LIFE
The wind that blows up from the
midnight valley is warm and smells of honeysuckle; the stars are glowing pale
like pencil shavings. Oh my sweet Carolina, welcome to the velvet times, the
ferns and bees, the driving with the windows down, the molasses months of
lemonade, the sugared times, the candied hours, crisp and spicy sweet.
Welcome to Graceland; welcome to
the battlefield; welcome to the age of innocence and the shedding of guilt.
Welcome to the afternoons of keeping secrets and the evenings of sharing them,
the mystery of bruises, the reinvention of the balcony and its bars, the smoky
blue view.
Come down to the riverside, and
welcome it yourself: set down your sword, beat it into a spoon, and eat of the
honey tree. The bees are baring their teeth and drawing near only to return
home, singing through the cemetery, speaking to the tombstones, this great
cloud of witnesses—the ground thrums with their heartbeats, for we will all be
changed.
DEATH
When my grandfather died, he died
slowly, as his body devoured itself. Grandpa lost his hair to chemotherapy, and
he began rearranging the living room of his farmhouse every night like an
auditorium, preparing to deliver lectures and speeches to empty rooms. Every
day he seemed less like himself, as if parts of him were being shed like yellow
leaves falling from a tree as winter arrives. Death does not occur on one
single day, but across weeks or months. It’s the slow fading of a life, a grey
walk toward surrender. And after death, the memories live on; the mind forgets,
loses its place in time. Our landlady in our last house in Kosovo kept all her
dead husband’s things in my bedroom: his shoes under my bed, his starched
Yugoslav army uniforms crowded into my closet, his papers and passports and
even a half-drunk cup of tea, sugared over and thick in the desk drawer. I felt
like I was sleeping in a tomb, but now, looking back, I understand the
haunting. Even three months after my father’s death, I dream that he is alive,
and when I wake up and remember myself, he dies again. I lose him again every
morning.
When I was a child, Dad used to
tell me when he shaved off his mustache that he had rolled it up inside his
ear, like a striped awning rolled up above a shop. As his mustache grew back,
he let me crank an imaginary handle on the side of his head, rolling it back
out of his ear. In childhood, things wax and wane with ease, like flowers that
bloom in the spring, wither with winter, and blossom again when the sun
returns. I would give anything to sit beside those flowers again, beside the
sunflowers and poppies in our Ferizaj garden, drinking sweet çaj with lemon,
sitting beside my father as he practiced his Albanian on our wrinkled
landlords, watching dusk settle in the garden’s corners and curl up like a cat
beneath the apricot trees. But those times have faded away, never to flower
again.
