Fiction

He tapped his fingers against the soft leather of the armchair, staring at his feet. The woman across from him scratched her pen vigorously across the pages of her notebook, enraptured. Her black hair was slicked into an immaculate bun, her eyes dark, yet open. Holly Dao, M.D. “Do you need a moment?” he asked her. She lifted her pen, her gaze and smile flashing back to him. “No, we can move on.

There’s a word in Arabic, ghurbah, that one dictionary defines as “a feeling of longing for one’s native land, of being a stranger.” I think that feeling approximates what it is to live a diasporic being, but we diasporic bodies have no homeland. Mine is the history of the Jews, my ancestors who, through exile and diaspora, learned to live with uncertainty and placelessness. Not like my friends among the Kamëntsá, whose ethnonym supposedly means “people of this place with our own thought and language.

Heavy moon full and fat shines bright in the pre-dawn, stars surrounding it made dull by its splendor. No light pollution, no cities nearby to blast photons skyward and ruin the illusion of pristine wilderness. Deciduous trees stand vigilant and block peripherals like porous walls. It is the moon, it is the night, it is the forest, the unseasonable warmth for autumn is expected. In the summer it is unbearable, in the winter it is uncanny, but right now it feels natural.

Before the bombs, in my younger and more optimistic years, my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “Just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that.