"Pilgrimage" by Tasneem Maher

Tasneem Maher is an Arab writer and poet who encourages theatrics and melodrama of any kind. A Best of the Net nominee, her work has been featured in Vagabond City Lit, Kissing Dynamite, and Jaffat El Aqlam, amongst others. She is also Fiction and Personal Essays Editor at Sumou Mag. She tweets @mythosgal.

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Pilgrimage

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I rub a dove’s smooth head and watch it fly out,
imagining that it is simply taking the long way to get to you.
We had our send-off on opposite sides of the desert. Now,
there are at least two bodies of water between us. I toss my voice
like a stone across the sea’s shuddering skin and it sinks halfway in.
My qiyam is a four-hour phone call while you cried through it.
I tell you I know what being alone feels like, that one time,
I opened all the windows in the middle of a storm just to smell it
and spent all morning mopping up pools of rainwater.
If storms make us feel less alone, it is only because they crawl
across skies carving out distance like the aloneness carved into us,
cured by the ache of distance alone. We would live by rivers
we know nothing about and had only seen glow apatite blue
in idyllic postcards we picked out in bookstores. We’d chosen this, after all.

On your first day, you show me your new river, pixelated and dim
through your camera. The windmills you’d passed on your way
into the city, farther out, are much prettier. You think happiness
looks a lot like the windmills catching the sunset, breaking the light
to shards, a thousand glittering suns. I want to see that happiness
without a screen. I want that happiness to be closer to you. For now,
you buy the cheapest bottle of wine for the novelty, disparage
all the food, and tell me very quietly that you miss Amman.
I miss it too, on humid days most of all, though maybe it’s the mountains
we miss, how much nearer to the sky we were. When you complain
about digging up coats in mid-September, I say you’ve been spoilt
by a sunburn summer but to you, it’s divine retribution for ignoring the duaa
before the plane took off or that it took off at all. It rains on your
first night and when we have nothing to say, we listen to the water.