Ma,

Let me begin again. 

It was October. Another country burning on TV. The sky falls again and again, until the clouds forget they’re even blue. Somewhere, a child learns how to brace his frail body when the explosion comes long before his teeth, tethered by grief and hunger, learns to say mother. 

Somewhere, the ground swallows a name and can’t spit it back, the earth, torn wide, its resting children ripped from their shallow beds. 

That one time, with his fists, shouting in the middle of August, kissed the soft flesh on my cheek so hard the world blinked. Sunset beneath my feet, the light folded. The room, in all its silence, trembled like skin. 

When I tasted iron, I thought it was love learning to leave my mouth.

He was as angry as a country, Ma. He had it in many names — a defense, a counterattack. 

But how could a child of four, who knew nothing but to remove mash potatoes stuck between his teeth, with his tongue you raised not with a language but of pure obedience, ever know how to fight? 

I remember how you stood, eyes wide open. Shaking in that kitchen. What hurts, from those knuckles, wasn’t the pain. But the silence that followed. Your footsteps breaking through the air, that night, as you ran away from home, from here — from hell, the sound of the door slamming behind you a punctuation I still haven’t learned to read. 

He shuffled the letters long enough and when my lips stopped bleeding, he finally called it a ceasefire. 

And, Ma, I think of that now — watching the men and women stand from their chairs, walking out of the marble room where another man’s mouth made a weapon of reason. 

I think now, the world is made of angry fathers and mothers who stitched silence. The world, nothing but an angry house, too.

You once told me about birds that migrate to save themselves. “They know when to leave,” you kissed my bruised cheek. “They can smell winter coming.” But Ma, what happens when winter isn’t a season, but a man?

How can you leave when the sky is not a sky, but a land?

You walked out, yes. But the dead are still dying. The world is still burning, Ma.

He is still here. Him. Here, exactly where I am.

I’ve learned, therefore, that somewhere isn’t exactly a separate place in the globe cradled by war. 

Somewhere is also here. 

I watch the birds crossing the sky and wonder if they ever mistake smoke for clouds, if they ever circle too long above what used to be home. 

It’s strange, Ma — how leaving can look like mercy, but mercy never seems to reach the ones still bleeding.

I think of that little boy, of me, of a child living in that somewhere — calling for his mother in a language even God has stopped translating.

You once said that the body remembers what the mouth forgets. Then maybe this is memory too — the way a building bends before breaking, the way a prayer keeps its shape long after the voice is gone. 

How else do we grieve over our shadows melting but to fold the skin to the good part — you, narrating about the birds, mumbling, “they’ll come back, they’ll come back.”