The Little Things by Zeina Jana

  She was standing by the window, her forehead just an inch away from the windowpane. Her breath fogged the glass and blurred her vision. She watched as the sun set slowly into the sea, unaware of the passing minutes but fully cognizant of the flaring disc illumining what remained of the day. Steam rose from a cup of tea on the sill by her waist, scalding her elbow and the fingers on which it rested. She felt the burn indifferently and let it graze her skin. Nothing burned harder than what was burning in her chest. The tea would eventually cool down and the steam would die. The burning would then disappear, leaving behind no marks or scars. The discomfort caused by the steam was transient, fleeting, one that would’ve disappeared if she’d simply chosen to move, unlike what was simmering in her chest. If only all pains disappeared if one simply chose to move.

She let the heat scald her skin. She could not pinpoint what the purpose was, but she let it. Wisps rose from the teacup and vanished into the air. Her eyes followed their ascent, their death and rebirth, until the cooing of a pigeon brought her back and she slid the white porcelain saucer a little across the sill.

She didn’t move for the next five minutes. Her body felt stiff and her breath was heavy. Her eyes travelled down to the iron gate in front of her building, then out to the neighbourhood, to the parked cars across the street, all the way to the grocery store and the closed bakery around the corner. From memory, she could smell the wet bundles of parsleys being delivered early in the morning and the freshly baked bread coming out of the oven. Warm and sweet and savoury. The intimate normality of it all was gut-wrenching, too much to endure. Two cars had heaps of luggage and mattresses tied to their roofs. Over her head was the sky, clear yet tainted with the foreign winged objects which also haunted her dreams. Birds flew freely, unbothered by the sonic booms and the buzzing of the reconnaissance drones which disrupted their peace. And how freely they seemed to fly knowing very well that they could easily return whenever they wished to.

She looked ahead, far deep into the horizon, and her eyes were fixed on the sea again. It wasn’t that nearby. She didn’t have a flat overlooking the sea. How nice that would’ve been. She would’ve postponed everything she was doing and gone down to take a stroll to ease her mind. She would’ve dipped her feet in the sultry sands of September and moved them around in the shape of her name.

Her lungs tightened at the involuntary return of flashbacks. Ones she’d thought no longer existed within the deep layers of her subconscious. A childhood memory in this very sea but the picture of a different shore. Her father holding her by the wrists, lifting her up and helping her walk against the charge of waves. Her mother calling for them to come out of the water. The same glowing disc setting in the background. Laughter. No, chuckles. Those of a six-year-old, mingled with the sound of tides. Waves crash against a rock. Seagulls fly away. It was one thing to revisit a memory knowing its setting was safe where it had been left, and another to revisit a memory knowing that its setting could be desecrated. When she was out of the reverie, her hand was around her neck…

With an open palm she wiped the fog downwards and saw her reflection in the glass. Behind it the sky was an expanse of dark blue, the sea one of a blazing fire. The glowing disc was no longer visible, and just as she was contemplating how she could not determine where the sky ended and where the sea began, her thoughts were interrupted by the stomping of footsteps on the stairs outside. Her mind had been so preoccupied that she didn’t notice anyone crossing the gate. She looked around the room and became aware of the mess. She’d been packing. Packing everything. She picked up some t-shirts off the floor and nudged a strewn shoe towards the doormat. She cleared the table and tucked aside scattered belongings and plastics bags she’d left here and there. The knock she’d been expecting soon came and she asked the knocker to come in. 

She threw herself on the sofa she’d bought just a week ago and slouched the t-shirts over its arm. She could still see scraps of the plastic wrapping around the edges. With a spare key she’d given her that morning, her friend unlocked the door and walked in.

‘Still morbid?’ said her friend, placing the key on the console table next to her.

She laid back and closed her eyes.

‘I know, I know. These are difficult times,’ she added, closing the door behind her. 

When she opened her eyes, her friend was inspecting the state of the room. She watched her as she picked up a handmade tapestry she’d recently taken down. 

‘I’m alright. Are you done packing?’

‘Yup. Here, I got you the extra bag,’ said her friend, holding up the bag then throwing it on the sofa. ‘Are you?’

‘Not yet,’ she said, scratching her head. ‘Every time I think I’m done, I realize that I couldn’t live without that one little thing.’

‘What little thing?’ Her friend sat in a chair and stretched out her legs on the table.

‘Everything. How can you pack little purchases that echo a lifetime of mini passions?’

Her friend thought for a moment.

‘Just take the important stuff for now,’ she said, shrugging.

‘My books are important… I can’t carry those around, can I?’

Her friend moved her eyes in the direction of the huge bookshelf in the room. ‘You’ll come back for them some other day.’

There was a brief silence between them. They knew that there were things being intentionally left unspoken.

‘What if there is no coming back?’ she said, breaking the silence.

Her friend threw her head backwards. She was in a territory they’d made a silent pact not to cross into.

‘What if this coming back isn’t in our lifetime?’ she went on. ‘What if it’s in our children’s lifetime?’

‘Well, then, first you’ll have to work on having children,’ said her friend, looking down to meet her eyes.

She was pensive for some seconds, their eyes were locked the entire time. ‘What if it’s never?’ This was spoken in a whisper, as if she was afraid of giving fate any ideas.

‘You lied. You’re more morbid than you were this morning.’

She fixed her eyes on the ceiling, both her feet hung up on the edge of the coffee table. ‘What if we lost the people? The grocer? The baker? The neighbours across the street? Will coming back be the same then? I’m always getting a million thoughts at once. I’m so anxious that I’m constantly one second away from breaking down. I’ve cried, but I’m yet to weep.” She sat up straight and leaned forward, resting her head in both her hands and covering her eyes. “I’d very much like to weep, you know. Like they do in movies when someone has just parted ways with their loved one and it’s raining and they’re on a crossroads and they don’t know what to do so they just sit down and weep in the rain. They have to move ahead but they’re not really reconciled with it. That kind of weeping must feel so alleviating.’

Her friend had picked up the tapestry again and was caressing the stitching.

‘Will the neighbourhoods and the streets survive? Will they carry the same names and keep the same turns?’

‘You’re thinking too much into it. The worst may never happen.’ Her friend wouldn’t meet her eyes as she tried to assure her. Her fingers had found a loose thread to torment.

Her friend was right. But this wasn’t weakness or submission, or exaggeration for that matter. She was indeed thinking too much into it, but she was navigating possibilities. She’d been having these thoughts for days and she needed them released.

‘Will we ever have the appetite to chase new dreams again like we did in our youth? Will we ever be able to muster enough strength above the pain to chase the old ones again?’ Will sunsets and sunrises feel the same seen from a different shore?

‘So much for hope and positivity.’

Her friend was right. Recently she’d been the voice bolstering everyone’s spirit with speeches about faith and resilience. But the poison got to her at times, surging and crashing into the deepest corners of her mind, its sharp and piercing splinters slashing her imagination and preparing her for the worst. How can it not when she was a writer? It was her job to imagine the worst and write about it. It was her job to create something out of everything, no matter how trivial or grand. Who’d want to write about nothingness? Who’d want to write about how things could not go wrong? Writing about the worst possibility, even when it might not happen, was one of the best protests against allowing it to happen. She looked at her photo albums, her journal from elementary school, a vintage out-of-print book by a dead author, the little red notebook she wanted to use but was always afraid of wasting on the wrong kind of content, the football kit she’d bought when she was thirteen, the handmade tapestry she’d found in a flea market in a town five minutes before heaven. It was the little things that hurt the most. When you first buy something, it is not yet something. But then time passes, and it is always there, in the corner of your eye, on the nightstand next to your bed, on the shelf by your favourite bookstack, in your closet or on the coffee table, always there until it becomes part of the sum you are. When she’d first bought those little things, she naturally thought that they would end up lost like all things you lost track of overtime. When something is lost overtime, the loss has no substantial weight. That something slides away lightly, like the smoke of a cigarette, like a dispersing fog, like the scissor you used in fifth grade and can’t remember where it went, and that something dissolves before any real or significant landing, before it can find route into your stream of consciousness and torment your every waking moment. She looked at the little things that had become something, contemplating how they hurt the most. They’d been there for years, proof of how she’d become what she was, and shaping what she was still becoming. It was the little things that hurt the most. Not the furniture, but the walls and the little things they contained. They hurt more than the new sofa, more than the heavy coffee table and the huge tv screen which had cost a fortune. How she would’ve easily given up all of these fripperies just to keep the walls and the little things. Those little things that, as she stared at them, seemed like things she would be elated in her old age to discover she still had. They’d be in an old wooden chest she kept locked at the foot of her bed. The chest everyone used as a chair when they visited and about which no one considered to ask. It would have that twentieth-century out-of-print author her grandchildren never heard of. CDs of movies they never knew existed. A football kit they never thought their grandmother could recognize. They’d open the chest while she’s in her comfortable grandma bed, God knows where, and they’d ask about this and that. She’d laugh and sigh with deep longing. Oh, that’s been in there this whole time? How the days have passed… And the questions would pour down on her. You knew this… You knew that... Now who in the world is this.... They’d find her journal and they’d laugh at the innocent notes inscribed in the crooked penmanship of children. Enjoy the summer… Do not forget about me… See you next year… Then her grandmother-self would look sideways, smiling warmly to the only one who’d understand. She could not have come that far alone, could she? Someone must have been there to get to a room full of grandchildren. She wondered if she’d ever have the time to find the person who’d be her grandchildren’s grandfather, the person she’d one day look sideways to seek. She remembered faces of young men she could’ve given a chance, and she found herself with little to no regrets. In that moment, she remembered one face more clearly than the others. Most certainly a face her grandmother-self would remember in her old age as well. He had one of the most beautiful faces she’d ever seen, if not the most beautiful. The first time she saw him she thought this was a face one wrote stories about. He looked like one who could’ve left a serious impact, but that was the romanticism of the writer doing the thinking. He was striking, and she may have wanted to think the best of someone who walked around with such perfect features. Isn’t that the trance of beauty? What haunting grasp it has on our consciousness even after years have passed. We like to think that we’re above such instinctive thinking, that we’re not shallow, but beauty forces itself. And how it forces itself. It can cloud our judgement and convince us in things that are not in line with our reasoning. But she’d never known him closely, so he remained a face, and it was the romanticism of the writer as well that told her that perhaps it was for the best that he remained a face. Because there are times when reality turns out to be the opposite of what our minds create and refine. She found herself thinking about him and about what could’ve been if their lives had been different. If they had been born somewhere else or in a different time. She wished she’d known more about him to be able to write more about him. But his face was all she knew, and maybe his distinct laugh, distant and reverberating across an empty hall, and add to that the little trivia she’d overheard in conversations she wasn’t meant to be part of. But that was it, that was all she knew, and she couldn’t help but think how her grandchildren would definitely want to ask about him if they saw an old remnant of him in that wooden chest of hers. How she wished she had a photograph of his beautiful face, now a half-blurred memory, among the little things that hurt the most.