love

In Your Home and In Mine

Painting by Guim Tió

He says I looked like a senior, on that first day. Something about my hair, or the way I leaned against the wall as everyone else hovered outside the door at 9:50 am, unsure of college classroom etiquette for our 10 o’clock lesson.

“Hi,” he said, crossing the small hall to shake my hand. This was normal. “I’m M.”

I gave him the normal smile and the normal handshake, “I’m Maggie. Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you, too. What year are you?”

“Freshman.”

He grinned, “Me too.” This was also normal. Freshmen gravitated towards each other like magnets, eager to make friends and party invitations.

“I like your Ankh,” he added, pointing to my necklace. This was not normal. Most people thought it was just a weird-looking Christian crucifix. This time I smiled back, pleased that he’d recognized the Egyptian hieroglyphic hanging in the V of my collar bone. When the professor opened the door, we walked inside together, and I put my stuff on the desk behind Ankh boy.

The professor immediately began to wave a copy of Hamletat the front of the class. M turned in his seat, glancing over his shoulder to make sure the professor was distracted before whispering, “What other language do you speak?”

I raised an eyebrow, “Italian. How’d you know?”

Ankh boy didn’t reply. He smiled a small smile, then turned to face forward again.

When I’m feeling romantic, I tell him that I knew we had a connection from the very first day. He laughs at me, but it’s not a total lie. It felt like I’d already known him for years, like we could skip the awkward first couple of days of weather-talk and go straight to the raw sensitive stuff that laces the insides of everyone’s chest. If I had met him before, it must have been in a different lifetime; in this one, we’d been raised under two very different skies.

~

“So you speak… Syrian?”

“Arabic,” he corrected kindly, under the starlit sky, “that’s the language they speak in Syria.”

“Right,” I laughed awkwardly, “I knew that.” I wanted to know everything but I knew how to ask nothing. I floundered in my ignorance of any country east of Greece, embarrassed by the fact that I’d ever considered myself worldly. I sat on one end of the roof, my ankles crossed beneath me, and he sat at the other end, his arms loose around his knees. The distance I’d put between us now seemed silly; but an hour previously, when he’d led me up the fire escape, the fact that he could recognize an Ankh had been overshadowed by the fact that he was a college boy taking a girl to a dark place on a Friday night. I tried to guard myself from the instinct to immediately trust him, but it was harder than I thought. I glanced nervously at the parking lot below, realizing few other people could have convinced me to climb that building.

“So you left?” I started again, trying to hide my stumbling knowledge of the nation whose name was constantly on the news. I’d never bothered to actually listen. “Left Syria, I mean. Well, obviously you left,” I laughed uncomfortably again, “because you’re here now.”

“Yeah,” he said quietly, looking down at his linked hands, “Things got bad. We were lucky to have American passports.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I know it’s not. I just…” I trailed off, repositioning my legs, “Do you miss it?” I immediately bit my lip. That was a stupid question. Of course he misses home–

“Yeah.” He looked up with a mischievous grin, his teeth glinting in the moon, “Especially the food. Maggie, American food is just trash.”

I burst out with a laugh, surprising even myself, then clapped my hand over my mouth and looked around to make sure no one on the street below had heard me. M leaned his back against the wall and I could see the Mediterranean was blinking back at me.

“It gets worse,” I whispered, “Americans don’t even kiss each other in greeting.”

He wiggled his eyebrows, “Now that’s a real shame.”

~

Maggie: Hey I heard on the news something about bombs?

Suddenly, the word Syria held so much more meaning. The morning news on the TV in the dining hall called my attention every couple of minutes. The refugees on the screen and in the newspapers were all M, M’s sisters, M’s parents, M’s friends…

Ankh Boy: Yeah Near Aleppo

Maggie: Shit are your friends ok??

Ankh Boy: I think so. Maggie I’m so angry. The news has no fucking clue about what’s actually going on

I didn’t either, and we both knew that.

Maggie: Are you okay? Do you wanna hang out?

Ankh Boy: I’m going to go for a run

Maggie: A run?? It’s 11 pm!!!

Ankh Boy: I need to clear my head

Maggie: I’ll come clear your head don’t go running in the woods by yourself!!!

Hey

Please?

~

“Jesus,” he cursed, clinging to the passenger door as I barely made the exit highway ramp.

I stuck my arm out to prevent him from smashing his head against the dashboard as I screeched to a stop at a red light, “Actually, if you get to class on time, it’s thanks to me, not Jesus. Plus I drive like an Italian, get used to it.”

“Hah,” he laughed his little one syllable laugh when he thought something was funny but was too distracted to find it hilarious, “it shouldn’t be too hard on me. You should see how they drive in the middle east.”

We watched as a beggar slowly made his way down the row of cars, shaking a plastic cup with a few coins. I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel and looked away. M rolled his window up and then dramatically locked the car doors. I slammed on the accelerator as soon as the light turned green, feeling oddly guilty.

For a moment, we were silent. Then suddenly M turned towards me; “Do you have mace?”

“Mace?” I repeated as I took a right down Centre Street, “As in, pepper spray?”

“Yeah.”

“No.”

He made a face, displeased, “Why not?”

I shrugged, “I dunno. I don’t really need one. I never walk alone at night.”

“So?” he demanded, “You should have pepper spray anyway. Promise me you’ll buy pepper spray.”

“Oh come on,” I laughed, surprised by his sudden intensity, “what’s going on?”

“Girls should always have pepper spray.” He paused, “Especiallyyou.”

I broke at a stop sign, “What do you mean especially me?”

“Maggie.”

“What?”

“Because you’re pretty!” he finally replied, almost angrily. “You’re pretty. That’s why. And pretty girls always get hurt. Not just in Syria.”

~

I awoke when I felt him move. I rolled over to my other side and waited for him to settle again. But after a couple of seconds, I turned again to see him sitting straight up in bed.

“M?” I whispered, rubbing my eyes.

The light that made his back into a dark silhouette was teal, glowing from a string of fairy lights I’d hung in my dorm room. For a moment I watched him; he was staring at the artificial light.

I pushed myself up to sit next to him, our bodies huddled together in the narrow twin bed. The lights were strung on the wall to my right, and he sat on the left side of my bed.

“What’s wrong?” I asked quietly. His eyes were unfocused, and the light reflected pale on his cheekbones. M raised his hand, reaching across me to point his finger at the small light closest to us. He parted his lips and breathed a series of words I could not understand.

“What?” I whispered.

He said something else, but I still couldn’t understand. Until I did.

“M,” I said gently, taking his pointing hand in mine, “you’re speaking Arabic.”

The switch was immediate. His eyes focused on my face, his arm went limp across my lap, “I am?”

I nodded, “Go back to sleep.”

He did so. The next morning, he remembered nothing. I wonder if he would have told me what he was reaching for in his dream.

~

If we had to move, we did so slowly: curling an arm around a head, sliding the arch of a foot along a leg.

“Do you want to turn the light off?” I finally whispered. He shook his head. We lay so close that the tip of his nose grazed mine as he did so.

“I wouldn’t be able to see your eyes.”

I laughed quietly, the kind of drowsy laugh that comes through the nose and lets the lips be, “That is so cheesy.”

“I also wouldn’t be able to find the door to the bathroom,” he admitted. This time I laughed for real, covering my mouth to silence the noise by habit, even though the house was empty and no one would hear us. I knew he watched me as I laughed, smiling a small smile he thought he could keep to himself. His dark curly hair stuck out in all directions, and his darker eyes reflected the honey light from my lamp.

“If this were your bed,” I started, splaying my arm out to the left, dragging my fingers along the tangled sheets, “In your room, back in Syria, where would the door be?” I don’t know what prompted me to ask that question. Maybe because it was his first time in my home, which inevitably made me think of his.

“Hmm,” he propped his free hand under his head, considering my question. I lifted my head up to free his arm so he could point to things, “So imagine my bed like four feet to the right, and the door in that corner. And this here,” for a moment his voice was quiet, a sad kind of dreamy as he waved his hand in front of my two, single-paned windows, “This was a huge, curved window that let me see our entire backyard.”

I forced myself to look away from him and to my wall, imagining what he could clearly see behind his eyelids. I rested the side of my head against my knuckle, playing with the silver chain around his neck as he continued.

“Your sister told me you have a basketball hoop?” I asked timidly, careful to say haveinstead of had. Still, I was nervous.

“Yeah,” he grinned, “in our backyard.” He tried to make the shape of his house with his hands, but then ran out of fingers to point things with. So instead he reached for my hands, kissing my knuckles playfully before shaping my fingers into a squared horseshoe shape, the floorplan of his house in Syria.

“My room is here,” he pointed to my right index, then slid his fingertip down to the fleshy part between my thumb and pointer finger, “this was the door to the backyard.” He grinned, “It was such a beautiful backyard. My parents threw my sisters and me a birthday party there every year.” He continued along my right thumb before encountering the left one, “This was the guest room,” he continued, “It has a huge furnace in the middle of it.”

“A furnace?” I demanded, “how cold does it get?”

“It snowed once.”

“It snowed? In Aleppo?”

“I said once,” he winked mischievously. “We were lucky, we could use our furnace the months we didn’t have power.”

For a long moment I said nothing, biting my lip. Finally I asked, quietly, “Months?” He was still watching my fingers, though I don’t think he was really seeing them. Even years after that first day of class, new horrors about his last months in Syria still managed to surprise me.

“My parents dragged a mattress into the guest room and they and my sisters all slept together at night. The cat and the dog usually joined, too.”

I relaxed my hands and nuzzled closer to him, pressing my cheek to his shoulder, “What about you?” I asked in a small voice.

“Nah,” he laughed bitterly, “I was too cool for that. I just slept with lots of blankets.” He traced distracted circles on my forearm. “Our house was so beautiful.”

“Your house here is nice, too.” It had sounded lame in my head, and now it sounded even worse spoken out loud. I knew he’d be upset if he knew how carefully I chose my words around him when we talked about his home.

He snorted, then looked around again, “You know, the walls of my room back home were green, just like yours.”

“Maybe it’s a sign,” I said lightly, walking two fingers along his shoulder.

“A sign for what?”

“It’s a sign that one day you’ll take me to your home, and show me your green room with the big window, and we’ll have been happy both in your home and in mine. Then we’ll go outside and I’ll kick your ass in basketball.”

I knew he was about to make another sarcastic noise, but then he smiled his small smile, touching the Ankh hanging around my neck to his lips, “Who knows. Maybe.”

__

Margherita Bassi is studying creative writing, history, and French in her final year at Boston College. She is an aspiring fiction novelist but is also passionate about poetry. Her favorite book at the moment (it changes on a monthly basis) is Le Cose che nessuno sa by Allesandre D’Avenia. Margherita is a big fan of Shakespeare jokes, coffee with lots of cream and sugar, horses, and working on a big desk next to clean windows with lots of sunlight.

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