REBIRTH

     The earthquake made the world pink and new, it shook old things back onto the surface. The trembling mess of my room held the bitter stalling of my life for the past season. For the first time in weeks, I went out into the world. The houses were already packed together, but now they are pushed into each other by the weight of their stories. Everyone is outside, afraid of being crushed by what they know but also fearful of witnessing the horrible beauty of the Earth shifting under our feet.

     Our people are from the Himalayas and we know that this stretching of Earth and unfurling of human lives are a part of our creation story. Still, a cacophony of wailing parents never fails to fill the air with mortal fear after an earthquake. 

     These earthquakes come twice a generation, so we feel this shift once as a child and once as an adult. Before, I clung to my mother’s skirt and buried my face in a pillow of her neck and shoulder. There was a solidity to her frame that I had never felt before and among the shaking my little world paused on that solid moment contrasting with the jagged image of her that I knew. The earthquake unfolds what is within, for a moment I was able to see a better part of her - a protector.

     I push away that memory and look at how the mountain breathes life, while at the same time holding buried darkness at a depth we cannot comprehend. The people haphazardly pile together in the village center, clamoring to get word of their missing family to the organizers. I make my way through the crowd, twisting and slanting my body to shift from one empty space to the next. I meet the eyes of the search team leader, he gives a quick nod and turns to the rest of the team as we set out into the settled dust and buried buildings.

     As we find footing among the rocks, I notice a couple keeping next to each other but not making any eye contact. When the woman’s foot slips for a second, the man’s hand is ready until she catches herself a moment later. She sets her jaw but keeps moving, his hand falls, both of them pretending nothing happened. I blink hard to get the image of my parents out of my head and both of them turn back into two people, strangers with no history.

There isn’t quiet among us for long, more than a few people start injecting some humor into our group. I smile as they poke into each other’s lives, seeing eyes turn into half moons and shoulders become looser. But then one person turns to me and smiles, my stomach drops as I speak to another person for the first time since my work started getting left unfinished, the front door started getting lonely, and my bed started forming an indentation.

     “Kina tapai hami sanga aiyeko?”

     “I just needed to do something to help,” I answer, instantly feeling too dramatic. To my surprise, they nod sympathetically and we continue trekking to the search site.

     The sun was low in the sky and the moon was still fading away, both against a pale blue backdrop wearing a  dusty grey shawl that no one looked up to see. We had arrived at the disaster area and began splitting up into smaller groups to dig through the rubble. I glanced over at one of the members of my team, a bulky man casually stepping onto the ground and making footprints at least an inch deeper than mine. My self preservation instincts made me quickly shift my eyes back onto the area in front of me. As I waited in line for my materials and instructions, the monotonous mood let my attention slide back over to him and I accidentally met his eyes. I saw the weight of the world manifesting in a clenched jaw and a desolate stare that scared me into curiosity. His eyelids reeled back from his dark irises to expose what seemed like miles of yellow white sclera with scars of red, rivers that pulsated to push away from the wild and sharp threat of his mind. 

     He danced to the rhythm of the world, to the beat of systems impressed on the minds of our people by fire and force. A dull and constant thud thud to push the strains of his mind beyond what his eyes saw, horrors that he accepted and would not tell his children. My father was a sharp man that was blunted by relentless strikes against the world’s wood, another tool for imperialists to use and throw away. Living with a flame that jumped and laid low at unpredictable times taught me that I always needed to do better to earn his love. History was sanitized but it still retains the scent of rust and sweat. My father’s father used to beat him with all the strength he could muster from his hopes of success. With a vision of excellence, he marked his son’s body with pain and loss, leaving his son’s mind with the gashes of disdain and distrust. Taking a stray stick, his father bent him to submit to the ideas of success that were created in small villages by people who craved the dignity that was taken from them. I don’t trust my father when he’s pleasant. I see his anger as his true self. His rage that he inherited and raised in our house. When he would be calm, it meant that the next flare would be inevitable. This distrust has been tamped down by blankness, refusing to participate in the rage and in the joy.

     Flinching back, I shake my head and see a man that is just a man and not my father. He eyes me warily and turns his attention back to the instructors. 

     When we break and set out to start searching the sun is higher and hotter, the wind carries mountain dust that finds home in our eyes. This grit passes through my lips and I can taste the dirt that I once craned my neck to look up to. After wiping my mouth I smile at the thought of those giants being small enough to swallow.

     I try maintaining a steady breath as I press forward into the dirt; eyes and hands clawing for a space that could bring me closer to finding someone. I scramble through rubble and listen for sounds in between, trying not to see my mother in my desperate dirt covered hands. It’s hard not to think of her when the breeze strokes my forehead and my whole body strains to look for some sign of love. I hear love screamed, hear it rooted in fear of powerlessness and full of rage. There are stories that live in her mind, they are let out by pressing her own scars onto me. I shut my eyes and take a breath, exhale out the rage I don’t own. I inhale the dust that buried me and mine and push on.

     The sky is screaming, an angry red burn marking everything on the horizon as a landmark birthed from violence. A tension settles low in my belly, nestling in the fat. There is only the same grey dust everywhere I turn. A knowing thrums in my bones and all my senses stretch forward to receive. Then I feel it, a faint ringing, a coiling of voice, an unthinkably small chance of a person alive somewhere underneath my hands.

     My first impulse is to start maniacally digging but I stop. I call out for help, more hands and minds to extract this person safely. When the group approaches me with determined faces and ready hands I feel a strike of warmth for these people I don’t know but I belong to anyways.

     There are no islands here, we are piles of stories that cling to each other to form a beautiful mountain range. You belong to everyone, that’s why you are free.

     I didn’t know that before, so I tried to divide myself from them. Doing that, I also split myself apart. My mother lost control of me, who she thought of as an extension of herself, and therefore lost control of herself. Her world shifted as a consequence of this fact and it was revealed for a brief stunning moment that true power is being able to live in the reality you know you are meant to be in.

     The tongue has a delicate and vulnerable skin, it is where the world can reach in and touch you. My mother had a tongue pink with solace, I was born with my heart in her jaws and felt comfort because she wouldn’t destroy something that belonged to her. Hurt mothers don’t hurt us because they want to, but because they have no one else, nothing else to scream into. They do what they can to get by. 

     My father is not a flame, but a kaleidoscope of a man. I cannot help but emulate him because he is everything, as am I and everyone else that I cannot help but love. From him I learned that this normality is born from trauma and I was born to shape a new world with his relentless blood in my veins.

     The sky is half asleep already, rolling out carpets of purples and blues. When we finally uncovered the person underneath the Earth there was a collective hum of relief and joy as we saw her breathe and move her limbs. When I turned to look at what we unearthed there were piles of unfamiliar rock. This land had transformed to conceal what I knew and uncover a new side of every feature.

     I understood her the second I saw her, a person so eminent with need that her brown eyes poured out her whole life. This child feels more than mine, she feels like me, drawn from the past and pushed into the present. Her presence is a reminder that the past comes calling because the present is the only real moment. 

     The red dawn is holy in a way that demands worship. The world looks like a newborn; tense, writhing, and pink with life - but undeniably and gratefully alive.