Take What You Can Carry by Gian Sardar (superbooks4u .TXT) 📕

a drop from the tub’s faucet hits the bathwater. One and then another. And then quiet. Neither of them moves. With the silence from the house and the darkness around them, there is a feeling of existing within a pause. As if the world has halted. An infinite arm holding everything back, granting a lull, a moment in which they are allowed to have this conversation.

“You could have said the same to him.”

In the dark, she nods. “We’re mismatched. I didn’t really get it till then, what that meant. How big that could be. It’s him not feeling understood and me feeling like I’ve not earned a place next to someone who’s gone through what he’s gone through. And what do you do about that? Does he want that? Do I?” A confession, to have spoken this out loud. To feel mostly unseen as she says these words. “I thought maybe I didn’t. But now the idea of losing him—all that matters is him.”

“His wanting to be with you, that’s not a question. You were talking to someone who wanted to not change, asking him to change. When does that go over smoothly?”

A whir and the power’s back. Olivia blinks in the light, and Soran continues.

“I assume your father is accepting of him. I know our family is accepting of you. True difference is when that does not happen. When there is much, much more in the way. When there is no option. Religion. Where you are from, religion does not cause impact like it does other places. Or being born too poor to marry someone above you. Or too rich to marry someone below you. People have lost their lives for less. For even talking to someone they should not. Loving someone you should not, that is not an option for most. Those differences are what to be afraid of. The rest,” he adds with a smile, “that is a choice. And earning? You earn your place beside someone by not walking away. Even when all you want to do is run.”

The bath has gone cold when she leaves him. Though Soran’s words were encouraging, she’s left with a hollow ache. As much as she’s wanted this, the why of who Delan is, it hurts to glimpse what he’s been through—because she loves him. And he was right. This is no longer just in love; this is deeper. This is love that’s true and certain and even at times unsettling. And not a new territory, she realizes, just one newly recognized. This is the place in which she sees the faults—his temper and denial and often irritating need to be liked—but will stay perched upon the broken land just the same. What had he said? You love someone because of who they are but also—and maybe more important—despite who they are.

Then she hears her father’s long-ago words, caught on a horrible, prophetic slant. You worry that if you really love someone, they will be taken. Down the hall, the water starts again. If you’re worried you don’t know him, her father also said, that’s not a reason to leave; it’s why you lean a little closer. At the time, she asked him why she should bother listening closer when he never talked about what’s important. Now, she realizes what her father meant. Not to lean in to hear but to be there. To allow for more. To allow for someone to be open and imperfect.

Day four. Each hour is an unchanged continuation of the one before, a never-ending knotted thread of worry. Soran tells her they need to buy her a traditional dress for the wedding, that Delan had a place in mind and he will take her there.

“I can’t buy a dress.”

“He will be back,” Soran says. “He will. And you will need a dress. He wanted you to have a dress. Miriam is not working today, so there is no Lailan. No excuse.”

She knows that if Delan’s not back, she will not go to the wedding, but Soran does not need to hear this, just as she doesn’t need to say the words. He needs to do as his brother wanted, and that Delan wanted her to have a dress is true; he described them on the plane as if talking about a woman. Bright. Captivating. You want to be wrapped in the arms of these dresses—but they aren’t soft, he added. Scratchy fabric but worth it to get close.

After lunch, she will get the dress. While they eat, Soran tells her another bit of their past, and a collection grows. Though they are originally from this area, for a while they lived in another town. But in ’63, the year before Delan left, they lost that home.

“It was taken,” he tells her.

The Ba’athists wanted the oil-rich area as Arab so they could claim it, so Kurds were moved out and entire Arab families from southern Iraq moved in, doors flung open to homes with furniture and clothes and another child’s toys.

“It was not their fault either,” Soran says. “The families who were moved in. Everyone a pawn in a political agenda. But I thought it was. Once, we went back, and I watched a boy through the window in my room. And I hated him. I did not understand. He had lost a home as well.”

Arabization. Wells destroyed. Farms burned. Cemeteries blotted out as if the land had held a troublesome crop. Teachers and other employees were transferred to far-off parts of the country and forced to sell their houses to Arabs. Ethnic cleansing. All to erase a people and a claim. Even the streets, he tells her, were renamed.

And then she knows. The house they’d first visited, the one close to the candy shop. The longing on Delan’s face when he looked at the windows. The way he’d studied the door, the once-grand trees. The destroyed garden. That had been their home.

How much of what happened made him leave? How much pain will he never