Chapter Eighteen: An Accounting

Chapter Eighteen: An Accounting

I am going to write this the way an accountant writes a final statement: clearly, without sentiment, with the rigor that comes from having put the sentimentality somewhere else and being left with the actual numbers. Here is what I bought with the currency of my freedom: I bought the experience of first love in its fullest form — the kind that rearranges your understanding of what is possible between two people. Layla was real. The two years were real. The walk along the seafront in the pewter afternoon was real. The accumulated texture of knowing a person well enough to have a private language with them — this was real and it was worth something. I would not unbuy it. Even knowing what it cost, even knowing how it ended, the experience itself was not a mistake. The ending was the mistake. The ending was cowardly in its mechanics and ungenerous in its timing and conducted from four thousand kilometers away on a phone call that lasted twenty-three minutes. I bought the education of Sana — the experience of being in the presence of someone who crossed her own internal walls for something that felt real, and the specific shame of honoring that courage poorly. I will carry the particular weight of "okay, Hur" for a very long time. Not as punishment. As information. As a data point about the specific ways in which my freedom was, in practice, someone else's cost. I bought the question Nadia asked me on a Wednesday afternoon: has the freedom made you happy? I have not answered it. I am not sure it can be answered in the affirmative yet. But I bought the question and it is mine now and I owe it the respect of continuing to sit with it, even when sitting with it is the thing I am worst at.

I bought the regretting of Rida's proposal. I bought the specific understanding that direct honesty, when offered, deserves direct honesty in return, not the evasion dressed as explanation that I gave her. I bought this understanding too late to give her the response she deserved, which is its own economy of education. I bought Karbala. The courtyard at night. The gold of the domes. The quality of the grief that had been refined over centuries into something almost like peace. I bought the understanding that grief does not have to be pathological — that some griefs are so old and so fully inhabited that they have become, in their own strange way, a form of presence rather than absence. I did not know how to apply this understanding to myself. I am still working on the application. I bought the panic attacks, which were not part of the prospectus. The three AM inventories. The afternoon in the canteen when my name arrived from outside and found no one immediately home. The bathroom floor. The forty minutes of staring at a textbook that I was not reading. These I did not want. These were not in the terms and conditions of the freedom I had signed up for. But they are mine, and I am learning to account for them, and accounting for them requires, I am discovering, a different relationship to stillness than the one I have practiced. I bought this book.