“You know, sometimes I start to cry. Yes! I cry! Because I think that I’m here and they’re there”. My grandma suffers from advanced Alzheimer. That day and for a little less than an hour, she recovered a perplexing lucidity when she realized I was leaving her again. From the corner of her eyes, she had noticed the small black suitcase laying against the entrance wall. She stared at me, brows raised, sitting on her throne, her wheelchair, seatbelt holding her hips, perpetually ready for a trip that never comes.
“Don’t leave, there’s no place like Lebanon”, she uttered with an articulate, inconceivably clear tone, unlike her usually whispered words. Her eyes lit up with the purpose of a revolutionary, but my silence was a caress delicately shutting her eyelids, veiling her face with ache. She slowly crumbled into the void that sucks her in at each goodbye, only to release her upon the return of loved ones.
When she reopened her eyes, gray like a waveless pond, they were dull once more. Her entire face fell like melting ice revealing the deep crevasses of her cheeks.
Emotional pain is a powerful mnemonic and even though she forgets her family, the hurt of separation shadows her ephemeral memory.
“Don’t leave”.
My Saïdé, your memory is ours as well, we who have been separated from you time and time again. To all those moments stolen in your embrace. I’ll see you soon my darling, in just a few months. Yes, it's a promise. You'll see how time runs to unite us again.
