once, there was time, there were moments that made up your life, there were hours and minutes, a morning’s routine, the bitter coffee you brewed in the copper pot you had longer than you could remember, mixed the hot liquid with sugar and spices, let it fill you awake to prepare you to journey to work, on the bus that always took you—the driver a sweaty companion whose voice had almost become a friend, though you never learnt his name; and so the days and the months and the years continued, marked by the habits you expected to one day lead you to a fullness of life, a silent agreement with yourself you’d arrive somewhere, achieve what you must achieve; but before you can get there, a decision is made, in a room with tiles that throw back every word, or an office whose plushness has grown with every new leader, or perhaps, the choice is made in a bar, during cigarette breaks at a global conference—a secret handshake, so secret no one will ever remember it—

but wherever it comes from, it comes to you with bombs and bombs, with raging thunder, with roars and rumbles that rip through your life, a giant hand from above, seizing buildings and houses and trees and it crushes your city, your schools, the yellow-gray stones of your mother’s house, then releases them in a shower of rubble that rains every day now, till all that you are and all that you have been trembles and shakes and the moments that made up your life lose their footing and you with them, among dust,

everywhere,

and smoke and the loudness of fear and you watch how your hours tumble to ashes, how limbs are ripped from those you once knew, who you haul through the fallout of every bomb, through the mist that taints every breath with a stench you think you will never unsmell, and you feel the edges of rocks and rubble press through the soles of your shoes, the stones still shaking, still longing for what they once were, the stories they housed, the one thousand breakfasts and two thousand loves—till one night, you look down, see your feet clutching the ground and you think of your habits, the fullness of life you once strived for, and know there is nothing here anymore, so

you choose

a leaving of home for an unknown future, and you go with what you have left, which is mostly your body and mostly your heart and a hopeful remainder of your mother’s inheritance that gets you to Istanbul and then to Bodrum in vans that you share with an ocean of faces, with eyes that search for the same thing as you, with the constant pressure of arms against yours, the air always dense and thick and about to run out and when the car stops at last, you start walking and walking, you have never walked this much in your life, but the air is clean, no dust, no sweat, so you tell your feet to lift and you tell your heart to beat and you tell your eyes to unsee the people falling behind, the mother who eventually breaks down by the side of the road, her newborn resting against her chest, attached to her like a limb she can’t shake, barely out in the world, and although she knows that her journey ends here, she can’t bring herself to detach him, so she keeps him with her, on her, his weight the last thing that binds her to consciousness till she can’t feel him any longer and she leaves, at last, and the new-born son remains in the night, wailing until the cold takes him too, until he becomes no more

than a fleeting moment,

and you walk past those fragments of sorrow, longing to leave them behind, your eyes barely open and blind to the hours and seconds and days, dirt growing on you, an obstinate second skin, a shield you imagine protects you against all that is yet to come and when you crouch on the raft that carries you over the sea, you hope it’s an ally against the waves that grasp for you, against the salty water that eats at you, but then the waves get greedy and reach and reach and try to pull you down, until you wrest and yank your body from them and onto dry land where your journey continues into another strangeness, a different van, the darkness only lit by a ray of sun that falls through a crack and becomes a beacon your eyes hunger for among the stench of a thousand journeys, a thousand fears, but then you wake up one day and realize that you’re almost there, or somebody says you’re almost there, or you see a road sign and think I’m almost there, so you pick yourself up, pick up your feet and carry yourself to a train that glides through the dawn, past more signs speaking Hungarian, then German, past fields that expand into yellow, past a deer, ears alert to the train that interferes with its life for seconds before you rush past it, imagine it lowering its head, forgetting the train, back to its own existence of meadows drenched in light, of grass, knee-high and wild, moving idly in the breeze, you and the train now a memory only in your own mind, one you hold on to when the train slows down, rolls into a station, releases you to a platform crowded with others and then voices rise, radiant like bells,

bright,

like unburdened air that has never known the tear of an explosion, and the voices grow into waves of sound, and they tell you, You’re here, and you think, I am here.

I am here.