Without reason, I lost half the words that lived inside me. I began to fear sleep—dozing briefly, then waking in terror without nightmares. I grew content with a body that betrayed me often, satisfied with gestures and signs, watching bodies stagger in the streets as if I were invisible among them. My heart ached, though this was no sufficient reason to cry. I walked forward on the road yet made no progress, pausing briefly to rest my weary body, but comfort never came.
My soul felt severed, and the cheap cigarettes I smoked evaporated into the air and the hollow of my mind. These were ordinary things, happening daily, repeating without dullness. I consumed them as I would food, water, or work. The truth was I had lost the ability to commune with my body. I defied sleep until my head fell onto the pillow, then slipped away from myself, waking abruptly to chase phantoms along the walls, pursuing buried illusions in my mind.
My body was defeated, my mind haunted by memories. I recalled only that I had slept briefly, attended work, performed family duties, and ignored cleaning my shoes— perhaps because I was searching for intimacy among things: street dust, particles suspended in the air, the clamor, and the trains departing with overzealous energy, then settling into rhythm as if retreating from a comma, the cars running chaotically. I tried to erase the boundaries separating me from dreams that had quietly left my life, leaving me to nightmares that attacked without mercy.
One night, I wished to become a train, cutting distances while committed to my mandatory route, screaming at stations where I would never stop, pausing briefly at key stations before leaving again. The thought occupied me for a long time. I watched trains from afar, yet abandoned the idea with unusual ease, sipping my coffee, examining my fingers, glancing sideways at an elderly woman crossing the street with painstaking slowness, indifferent to the cars swarming in both directions. Their horns screamed while she crawled toward a mailbox.
I inspected my crooked finger and tried to find my voice, to recover the words I had lost without winning free battles. I tried earnestly. I would release them violently, piercing the expanse of sorrow. A word surged, traveling a reasonable distance, slipping over my throat. I strained my vocal cords angrily. The word dodged me, sticking to the roof of my mouth. I drank enough water, stammered, swallowed it, and belched before digesting it. I gnawed my nails, trying to flee the elderly woman leaning on the mailbox, fleeing from my mother’s face—the face I missed so dearly. I begged dreams to grant me a chance to see her, even for a moment, though the black blood she had vomited onto my clothes lingered in my nostrils. She did not complain, compressing her pain, swallowing it silently, replacing it with a sickly smile. When it finally erupted, black clots spewed onto my clothes. I froze, even as I felt my first steps toward flight.
I rented a car and rushed to the general hospital, dashing between streets, pouring every ounce of energy into persuading doctors to examine her. Her head left my embrace only when I lifted her with the help of a corpulent nurse to a bed lined among many others, separated only by curtains left wide open, as if to expose the crowded bodies and their companions. She erupted again. A thin nurse asked me to fetch something and clean the dirty floor. A young doctor confirmed to his colleague, who watched me under his spectacles aimlessly:
“Probably a rupture of the esophageal varices.”
He asked me to bring an admission ticket with the patient’s details, then left, requesting a box of koshari with extra sauce from his colleague, ignoring the old man crying and begging everyone to persuade the doctor to examine his unconscious daughter. I stumbled, slipped on the stairs, and fell on my face while climbing to the internal ward, searching for an empty bed. I left my mother curled on a worn black-leather bed, groaning under the weight of days and the pain she had hidden from me for years. She masked her grief with her hand, offering me her spirit, pushing me toward high stars, giving me security when I rested my head on her thigh, patting my shoulder as a free compensation for orphaned confusion.
When she held me in her arms at six months old, barefoot, heading to my grandfather’s old house, she abandoned the title of wife to a man about whom I knew nothing for sixteen years beyond his name. Pain coursed through my ribs as I watched the elderly woman leaning on the mailbox. Why did I watch her with such exaggerated attention? Half the words remained imprisoned within me, and though this woman—unintentionally—tried to erase the short distance between us, oh! distances contract and reform into icons of memory.
This woman, unlike my mother, stirred me to enact a decision I had long postponed: to split my chest open and release the distances at once, freeing myself from the chains I had imposed, to drink a cup of coffee with the wind, to cleanse myself from fragments of memory I had failed to kill intentionally. Perhaps my tears flowed endlessly, freely, in the same torrent they had poured over my mother’s body on the washing slab. I received condolences while my hands probed my chest, attempting to obstruct the pain. I surged into life with heavy sorrow and half-caution, unknowingly propelling the counterpart of the words dwelling within me. I searched my body for the source of the bleeding I felt, obeyed traffic rules, paid fines I had not committed, attended work without boredom, sat alone planning my future, gave life to two sons and a daughter, and adorned my hair and beard with white.
Life taught me to dodge the small ones, to outwit their requests. I evaded my own desires, pretending to renounce cravings. Half my friends vanished, replaced by a steady chair in a modest café. I became adept at stealth, searching crowded streets for a boy like me, abandoning the chase for colored butterflies and tireless birds. Silence ambushed me, seizing me while I slept clutching my pillow. I woke in terror, scanning my room’s walls for fragments I could remember. Anxiety overtook me when I dozed, sitting with my head propped on the bedpost. I tried to speak, to ask my wife for food as hunger struck suddenly, but words eluded me. I gestured my hunger; she shook her head, not understanding. Despite our many discussions about empty children’s bellies and insufficient salaries, she continued watching an unknown series while I retreated to my room. I tried to vocalize words aloud; none passed my throat. I tried others: safety, future, freedom, justice, conscience, right, truth, deceit…
Finally, the word “homeland” emerged powerfully from my mouth, echoing between the tightly shut walls of the room. It was strong, swinging like a speeding tennis ball, yet it did not strike my trembling body.
