True to Type

The four survivors

They call it aloocheh. A sour plum. I ate my first ones in Istanbul. She filled her belly a long time ago in Iran. 

Sometimes surprise is the greatest gift of growing. Just yesterday she told me that “these plants, these seeds, this constant talk is your second addiction.” I would like to argue it’s my first. I would like to argue that love is the witness of a stone cracked open after being forgotten about in the refrigerator.

I don’t know how to explain what this does inside of me. I don’t know how to explain opening the ziploc bag and seeing life inside. This must have been early January, just before the move. We ate those plums in Turkey last June.

I know the tree may not grow true to type. This also excites me. This not knowing. This mystery.

What I have been trying to say today is that this is life. When I walked through Arabi with both pockets filled with sunflower seeds, I wanted to explain the dangers of certainty, but isn’t that in itself another attempt at certainty.

Reading and writing and watching youtube videos pale in comparison to the observation of nature, to seeing what happens when plants grow together, to wondering what birds will come, to imagine this street as more than a haven for starlings.

Are these not birds once on a boat from Europe? I don’t know. I imagine. I perfect not the outcome, but rather the journey itself. And our journey is perfect. That’s what I want to tell her when we walk down the street and speak of Jesus and buy a book about Bob Dylan from non gendered kids circled around a table.

When she says, “You used to write me poems. Remember?” And then she says, “You used to remember what I said and you would write, ‘She said.’”

And when she said that I remembered the streets of Istanbul. I remembered how everything we ate came to me in the vision of a tree. I remembered the day she left and then her family left and then I was all alone in the streets. I remember, in that moment, never wanting a day without her. I remember moments before when I held a yogurt drink.

“You have to shake it,” she said.

I got angry because I don’t like being told what to do. I raised my voice in front of her brother and this surprised her. I don’t know if I ever made that right. I don’t know if I thought of her that day at the Hammam, when that man scrubbed my back.

I thought of the dead skin and the pipes through which all of this dead skin flowed and what if there were a space just outside the grounds, right around the corner from the Iranian Embassy where this skin might be collected and mixed into the soil and where worms might eat this and aloocheh could grow.

And in this moment, remembering that moment I want her to know the preciousness that I sometimes forget. I want her to know the ways her joy wakes me in the morning. I want her to see in the trunk of this aloocheh the love that I see, the way this is a memory, the way every walk, every touch could not come without the struggle, could not come without scraping away what no longer serves.

We don’t know what these saplings will do. We don’t know if they will produce fruit.

But we can watch. We can pray. We can offer silence and presence. And maybe someday, my words will show her how much she means to me, how the best I have to give her is a cracked open stone that has become a sapling in this moment.

You see, just moments ago, lying on the floor, her book exposed, she looked up at me. “I love good literature,” she said.

And someday, I will give her this.