Reading Time: 2 Minutes
On March 4, 1996, a woman’s shoe soars over the crack of light between boarding bridge and plane. The foot lands with a jolt, much like the plane’s wheels will when they hit American pavement sixteen hours later. Clutched in the woman’s left hand, a rolling bag, heavier than the baby in her right.
The baby’s eyes are shut, as if she knows the severing of homeland is an operation one should not be awake for. She sleeps. For three hours, she sleeps. For two hours, she cries. For one, she watches dark shadows shift, melt into, and emerge from gray light, blurry against the decisive snaps of doors, the forceful suck of toilets, and voices—unfamiliar melodies punctuating the plane’s background roar—sweeping in hushed tones like water gliding across tiles.
The woman is relieved. This is her biography’s climax, the node from which the room of her life—and her child’s—will pivot, though her daughter will grow up none the wiser. Indeed, her baby will not remember the motion sickness of one’s trajectory suddenly swung to a different angle, the grief of watching kaleidoscope landscapes fade into cloud, never to be glimpsed again. This—this quiet, merciless break—this is what she has prayed for.
In the air, the earth seems to dissolve. Like snow. She shakes the hymn out of her head. The next in a line of converted kin, she married an unbeliever who would follow his own detour through faith only to descend once more into the clutches of the world. Though devout, her parents hardly sniffed. Qualified Baptist bachelors, after all, were rare. The man was modest, handsome, and brilliant. She knows he can bless their child with what her country has spent its last penny to keep her from having: independence, honor, a dignified life.
For what mattered most was the destiny that had drawn her to him in the first place. Like her, he yearned for a planet beyond this wasteland—a gentler air, younger forest. Together, they dreamed of stores fat with food, suns setting behind backyard swing sets, streets smooth as velvet. At home, she was smothered, loved as an afterthought. But now having leaped the nest, she could breathe with the gravity of feathers. Gazing at her baby, she imagined the fields, their soft embrace, pockets in which to plant her daughter and watch her rise. From now on, they traveled a new axis, one pointing toward a nation of blossoming tongues, where silence was a cage that could open.
Pin the summer breezeTo your daughter’s migrant hair
Kiss her name goodbye
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