You have a terrible memory, and trying to recall things is like digging around for keys that have long fallen out through a holey pocket. Most things you know about yourself are stories other people have told you. But you have a few memories that are yours alone, and they come to you in finely-detailed flashes when you draw upon them. They go like this:

You sit in an ESL classroom, and your teacher painstakingly corrects your clumsy English consonants as you read aloud to her from Amelia Bedelia. On a crowded train, the three-seater you’re on is empty. A man materializes in your DMs when you are fourteen, and asks you if you know how to belly dance and if you’d keep your hijab on while doing it. Your mother fixes the folds of your first hijab and says you should carry yourself with pride. You see your grandmother again after four years. Her hair is silver, her fingertips are stained with henna, her face is lined with age, and envy burns hot in your chest as you think, if there ever was pride to wrestle away from the world, she took it all. You sit through a sociology class where your white teacher asks you to make him a film about how the world views you, about all the complexities of the identities you didn’t know you had until someone made them dirty. You make him a film, and watching it feels like a bad impersonation of the girl you’ve taken to wearing in the confines of a predominantly white institution. You go home and delete it off your computer. You’ve always loved a metaphor so, at some point, you remember a game you used to play with your cousins as a kid. You’d all give a raw egg to one person, and chase them up the stairs, through chicken coops. They won if they made it to the end of the round with a whole, unbroken egg. You think then that if the American immigrant dream was a round of the egg game, then your egg has long been broken, though you don’t realize it at first. All along, you’ve been trying so hard, so desperately, so blindly, your hands full of eggshells and yolk.

The woman promised he’d be free by morning.

Her name was only spoken in whispers behind cupped hands, recorded only in memory and never on paper. The day he heard it spoken first, he was lying spread-eagle in the snow, face crusted with tear tracks, fingers curled around the neck of a half-empty liquor bottle. The girl saw him from the house across the road—he thought he knew her from town. What was her name? Amal?—and came rushing over, dragging his limp body back to the house when he refused to respond or get to his feet. He stared blankly, unspeaking while she asked him what he was doing in the snow, while she pried the liquor from his frigid, blue fingers and sat him in front of the crackling fireplace. 

“Were you trying to die?” she asked, peering at him the way you would a particularly challenging riddle. “That’s a terrible way to go! I can’t imagine what would be worth dying so painfully for. You’re lucky I found you.”

He said nothing, the fire throwing a flickering orange glow over his features. She said, “I know you. You’re Shahryar, from the farm down the road, aren’t you?”

The sound of his name startled some of his consciousness back to the surface. He said, “I was not trying to die. I was trying to forget. Though I suppose it might take death to forget after all.”

Amal studied him with a sharp, secret gaze. She said, slowly, deliberately, “Memory is not so stubborn. It is not so eternal. It’s easier to let go of than you might know.”

Shahryar moved of his own volition for the first time, turning his creaking body until he was eye to eye with her, his gaze suddenly attentive. He had a feeling that she didn’t mean her words in the way of a cheap comfort or a rehearsed platitude. 

He spoke, haltingly. “Wha—what does that mean. What are you saying.”

“There’s a woman. A rawia. She’s a craftswoman. Her trade is memories. If you have a memory you want forgotten, you can tell her what you want gone.” Amal’s cadence was no different than it had been only a moment earlier, but her eyes were fervored and she was leaning too close to him. He didn’t move back. “When you speak the memory aloud, she takes it and it is gone from you; you forget whatever burden you were carrying.”

Shahryar’s chest heaved with something like a gasp. He blinked and Amal’s thin shoulders were in his hands, crushed under the sudden, desperate strength in his grip. “Tell me,” he croaked. “Tell me! Who is she where is she how do I find her what’s her name—”

“Her name is Khalida,” Amal said, fearful of his sudden animation, but not so fearful that she’d forget to whisper, to look to the ground as she spoke. “You can see her tonight. You’ll be free of the memory by morning. That’s her promise.”

Rimaal*, it has been six years since I have seen you.

And yet.

I remember to anticipate you. I remember

how you cover even paved streets, the feeling

of you in my sandals, under my heels, 

so insistent, so bothersome, so constant.

In the apartment, I find traces of you still,

carried by the wind from mountains that 

are far enough away to be mere pinpricks,

but not so far for you to travel 

to make your irksome presence known.

And yet.

Rimaal, you are encompassing. You are

rickshaws, small and quick through city streets,

kicking up clouds of you into our faces. You are 

Sharm el-Sheikh, Gamasa, al-Sokhna, Port Said,

where we go when we want to remember

 that we still have horizons, with you beneath our feet.

In the one-bedroom-one-living-room apartment 

that makes the motherland, you are her bowels,

her leftovers, her faraway gaze, her forgotten dunes,

her nile as it calls and weighs and pounds upon us.

Rimaal, you are so aggravating. You are

the years I have forgotten, the proud balcony

presiding over generations, the midnight dares 

over a deck of cards in crowded gardens.

Rimaal, you are home, you are awful,

you are terrible, you are beloved.

And yet. 

Rimaal, love, can I tell you a story?

*rimaal = Arabic word for sands

Years ago, I read The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri and I did not like it. I wrote about it, analysis paragraph after essay after discussion board, and every time I saw my English teacher I complained to him about how much I didn’t enjoy any part of it. Before I graduated, I asked him if the book was still on their curriculum; he laughed and said yes because it was one of his favorites. It did not occur to me then to think about why I disliked it so much. It didn’t hit me until recently when I began to see conversations about immigrants and refugees flooding my feed in the wake of the crisis in Afghanistan. I found myself thinking of The Namesake again and I realized, for all the time I spent complaining about it, this book was the first time that I could remember feeling seen.

All the melodramatic chapters of the narrator complaining about his hatred for his name, the complete immersion in the most mundane details of the lives of this immigrant family – it felt very familiar to me, an immigrant who also used to dislike her name. I realized I had disliked it because it had hit too close to home. I was keenly aware for the first time of how empathetic this book was and how much the world was lacking empathetic narratives, whether it be for immigrants or anyone part of any other group that has to justify why they too deserve to have their stories written. I spent a lot of time looking for more books like it, talking to my other English teachers and my friends about it. Representation has been gaining ground in the last few years, yes, but I still think it remains in the periphery of people’s minds because it’s not all that pressing, cannot be remedied by law, and doesn’t pose any immediate danger to anyone. But ever since I read The Namesake, and even years before I realized it, I have wanted to see stories of people who have lived my experiences. I want to see people who share my roots be given the full spectrum of complexity in fiction, beyond the caricatures we have been assigned and rooted in for decades. I want to see it in everything, in good, groundbreaking books that win awards, and in bad, melodramatic books that make English classes difficult.