmother, rising, knowing all of this without being told, guides me to the kitchen, sets a plate before me, and asks not where I’ve come from but for how long I plan to stay. I ask how long I am allowed.
And with a careful tone, her pleading eye turned towards a pot on the stove, she says, For as long as you want.
I never meant to turn my travels into a crusade, but I wanted revenge. I was a woman before my time, when the choice wasn’t mine. And then when it was, I wanted to be a child of the road. Instead, I was more like a raging woman running away from something I held in my head and towards something I had only imagined. I wanted to prevent my days, so many of which had already been taken from me, from blending into a mortuary pallet, the way they did when I was a captive child. I wasn’t after all entirely certain this freedom was mine to fight for. Still I fought. I could think of nothing else in my life worth the effort.
When I did finally receive it, it didn’t feel right. Some days it felt stolen, other days it felt like a boat without anchor, something I needed to keep a firm grip on lest it drift and I be left with nothing to escape with.
It took years to get it, and when I did, it took just as long to convince myself it is mine to hold, to use, to take pleasure in.
Three Migrations
Here’s the funny thing about love—it commits to its end and to nothing else. Each of us summons our own tragedy in the if that is either answered or not. If I say hello, and if he answers, and if he agrees to coffee, and if I gather the courage to meet him there, and if and if...then I will be his. I know what I am giving, what could be lost, which is nothing less than all of me. And in answering a short series of ifs, I risk losing what I am. With him, I exist. Without him, I cease to be.
Then, all the accidents that lead us towards the end we blame God for. How else to make sense of it all? How else to explain that the same hands that desperately brought a love into being also brought forward its end?
I was nineteen the first time I traveled to Palestine. I met him in the city of Nablus. He drove a 1980s Volkswagen, and it just so happened that it was his grandmother’s house I was staying at. I remember his hand over mine as we pressed a spoon over a plate of fava beans, how he kept it there even after all the beans had been pressed. I remember the time he asked me to meet him outside, how we’d barely gone five minutes before his car broke down, how he turned to me from inside a borrowed car as we waited on the mechanic to gather his things, how the sun bowed against his head when he asked simply, Do you understand now?
It is, I’ve learned, in our travels as it is in our little tragedies. For every city, every lover, every dream, every possibility, there is the one imagined, and the one that, with time, reveals itself to us.
And I could not live with the one that revealed itself to me.
Tell me every couple begins their love with the same naive belief that theirs is unlike any other that has passed. But it is true, I do not believe two people could have been more madly in love and had to hide it so well. At the end of that summer, he stood beside his family, each taking their turns to say goodbye. When we hugged, it was no different from the others, except for the subtle way he squeezed my arm. Ah...that squeeze, it was the touch of a man in agony, then multiply that agony with the uncompromising duty to keep it hidden.
We hid in dark stairwells to kiss, we took long drives to the highest parts of the mountains to be alone. Then, four years later, around the same time we first met, I was, despite my disbelief, willingly parting from him who was no longer the him I’d fallen in love with. I could, almost suddenly, no longer bear the hour with someone who’s absence once made the hour unbearable.
Give all the complicated reasons you want, in the end, we leave for simple reasons—his hair no longer curls at the temple like it used to, she abandons the habit of breaking plates when she’s angry. He no longer asks you out on long drives after work, she no longer comes to the door when she hears the sound of your car. But how could you explain this to the in-laws, your family? It must be why the courts offer us the sparing excuse of “irreconcilable differences” … it saves us the agony of lying for the sake of decency.
***
Around the same time the roads began to fail me, so too was my writing. No train could quiet the chords of hell inside me, no writing could loosen the unyielding grip of despair that held me in cuckold. I could think of no harsher verdict: to go on living without the only three sources of pleasure I’d ever known, travel, writing, and the man I loved.
I think, if we’ve been good, we lose ourselves in pieces and in such a subtle way that the loss is only ever fully completed late in our lives when the faculties have faded and what is gone is hardly felt. But for those of us who’ve been bad, who’ve made fools of ourselves when a prayer or dream was answered, it could be as unforgiving as waking one morning and finding it all gone. The pencil no longer dances against the page, your emergency cash supply for travel is suddenly empty, the man you love has left for work hours ago, and you’re hoping he doesn’t return anytime soon.
And what did I do on the morning I rose and found everything lost? I prepared for another migration. It made sense, then. I truly believed that among the unfamiliar faces, something previously unknown would suddenly be made known to me. I began with short, desperate travels. When I’d feel that dull tapping of one grey morning against the other, when I’d hear the drip-drop of a boundless sorrow against the pothole in my heart, I’d scrape up just enough money to leave. It was that impulsive, that desperate.
And there, at the other end of our love, began another round of migrations—
I am at the foot of Lion’s Head in South Africa. It is dark and the group has left without me. I am wondering how I’m going to make it back with no cash.
I am in the basement of an eerie family hotel in the empty, haunted winters of Georgia, watching a giant woman bend her head beneath the doorway to enter. I return to my room, push a couch against the door.
I am standing in a night clinic at the edge of Moria, desperately translating for a Gazan man who no longer wants to live.
I am sitting in the dining area of a train heading to Croatia. The train stops in the middle of nowhere. It is late in the evening. Twenty border guards enter, surround me, shout out at me for my passport. I do not know where I am, where I might be taken.
I am in Tunisia, sitting in the back of a pickup truck. A man is driving us into the desert, the sun is setting. I think there’s half a chance he is who he says he is, and there’s another half I won’t make it back.
I am driving from Florida to Virginia. I’m nearly broke again. I buy a loaf of french bread for the road. Four days later, I’ve only eaten half of it.
Then came the final migration that led me to Scotland, where I sat hunched over that lovely wooden table beneath the smogged window, celebrating a single poem wrung from the dishrag my hands had become. Months passed. I get one day of writing, then weeks of panic in its absence.
I decided that one of two possibilities would occur, either I’d claw my way back to my art, or I’d abandon it all together. I learned too that it’s much easier to fail among strangers, so I kept moving long enough not to know anybody well. When they’d ask, I’d reply, I am a writer who doesn’t write. It became something like a second name to me. Not that I had to introduced myself too often. I was suffering through the longest spell of solitude I’d ever known. I wasn’t even quite sure I still remembered how to carry a conversation. I comforted myself with an odd belief I must have picked up somewhere in those long, aimless walks. It is God’s will, I said, that writers make such undesirable company. It’s his way of making sure nobody tampers with them. I believed it too. How else could I have borne those silent months, those painful, sudden impulses to be held, to speak with somebody?
I thought, well, let me just wait here, by the margins of life. What if all the words I’ve been waiting for finally decide to arrive on the night I chose to live?
To make matters worse, I had little to show for my solitude. The thing is I believe every writer writes with a single purpose, not that we’re aware of it, not that we’ll easily admit to it, but at the end of the day, what we want is something to hold that answers our why.
Most artists, I believe, think that God’s just as troubled as we are. We can almost see him, one calloused, tired hand lost in his black curls, the other gripping a pen, his head tilted slightly to the right, his coffee, cold, neglected, scraps scattered across his table, the mosaic windows spilling yellow, red, blue over the shape of him.
The angels tip toe in their housework. The fireplace tickles his mind.
It’s the image of God suffering through pages of useless drafts, the earth not penned yet, not something he can work through. And in this troubled God is an alley to the blocked artist. It is easier to believe, to forgive his troubled silence as you sit there feeling like it’s the first time you’ve ever held a pencil.
And for what, for whom, this insistent effort, to write?
It’s not hard to explain. I wanted to be a name in a stranger’s mouth. I wanted my words carried in the mind of a man who lives in a far off town I’ve never heard of, nothing I’d find on a map. He lives in a one-bedroom apartment, he leaves the coffee urn on all day. He thinks he might be an artist, he isn’t sure. But he feels things, things he can’t share with anybody. I see him, in his bedroom, no lover, no wife or anything like that, just him, whose life here has always been the same and is suddenly not.
It’s not for vanity, but for the chance to take a stranger’s hand, walk him by the esplanade of his own world which I, in this poem, this story, have built for him.
I was once a captive of ordinary circumstances, the days mundane and passing and unremarkable in every way. Someone else’s words once carried me where my little body, ordered around by larger ones, could not. What wouldn’t I do for the chance to be the Greyhound a stranger takes in his mind? This man, who has said I will, I will, then didn’t, who purchased a ticket once, then hid behind a son, a wife, an ailing mother, a father he imagines facing...one day, one day.
Put Aside the Truth
Have you ever carried around a pack of marlboros just to hear your thoughts? Not that you smoke, not that a cigarette will do that. But say you find someone to split it with... a rambling man with more time on his hands than is good for him, a boy who looks too young to be smoking, an elder lady with a son who doesn’t call enough.
They don’t mind the price of a cigarette: two for an hour of listening, three when you need them to stay. Sometimes, they’ll even put down a share of their own stories, which always sound more interesting than the one you meant to complain about. Other times, you get the odd ones, sort of like my father, the kind that aren’t used to being spoken to, not this way anyhow, the kind that’ll board a bus with their last dollar just to remember what it’s like to be greeted, except sometimes the driver’s distracted and forgets to say hello. Then they’ve spent their last dollar on nothing.
***
Allow me to introduce myself by what I failed to be. I share the artists’ right to dishonesty…
I am a poet who has written the poem that matters, a woman who has gone where I intended to go, a lover who does not deserve her loss.
I am well, now. I have gathered the loose ends of my story, harnessed what has harnessed me, conquered what has conquered me.
When I look at a stranger’s face, I see only one.
I believe the pages of my life unfinished, mendable, a draft lying at the corner of God’s table. Maybe it’s even fallen to the floor. He means to get to it.
When I lie, I understand. I meet myself.
I am the poet repeating myself in the cabin, the woman holding her lover’s head on her shoulder, speaking to him in his sleep, the traveler guiding herself to the empty seat beside you, the one you intended to sleep on.
I am the woman sleeping in a rowboat tied to the oak tree. In my sleep the rope loosens, and I wake to find myself not here, but somewhere closer to where I intended.
I have drifted through the haze of what was once an uncharted, formless future.
I have been punished by the road for using her, and by love for using it to silence a violent tremor in me that needed no silencing and no company.
I no longer have someone to return to, someone I owe apology to when the impulse returns and I find myself at the airport, again.
Tell me, how else could I have discovered what it’s like to stand in the terminal of arrivals and departures and belong to neither?