Amber Brown #2
There are no tears in me. I feel as if Amal has taken a knife to my back.
She just said our family is small, and now it’s even smaller.
It’s practically nonexistent. I want to throw back every sentence she said.
How could she do this now? Mama’s been dead for over a year.
Buried in a strange country that has no inklings of her home.
She doesn’t even have Syria in death. How will Amal visit her grave?
How could she leave her here? Haven’t we lost enough?
My phone vibrates with an incoming call I know is from Amal.
She hangs up and starts sending a torrent of messages. I ignore that too.
A small whisper in my heart knows exactly why she’s leaving. I just didn’t think I would be left behind like this. But my anger covers everything. The colors are chaotic, the gray weakening like I’m punching through it.
Suddenly, this city feels like a monster opening its jaws to swallow me whole. It took everything from me and still wants more.
I stop and look around, unsure of where I’m going. The white gate of Washington Square Park gleams in front of me. It’s a bright Saturday afternoon, and the park is filled with families and other people enjoying the very last summer days that are more sweet than hot.
The conversations around me create a lull in my brain, a sort of white noise that calms me. A man gets up from the bench in front of the fountain, and I take his place.
I cross my legs, pulling them close to me, and watch the fountain for a second before my eye catches on something.
My mural is painted on the ground. I look down to see that all of it is here, magnified.
Under my bench is one of the jellyfish settled on a strand of Mama’s hair.
Children run around the jellyfish, making a game out of it, while a toddler is stomping her little feet on the water bubbles.
A sob builds in my chest that disappears just as quickly.
How could Amal do this? How could she leave us? How could she leave me to take care of Baba? How could she just move to the other side of the world and start anew?
I’m leaving too, I think fiercely. I’m not staying here.
There’s a whole life waiting for me in San Francisco.
I will get early admittance with a full scholarship to the Opus School of Art.
I’ll graduate from Braxton, passing every single class.
I will get a part-time job in San Francisco and move into an apartment that’s near the ocean.
I will tell the jellyfish there about Mama, and they’ll pass her story all over the oceans and seas until it reaches the Mediterranean. Her story will reach her home.
“Jihad?” a voice says, and I look up, my gaze blurry then sharpening.
Jamie stands in front of me with an astonished look that turns into a grin.
This is the first time I’m seeing him outside school and out of uniform. He’s wearing linen pants and an unbuttoned white shirt with a turtle T-shirt.
“Hi,” I say, breathless. The switch in my brain from anger to surprise is jarring. The rest of my body needs a minute to catch up.
“Well, this just made my weekend. I was out for a walk.” He’s still smiling and then nods at the empty space beside me.
“Sure,” I say, still flustered. My brain is two seconds slower than reality. “How—why?”
“I live near here, in the West Village.” He sits, pivoting toward me. His smile falters for a second, and he squints intensely at me. “Are you okay? Your nose is incredibly red.”
I immediately rub at it. “I’m fine.” My voice comes out scratchy. I clear my throat.
“You sure?”
“I’m fine,” I repeat with an edge. “Sorry.”
He shakes his head. “I’m here if you want to talk about it.”
“Thank you.”
His expression softens. The irritation still hasn’t left my system, so I say, “Don’t look at me like that.”
He frowns. “How?”
“Like you’re pitying me.”
He lets out an incredulous laugh. “There are a lot of feelings I’m feeling, but I promise you, pity is not one of them.”
I hug my knees to my chest. He watches me while I watch the fountain.
After a second, I say, “Sorry I snapped. That wasn’t fair of me.”
I see him smiling from the corner of my eye. “Thank you.” A few moments pass, and then he asks, “Do you want to talk about it now?”
My lips twitch, and he says, “You can smile. I won’t tell anyone.”
I roll my eyes and glance at him. My lips fall in surprise when I finally notice I can see the color of his eyes.
Brown.
A warm, wonderful brown.
I think I’d like to paint them. They would look wonderful as a mural.
“What?” he says, self-consciously, rubbing his nose. “Is there something on my face?”
“N-no.” I clear my throat. “You have brown eyes.”
“Yes?” he says slowly. “I do.”
“What color is your hair?” I ask, and he tilts his head to the side. Frustration builds inside me that I can’t see all his colors. The red still beats in his soul, but I don’t know the shade of his hair, his skin, his lips, if I was right about orange being the color of his soul.
He scratches the back of his neck. “It’s blond now. I bleached it a while ago, but it’s supposed to be black. Does it not look blond?”
“It does,” I say. Gray has its shades, and I can see that his roots and a part of his hair are darker than the rest.
He pats the darker places. “Yeah, it needs to be bleached.”
“I think you should let the black grow out.”
His eyes glimmer, and I’m mesmerized by the contrast of the gray against his eyes.
They’re so full of life, I think they outshine the sun.
My thoughts surprise me, but I tell myself I’m looking at him through the eyes of an artist. Even so, there’s something so wonderful in being looked at with such warmth.
To have someone be there for me like he has been.
“You think?” He glances up at the sky with a half smile. “I’ll do that, then.”
My cheeks heat up. “You don’t have to do it just because I told you.”
“I don’t have to,” he agrees. “But I want to.”
The gray wavers before settling back.
“Can I ask you something?” he says. “It’s a bit personal. You can absolutely tell me to screw off.”
“Screw off?” I say with a smile in my voice.
“Well, I’m not going to say the f-word in front of a lady.”
I shake my head, a quiet laugh melting away all my anger. “Sure. Go ahead.”
His easy demeanor falls away. “I want to ask how you deal with grief as a Muslim. Like about the afterlife, and how you make peace with that.”
I blink, straightening up.
His fingers tap on his knee. “My bà ngo?i practices Confucianism. She raised my mom and me on it. There isn’t much about what happens in the afterlife.
It’s more about being a good person right now and living ethically.
The stuff with death is mostly honoring our ancestors during T?t Nguyên ?án.
I respect that, and I live by it. But I always wondered about what happens after.
” He looks around, smiling faintly at the life happening around us.
“I researched, but I wanted to know something more than facts from the internet.”
I stare at him.
He raises his hands in apology. “I know. I’m sorry. I’ll screw off. It’s too personal.”
“No, no.” I lean back against the bench, tightening my grip on my knees.
“I guess in Islam, life and death are very much intertwined. We know exactly what happens after we die. What happens in the grave. We know death isn’t eternal.
It’s just a moment in time, and the afterlife is what’s eternal.
It doesn’t make losing someone easier.” I close my eyes, taking in a deep breath.
“It’s more like something you hold on to while going through the grief.
We believe that the dead hear us. I know every good deed I do in my mom’s name goes to her.
I know when I visit her grave, she knows I’m there.
I know she knows when I pray for her. And it helps to know she knows this. ”
I swallow hard. “But it’s horrible knowing I’ll live the rest of my life without her in it. She’ll never see me graduate. I’ll have so many new moments in my life without her. There were so many things she had yet to tell me. I lost a lifetime with her. But you know what’s worse than all of this?”
He shakes his head, his face sorrowful.
“That there will come a time when this pain inside me is not soul shattering.” My voice trembles.
“That I’ll be able to talk about her and smile instead of wanting to cry forever.
I know this is a mercy time gives me. But I hate it.
I don’t want to forget this feeling. I want this anguish to always be a part of me.
Because how can I move on? I lost my mom. My mother is dead. She’s dead.”
It hurts to breathe, like I’m taking in winter air. I press the heels of my palms against my eyes, but I want to cry so loudly the whole world stops and listens. I lost my mother. She will never hug me again. How can I see the colors without her?
“You don’t have to hold back,” Jamie says quietly.
I can’t even answer him without sobbing.
Instead, I wrap my arms around my knees, hiding my face, and let the tears find their path on my cheeks.
My shoulders tremble, my breaths are choppy, and I know I’m making a scene, but I also know Jamie hasn’t left.
If anything, he inches closer while still keeping a respectful amount of space between us.
Just enough for people to know there’s a friend beside me.
When there are no more tears to cry, I wipe my eyes with the back of my arm. When I look up, Jamie is dangling a wrinkled tissue in front of me.
“It’s clean; I promise,” he says.
I accept it from him, dabbing my eyes and carefully blowing my nose. “I keep crying with you.”
“Well.” Guilt lines his expression. “I’m so sorry I asked that question.”
I snort, looking away. My eyes feel tight, stretched too thin.
“No, I’m serious,” he says. “I said I wasn’t going to ask you something that would hurt you. And I just did.”
I shake my head. “It’s not a bad question. We all deal with grief, don’t we?”
He smiles sadly. “I don’t think it’s wrong that a day will come when you don’t feel this grief. But I don’t think you’ll ever forget the pain. You’ll just have more joy in your life.”
I hope he’s right. “Why are you asking, though?”
He lets out a low whistle. “You can say I’m curious about the world?
This life can’t just be it. There has to be something else.
A way to deal with an inevitable pain like losing someone.
Or even to deal with the everyday grief of being let down or wondering why your life is a certain way.
” He goes quiet as if reassessing what he wants to say.
“I’m interested in religions. I know for some it’s personal, but I feel when we have questions like this, it helps to know if others feel the same way, you know? ”
I nod.
“I think about what’s happening in the world,” he continues, not meeting my eyes.
“Innocents dying and people never finding justice, and I wonder if this is it. How could their lives be just that minuscule moment of pain. It’s all they knew.
” He messes up his hair, smiling uneasily. “Forget it. I’m being weird.”
It’s strange seeing the colors in pieces like this. Like I’m trying to fill in a page, but I just can’t seem to do it. Slashes of color seeping through the endless gray.
He tilts his head, resting his chin on the arm stretched over the bench “Tell me about you. What do you like?”
My eyebrows lift, a smile tickling my lips. “You are… you’re something else.”
He grins. “Good something else?”
“I don’t know.” I try finding the words, but the sun is too bright and there are too many people around us. There are words I’d find if we were in a space and time suspended outside of reality. But sitting in this park, it feels like I’d be saying it to the whole world.
“But we’re friends, right?” he asks.
I think about that word. I give it such reverence in my heart, but I’ve known it only in rare moments.
The night when Alexis and I were ten and her mom let her sleep over at my apartment.
The summer day when her mom showed us how to bake cookies, and I got a sugar rush.
The maroon paintbrush Alexis bought for my fifteenth birthday that I found delivered in our mailbox.
Talking for hours on the phone when we started junior high in separate schools.
This is different. But I like it.
“Yeah.” Orange flares from the red in his soul. The color of kindness for me. “I’d like to be your friend.”
“As my friend, you should know I hate mushrooms,” he says solemnly.
“Oh, then I take back what I said.”
“There you go with your jokes.”
“No, I’m being serious.”
He laughs and glances at the mural on the ground, smiling. “This drawing reminds me of your mother.”
A zap of electricity sizzles through me. “What?”
He looks bashful, giving me an apologetic look. “You said she lived in a coastal town and on an island, right? And that she liked to paint?”
I take in a measured breath. “Right. I did.”
“I really like it.” He nods toward Mama. “I can actually feel the water on my skin, and I imagine the jellyfish are soft. The girl looks so peaceful.”
I lean forward, and my heart flutters again, crocus petals opening under the sun. “Really?”
He nods. “It’s like the girl is the sun in the sea. A beacon of light. I’ve never seen jellyfish like this before, though.”
He finally turns toward me, and I’m too late in schooling my expression.
He blinks but then lets it go and stands abruptly.
“Can I treat you to a drink? Hot or cold. Your choice. And I insist. If you don’t have any plans, that is.
” He holds out a hand toward me before taking it back just as quickly. “Sorry. I forgot.”
I laugh, pressing a palm to my mouth. After everything that happened this morning, I didn’t think I’d laugh for a while. This boy who treats me like the person I’ve always wanted to be treated as. I can see how the whole school would fall for him. “If you don’t mind my company.”