LITMIR.BIZ

       Seven Shorts

       A Future Hope

      When I was born, the story goes, my young and inexperienced mother was frightened of the sudden and new responsibilities I represented. It was my grandmother who nurtured me and raised us both until we were able to move into our own as mother and daughter. I was named after my grandmother, a fact of my life that filled me with a strange and glorious feeling. Sharing her name brought me close to something transcendent. It made me feel both young and old: a girl living next to a future version of herself, evident in my grandmother’s aged, loving figure. I remember moments of pure delight when a neighbor or a relative would call out my name, and she would answer. That response felt like an answer from my future self to the one in the present. I had no words to articulate this back then, of course. I thought of it as a game, a joyful one.

      My grandmother and I were especially close. The first real devastation of my young life was leaving her and my grandfather when my parents, my little brother, and I left Ethiopia for good. She was my first definition of love and compassion, so when she gave me a bracelet when I was twelve years old during one of my visits back, I knew she was giving me tangible, solid proof of our bond. She asked me to wear it all the time to remember her while I was in America.

      The bracelet, a thin and delicate band of gold, had faint scratches that spoke of its age. It pressed gently against my palm as I held it, both fragile and durable at the same time. As I balanced it in my hand, I was so moved that I could not speak except to say, “I’ll never take it off, I promise.”

      My mother was sitting with us. “Let me have it first,” she said. “I’ll give you the bracelet that your grandmother gave me when I was your age. I’ll melt them together and you’ll have one piece that’s joined and from both of us.”

      When the work was done a few days later, my mother slipped the bracelet on my wrist and adjusted it. I stared at it, moving my arm up and down, growing accustomed to the new weight. The bracelet was still delicate, but it was fashioned in a braided design as if two ropes were woven together, then melded into one piece. My mother reminded me of my promise, and I vowed to her and to my grandmother both that I would never take it off. It would be a small reminder of the two of them, of Ethiopia and family and the distance that had forced itself between me and so many whom I loved. It was a path back home, becoming a part of me until, as the years progressed, I could not imagine myself without it. It would be, I once said to my husband, like cutting off my arm.

      The bracelet stayed on my wrist. It accompanied me through middle school and high school and college. It graduated with me into the work world. And as the years passed and I returned to Ethiopia for visits, I noticed the way my grandmother would look down at my wrist and nod her head. When she held my hand, I often felt her tap the bracelet and smile. My promise was a silent affirmation of our bond; it was the expression of my gratitude for all she had done for me. I knew that my journey to America did not begin with me. I was well aware that those who leave can do so because of those who stay behind. Every step forward I made came at a cost that was beyond the parameters of money, and often invisible; it was visible in what my American life lacked: those dearest to me. On each trip I made to see my grandmother and grandfather, I felt my conviction strengthen: I would never take the bracelet off, no matter what.

      To promise: from the Latin pro (forward) and mittere (to send). To send forward, send forth, to prepare a path before one’s arrival, to push ahead, to charge through, to enter new space, to migrate. A promise is a shift into uncharted territory that we have no way of predicting. It is a claim made on our future selves by the person we are in the present moment. A promise beckons an unshaped world and attempts to control it. It is a willful suspension of disbelief, a naïve assertion that the future will bend in our favor and that what we call our existence is intractable and immutable: predictable. It is hope. It is also foolish.

      “What do you mean it doesn’t come off?” a TSA agent asked me in an airport in Italy. “Of course it comes off.” And she grabbed my arm roughly and held it tight as she tugged at the bracelet to pull it off my wrist.

      I felt cold air wash across the back of my head. Every word dropped out of existence except one: “No.” I shook my head and tried to pull back my arm but she held on tightly. “No,” I said again, becoming immobile. “No.”

      For years, it had been relatively easy to keep my promise. There had never been a need to take off my bracelet. It became a permanent part of me, like a birthmark. But I was in an airport and this was 2016 and the world had new fears and precautions that I could not have predicted when I had made my vow as a child. That day, in that airport in Italy, it wasn’t enough to say, “It doesn’t come off.” It wasn’t good enough to say simply, “No.”

      “No? What do you mean, no?” And she called someone else to help her even though I was too stunned and shocked to struggle. Even though the bracelet was delicate and held no weight at all. Even though my wrist was caught in her grip and there was nowhere I could go.

      How do you say to two agents holding your forearm and your wrist that there are oaths you will not break, even if your arm does? How do you explain that a promise made in childhood can solidify to become as sturdy as the strongest bone? That it will snap before it bends? That certain vows require more from us than others? That they form us and to undo their bind means to unravel completely?

      I cannot remember why the agents stopped their attempt to take off my bracelet. Maybe it was because they recognized my deep, muted terror. Maybe they understood something about precious objects that would mean nothing to someone else. Maybe they realized that there was nothing about me to fear. Maybe they saw what they had become in my eyes. As I kept saying no, they stopped. They dropped my arm and as I held my wrist, they told me to get my luggage and go on. I turned around and looked at the first security agent. I could not speak, but I would like to think that I didn’t need to.

      Since then, I have been asked to step aside for other inspections. I have volunteered to do so before I’ve been asked. I’ve said that the bracelet will not come off. I’ve said that it simply does not come off. I’ve said that I cannot take it off, and I have seen how those declarations have sometimes prompted recognition in TSA agents who then wave me on. I have tried to prepare myself, though, for the inevitable because one day it will happen.

      I made a promise as a child believing that the world would bend to my oath. I did not foresee the many ways that this world would try to inflict so much damage on those words—my words. Back then, I did not know enough to accommodate for the wreckage that time can exact on everything around me. I imagined that I would stay the same as the moment in which I made that vow: I promise you, I swear to you. And yet: what “I” remains untouched by life?

      Several years after my grandmother’s death, I found myself standing on my grandfather’s veranda. He was dying and had begged to see me once more. I could not travel back to Ethiopia in time to see my grandmother before she died, and he wanted to make sure this would not happen with us. When he opened the door and saw me, he began to weep and call out my name. And as he repeated it, bowed by the weight of the word, I knew that he cried for my grandmother. I knew that when he looked at me, he wept for the other Maaza who was dead. The one who was alive and standing at the doorstep was less real than the one who had left him behind. I cannot imagine what it was like for him to stand in front of me, on his way to dying, on his way to our last shattering farewell, and understand that his utterance of my name would also call forth a ghost. As I watched him struggle to regain his composure, all I could do was grip my bracelet and cry. To promise, to send forth, to migrate. To hope.

      —Maaza Mengiste

SLEEPLESS LOVE

      Jonas is sleeping: deeply, obliviously. Not I. With him as with all the others, I am the watcher, the wakeful

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