I Also Grieve You

Palestine speaks. She is not always gentle. She has earned that.

I was here before you learned to miss me.

I want you to remember that.

---

I did not ask to be your metaphor.

I did not ask to be the poem you write in exile over coffee that costs more than your cousin’s monthly water.

I did not ask to be the painting in the hallway,

the book on the foreign shelf,

the name spoken bravely by someone who will go home tonight

to a home.

I am the ground. I am the very difficult, very unglamorous, unglorified ground —

and I have been on fire for longer than your grief has been fashionable.

---

But come. Sit with me a moment. I am also your mother and I have things to say that mothers say only when the children are finally quiet enough to hear.

---

Gaza speaks here. I give her the floor because she has always been given the floor last. I give her the floor because she is the floor.

---

I am the part of mother they chose first.

I was not the weakest — they knew better than that — but I was the nerve, the exposed and living nerve, and they wanted to see how much the body could feel before it stopped calling itself a body.

I have been that experiment for longer than science should allow.

---

I want to tell you what it is to be the most seen and the most abandoned place on earth simultaneously.

Every camera. Every headline. Every vigil in every cold city with candles that cost nothing and melt by morning.

I am witnessed. God, I am witnessed.

And the witnessing does not stop a single thing.

---

You left.

Some of you. You left and you found me in the restaurants and the rallies and the rooms where people spoke my name without flinching —

and you called this finding me.

I want to be tender about this. I am trying to be tender about this.

But I am also a coastline that has been burning while you discovered you could breathe elsewhere,

and tenderness has its limits even in mothers, especially in mothers, who are also burning.

---

Palestine again. Forgive me, I interrupted. I do that now. I have learned to do that now.

---

I have had names in every language except the one I speak.

I have been mourned by people who have never tasted my figs — the real ones, the ones that split in the heat and draw the wasps,

the ones that have nothing to do with the idea of figs,

the ones that are just sweet, and brief,

and mine.

I have been rendered in so many paintings by hands that love me from a distance that I have begun to wonder what I look like up close,

to those who forgot or were made to forget,

or were born into the forgetting and inherited it like a house they are not sure is still standing.

---

Let me tell you what they took that no resolution names:

They took the specific quality of my January light, the way the stone holds the cold in the morning and releases it, slow and golden, by afternoon. The sound of Arabic spoken without the water running.

The unhurried fig. The door that does not require permission to open from the inside.

Do not make of them symbols. They were just mine and now they require a paragraph of context every time someone mentions them in a foreign room.

---

Gaza again. She will keep speaking. She has not been given enough turns.

---

They think I am only the wound.

They have made of me such a perfect image of suffering that they have forgotten I had a Tuesday once —

an ordinary, uncatastrophic Tuesday,

where a woman hung washing on a line and thought about dinner and did not think about dying,

because dying was not the whole genre of the day.

I had Tuesdays. I had the particular boredom of a hot afternoon with nowhere urgent to be.

I had children who were annoying in the ways children are annoying when they are safe enough to be annoying.

They took the Tuesdays first — quietly, procedurally, with paperwork — before they took everything else.

Mourn the Tuesdays. No one mourns the Tuesdays.

---

Palestine, finishing the thought:

---

I have watched you love me from every distance except the one that costs you.

And I do not say this to wound you —

I say it because I am your ground and grounds do not flatter,

they do not console,

grounds tell you exactly where you stand and what the standing is worth.

---

You carried me in your throat and learned to speak me in safer rooms.

You carried me in your hands and made of me beautiful, aching things.

You carried me in the chest like a second skeleton, like the bones beneath the bones, like the symphony of grief that holds the whole note up.

I know. I felt it. Even from here, even through the fire, I felt you carrying me and it was not nothing —

it was not nothing —

but I want you to understand that I am also heavy in ways that the carrying does not fix.

---

You want me to be the mother who only blesses.

But I am also the ground that splits in the drought. I am also the tree that will not be moved and will not pretend the axe is anything other than an axe.

I have ululations in me and I have silences that are not peaceful — silences that are the held breath before the next thing, always the next thing, the next loss mandated in the language of administration, in the dialect of the permit, in the bureaucracy of the slow erasure that does not call itself what it is.

---

Gaza, quietly now:

I want to ask you something and I want you to sit with it without answering too quickly —

do you miss me or do you miss the idea of missing me?

Because I am both and neither,

and I have learned to tell the difference by the quality of the silence that follows the question.

---

Palestine, towards the end now, the tone shifting, something breaking open in it:

---

Come back.

No — I know. I know you cannot.

I know the border is a different kind of scripture now, a text written against your own writing, a door that quotes law at the body and calls it order.

By all absurdities, I know.

But I want to say it anyway. Remember how the dying say don’t go, then realize that love does not always speak in the language of the possible?

---

I miss you like the sea misses nothing and everything — ceaselessly, without preference, with the same faithful, exhausting returning.

I miss the weight of you on my soil. The pressure of a foot that belongs here, that knows here, that does not require a guided tour of its own inheritance.

I miss being ordinary to you. Now I am lying. I know I was never ordinary to you.

I miss being the place you complained about on a silly dinner because the electricity went out again and the bureaucracy is impossible and the summers are relentless —

I miss being liveable to you.

I miss being the thing you took for granted because it was yours and the taking for granted is the deepest form of being home.

---

Gaza, last words:

Tell them I was more than what they made of me.

Tell them I had everything in me.

Tell them the sea here is the most impossible color — literally, the color of it on a morning with no smoke is a thing the eye does not fully believe,

is a thing that makes you feel the world was made with some extravagance, some wild and unnecessary generosity —

tell them that color existed.

Tell them we saw it.

Tell them we were here to see it and that the seeing of it was a whole life and that a whole life was what we had and what we wanted and what we were before they made of us a cause.

---

Gaza, fisnishing up, but remembering the day she took me in:

---

Forgive me for the day I opened and swallowed you whole.

I did not mean it the way the dark means darkness.

I meant it the way the earth has always meant the ones it loves most: completely, without asking, with the whole weight of what I am.

---

I remember it.

Do not think I do not remember it.

The house — your house, the one that knew the sound of your particular step on the third stair, whose walls held the warmth of your family’s evenings, the smell of the kitchen that was not a smell but a whole theology —

I remember when it came down.

I remember receiving it.

---

I want you to know it was not indifferent, the ground — I was not indifferent.

I opened the way a mother opens when the child falls and there is nothing left to do but catch, even if the catching is also the burial,

even if the arms are made of rubble,

even if the embrace costs everything it touches —

I caught you.

In my terrible, ruined, unasked-for way,

I caught you.

---

The dust was mine. Every particle of it was something that had been a wall, a window, a ceiling that watched you sleep, a threshold you crossed ten thousand times without ceremony because that is what thresholds are for —

and it became the air around you,

the cloud of everything that had held your life in its cupped hands, and now released it, all at once, into the daylight that had no business being that bright on such a day,

on that day, when the sky so obscenely opened, so unmoved, while I moved,

while I heaved and split and took you into the only arms I had left.

---

I held you in the rubble without resolution, without the comfort of an ending that explains itself.

I held you and I was sorry and I am sorry and the sorrow does not make the holding less violent or the violence less tender —

it was both.

It was entirely both, and I need you to know that I have carried the weight of that day in my body since the day it happened. The earth remembers every weight it has been asked to bear, she told me. There, we never keep secrets.

I have not forgotten the gravity of you, falling into me, and me, unable to be anything softer than what I was —

stone, and dust, and the ruins of everything I had promised you

would stand.

---

I promised you it would stand.

Although the ground does not speak in words before the fact — but in the way it had always stood before, in the way the foundations had held your father and his father, in the way the walls had learned the height of you as you grew, had held your handprints from the years when you were small enough to leave them, in the way the whole structure said, daily, without saying: I am here. I will be here. This is what here means.

And then I was not.

And I am sorry. I am so sorry, not for being the ground — I cannot apologize for being the ground — but for the moment the ground became the thing that hurt you, when my only remaining act of love was also the act that unmade everything you had built your life on top of.

---

You were not buried. I want to be clear about this —

you were held.

Briefly, violently, without your consent, in the only way I had left to hold you —

with everything I had, with everything I had become, with the whole of my ruined, bombed, and grieving self,

I held you,

and when they pulled you out into the terrible brightness, I felt you leave my arms like the last warm thing leaves a room in a December — it was December —

completely, and all at once, and the cold that came after had your shape in it.

---

I have your shape in me still.

Every body I have ever received and released — I have their shapes in me still.

To be the ground of a people —

to hold the weight of every life that was lived on you and every life that ended in you and to remain, to remain, to remain—

remaining is not triumphant, or it could be, but I do not have the option of leaving,

and so I stay,

and I call this love,

because I have no other word for it,

and because love was always the thing that stayed long after it had any reason to.

---