I came into the world in the early 2000s, in the in-between of spring and summer. My life has always run on transitions. Maybe because I was the third in a two-person family, third parties keep showing up. After a childhood you could call quiet, the rush of life at 23 is still rush and loneliness. Loneliness was never an add-on; it felt like one of us. I was lonely as a kid too; when evenings pulled everyone indoors I envied people who spent them with siblings. I never had a sibling for those evenings. Life taught loneliness so well in 23 years that now, when I am not alone, I look for it. It taught loss too, in a short span. At nine, in an August heat, inside screams of “can anyone hear me?”, I lived my first loss. Pulling my cousin, a piece of me, from under the rubble, I felt the word lose in my bones. I understood then that the lives we pull from rubble still arrive as losses. At thirteen, life reminded me again by taking my grandfather. And just as I was getting used to it, another loss came, as large as its pain: FATHER. Losing a father may be one of the two greatest losses a person can live. Even if he dies in your arms, even if you hear the last words, close his eyes with your hands, wash him yourself, until you set him in the earth you keep waiting for him to walk back in from somewhere. That large a loss. I accepted every other loss; years later I still cannot accept losing him. The kind of leaving that leaves your life short one life, short one joy, short one laugh, short one dream, and always one extra measure of grief. On a day like that you do not want to celebrate any day, and even the day you were born without him becomes a day you are angry at life. On another day like that, talking to myself, I still cannot say I am glad I was born…
And I am glad I was born
