Three days after the election of the 45th president of the United States, my mother calls me. It is late and I am awake. I am in a tiny, top-floor apartment at what feels like the edge of the world, but is actually 24 Pearl Street. From my front door there is a two-minute walk to the harbor, which is the end of the world, or an end of the world. I know this in an irrefutable, visceral way because three days before this, late in the evening, I walked down to the harbor and then into it, into the unrelenting black. I thought it was the end.
• •
I am, and have been, afraid of many things. Historically, I’ve been terrified of the following: open doors, dogs, spiders, deep water, God, Hell, ghosts, jinn, heights, the dark, sharks, cars, speaking to strangers on the telephone, speaking formally in front of people I know, cancer, failure, the sight of others’ blood, amnesia, vicenarian-onset of mania, hydroplaning, uxoricide, government surveillance, childlessness, rape, not being believed about rape, bird flu, racism, aneurisms, terrorism, love, love’s sudden and absolute absence.
My mother is afraid of next to nothing—rats and separation. So when she calls me in hysterics, her breathing labored, her voice sharp and tinny, I know to be frightened because she is frightened, my mother who is afraid of next to nothing, my mother who says you need to come home, you need to come before they get you, come home right now so we can leave.
• •
I am not speaking to myself, so there are things I must explain to you.
My mother is afraid because we are Muslim, we being her family—her ex-husband (my father) and four children. We are Muslim, and Arab, and she is not. She is white and so American, a real American, in a way we are not and will never be. She lives in a Michigan town where in my lifetime Klansmen gathered proudly, where crosses smoldered on lawns so recently I am certain I can feel smoke lingering in the air. Men who would gladly see me killed smile at my mother while she pumps her gas.
• •
I resolve to be braver, then stop checking the news. It’s a new year and everything is older than I thought it was, myself included. Each day the breaking update is that we haven’t changed. Something again about history.
To keep myself from walking into the surf, I read Etel Adnan. I sit on a dock on the far edge of town and watch how the tide plays fickle with the shore. Sometimes, snow. To feel the cold is to fear the falling apart of one’s bones. I feel something vast in myself. It is cold and empty, like a window left open.
• •
What does it mean to belong to a land? For those of us who live away from our private history, the question never heals.
• •
This happened, everyone leaps to explain, because Americans are afraid. The true-blue and formerly great. There are think pieces and Twitter threads and televised conversations in which intellectuals investigate fear as impetus. They make intelligent and well-reasoned arguments. But I am bored by American fear.
So what? I want to shout into boardrooms, churches, bleak forgettable towns of America where I am told to direct my blame. You’re afraid? SO WHAT! SO WHAT! I want to introduce them to the concept of an impenetrable border. Of buildings decimated in the night.
The intellectuals posit from fear comes hate, a shared blood.
Do I hate them?
(SO WHAT!)
Their fear seems so small I could crush it.
• •
I have learned by now my response to fear: to do nothing. An animal, I am told, I have three options: fight, flight, or freeze. I find it fascinating that there are beasts in nature who play dead when they fear death is near. Is that what I’m doing? Something draws closer, and I consider a calculated collapse.
• •
On the day of the inauguration, all is white. The sky blank as if God hadn’t gotten around to it yet. I wake and the future yawns before me, deathly possible. For the first time in years, I pray in the proper way. I wash myself, cover my hair. I weep the whole time, sand biting into my knees and palms, my own salt on my tongue. My enormous fear crashes against and over me, a wave I gasp beneath. Then abates. In the vague light, I brush myself off. I find the world outside where I left it.
• •
What do I tell you, you who asked nothing but are here? A year passes. In which I stop writing. Then start. I stay alive, and then I stay alive some more. I learn to drive, carefully looping a Mitsubishi in a parking lot hemmed in by dunes. I move away from the edge of the world to its provincial interior. I retreat further and further into myself and count my breaths and five things I can sense.
What is terrible remains terrible. Still, no one has come for me. Perverse to consider this a blessing, yet I do. When my mother calls, we talk about the weather.
Madison, Wisconsin. February 3, 2018.
