“I never said move on. You move with. You move with, but you move. That’s the point. You cannot stop. But to do that, you need to put it out of your mind so you can. So you become a politician and fix things or be an artist and put it in your art. If you crawl into a cave and let this defeat you, everyone loses.”
For a moment, he just watches her, as if making sure his point landed. And this irritates her even more. As he opens the window to scan the street, she feels her words honing, pressing to a point.
“Is that what you do?” she asks quietly. “Put it in your art to help?”
Her words are like a jolt. His back tenses, body gone rigid.
“That’s why you feel bad,” she continues. “You think you don’t do enough.”
Now he turns to her. Shocked and irate. “Don’t tell me I’m living my life wrong.”
“There’s no standard for what you have to do to feel okay. But you know. You know what you have to do, and maybe you’re right and you don’t do enough. The only thing I know is you’ve spouted a whole bunch of made-up rules that allow you to look the other way—all so you don’t have to feel.”
His eyes seem to actually fill with what he’s about to say. And she feels it, an undertow of anger. The start of whatever he’s about to say that will pull them in and strand them. From his words, there will be no getting back.
“You,” he finally says, “don’t come from a world where you get to judge how I handle this.”
A slam that renders her speechless. But one she’s been waiting for, that she practically asked for. Words strip in her mind: There it is. All this time, it’s been there, off in the corner, waiting. Now in the open. Thickening, filling into the silence. Her youth. Her vastly different childhood. The weight of his past, compared to the relative ease of hers. It’s all right there. And the problem is that he’s right. In some way, she’s always known this. But what does it mean? That, she realizes, is the question. The crux of what she’s needed to learn.
“You’re right,” she says.
There’s surprise on his face, as if he’s just glimpsed a swerve in the road.
“What you’ve been through,” she continues, “nothing I’ve known will ever compare. But does that mean I don’t have a point? That I can never tell you I wish you’d do something differently, because I didn’t grow up the way you did? How does that work for our relationship if I get dismissed for my past? If nothing I say is valid?”
The questions hang. They’re everything, these questions. She’s never conjured them this clearly before, never assigned them these words, but they’ve always been there. A simmer beneath recognized worries.
“Of course not,” he finally says. Outside, a horn sounds. “If that were the case, no couple would work unless they grew up in the same house.”
A pause, and he leans away from her, searching the street through the window. Maybe he’s just saying what he knows he needs to. He’s still angry, that she can tell. And so is she. Despite his response, the questions remain unanswered.
“But you can’t presume to know,” he finally says. “You cannot tell me me.”
“Then likewise. That works both ways.”
From the street, a car honks again. And then another. For a beat, they are silent, held back as if tied to their own points of view, until again a horn sounds, and he leans out the window, calling to a man in an off-white pickup truck. Behind it, a caravan of cars stretches the length of the road.
“Maybe we just do things differently,” she says.
“Clearly.”
There will be no resolution. Not now. She watches him yell to the man again in Kurdish, watches his profile, and feels, starkly, sadly, the borders of themselves in a way she never has. All the memories tied to what passes before them, the layers of fears and hopes and regrets, the events that have made him see the world as he does and pass off what’s happened as not that bad—all of it kept separate by the simple lines of his skin. She cannot know him. Not truly. You cannot tell me me. And though she knows that’s the case for everyone, for no one can exist within another’s mind or skin, it’s how far apart they are in their history, their beliefs, that ultimately matters. After all, it’s the distance of separation that creates the impact.
An assortment of cars and trucks curves around the base of the mountain, each one with multiple men crammed in the front seats and women in the back. Though Delan was offered the front seat, he wisely chose to sit next to Olivia, and in this, their battle at least hasn’t escalated. On her other side, an older woman in a traditional dress that’s a brilliant, iridescent beetle green stares only at her folded hands in her lap.
The road is unpaved and rocky, at times more an idea of a road than an actual road, and after twenty minutes of views heavy with green and the shock of pink plum blossoms, they swoop upward on a road so narrow that the side mirrors brush shrubs and catch on branches. Now and then, there is a blind curve, a switchback, and the sheer cliffs and the absence of land pull with a vacuum’s energy.
You put it out of your mind. She closes her eyes, chin against her chest.
That family, they left.
You don’t come from a world where you get to judge how I handle this.
They’ve barely spoken since they left the house, and now she’s thinking of all the ways he lives in denial, even at home, in mundane ways, such as with a phone bill shoved into a drawer—don’t look—or a bottle of gin that eases
