Starfish kicks as Jean eats her last bite.
This is one of those realities I never thought of, one of those realities I never thought I’d write about, be a part of, think of even.
I am spending a day with Jean, the soon-to-be mother of 20 who is already living a life. She touches her belly and feels him kicking, swimming like a little, playful fish.
It’s one of those realities that I could never handle, and yet envy, just a bit.
Jean is like an older sister who teaches me things my own sister wouldn’t. She has seen more of this world, more of its realities, its dramas and accidents. She has lived the American way, leaving her family and her California home, going after her dreams, falling in love, achieving more than one could ask of a girl so young.
I am like a lost puppy around her. I have the wrong reactions, the wrong answers. Sometimes, I have no answers. Sometimes, I don’t even make sense.
Starfish is a reality that I cannot envy. Motherhood is one I will always envy. Motherhood is a reality many mothers escape. Motherhood is powerful; it’s more than an idea. It’s unexplainable. It’s Jean loving Starfish already as he moves in her belly. It’s loving the thing inside of you, your other, your own. It’s loving all of yourself and all of Starfish and all of what makes the two of them you. It’s complicated.
I wonder what it’s like to be Jean. To have the power to walk away from everything that wasn’t real before. I wonder what it’s like to feel another heartbeat. I wonder what it’s like to love Starfish, sing for him, name him, call him and have him call you Mommy.
Maybe I envy because I see Jean and she looks ready. Maybe I envy her fearlessness as I hide in cowardice.
You can’t get more real than Starfish. You can’t get more real than a baby you may name Noah. You can’t get more real than a sonogram, a heartbeat, little toes and feet.
I part from Jean and her Starfish. At home, I make myself a cup of tea, turn up my music, and that’s reality for me…

Winds blow and the branches sway, the leaves falling violently, leaving us in bitter turmoil. The scene is surreal; we are disillusioned, disoriented. The winds push us back, and it’s hard to move forward, to push past the force.
And we are wanderers, dreaming. The winds change us, change the world.
We pray for those who are now gone with the wind. We pray for those whom we lost, for those who lost us, for those who lost each other.
What is left is more than sadness, more than a heavy heart. What is left is a bitter, unbearable, heavy silence. A silence stronger than the winds of time. Heavier than the forces of nature.
How do we move against these winds of time? How do we find our way back? How do we stop these violent winds, these painful drifts?
There is too much loss in our world. Too many winds. Too many fallen angels. And what we are left with is our troubled minds, our grief, our sorrow. What we are left with is heaviness and a loss for words.
Sometimes, even words can’t break the silence.

I don’t know what’s harder to accept: the fact that we have not yet seen a trace of real spring, or that at 19, I am still a stranger to Maman and Baba.
Or perhaps they are both equally hard to believe.
Our Sunday was soaked in a hard, constant rain that has only now broken off. Baba and I had tea together on the sofa. I put on French music for him because, like me, anything French makes him happy, almost content. Then again, he has always been a content man, or so I have believed him to be all these years.
Raphael, who sings Caravan in his charming, boyish voice, fills our silence. It’s the kind of silence that has become bearable, routine, a mutual understanding between two strangers who love each other. Sometimes I break the silence off. I tell Baba about something I haven’t told him before and he responds depending on his mood. Sometimes he jokes and is happy for no particular reason and we laugh together like children who are not in need for reasoning. Sometimes he is too quiet and the spark is gone from his tired eyes; on those days I don’t attempt to break the invisible wall between us.
Lately he brings sliced apples into my room and I feel a hint of hope. I hold on to that spark of hope so that I don’t lose what we have.
He solves word puzzles in between his five-minute naps on the couch. I think he has improved. I am sitting next to him because I like his presence, I like the smell of his cologne and aftershave; I like his stripped shirt and the oversize white socks. I like how he concentrates on the word puzzle without blinking an eye, tightly grasping his blue pen, pressing it into the paper forcefully. When I was in elementary and needed Baba’s signature, he would press the pen so hard that you could almost see a hole where the signature was. To this day, I prefer his solid, firm signature to Maman’s formless, barely readable one.
In the end, we are back to where we were before. Baba in his world of contentment and acceptance, me in my world of dreams. We are a world apart, but no longer by oceans. We are together, even when our thoughts are worlds apart. We are together, even as strangers. I can reach out to him and hold his hand. He can reach out to me and hold mine. And as strange as that might be, as obscure and ambiguous our worlds are, we will never have to endure the tumultuous waves that once separated us.

I miss the sun. I miss the unreasonable happiness, the contentment, the satisfaction of morning sunshine, my missing peace.
So I bury my head under the covers, and stare at my ceiling, thinking of nothing. And I wake up, not wanting to, only to pass the time in languor and laziness. I wake up to be yet awakened by a cup of coffee, the one thing that brings a smile to my gloomy, sunless face. I then realize that I have yet to finish readings or papers, that I have yet to do the week’s laundry or empty my room of dirty clothes or take out the trash.
I find 19 to be an age of excuses, of irresponsible, immature acts, of mishaps that are finding their ways in. I find 19 to be an unbearable time line, a border between freedom and mature responsibility. I find 19 irrelevant to my needs, dull and bland.
Sleep is becoming the only great part of my days. I get to sleep without being. Without the thoughts. So I sleep and everything else is whatever.