Onism with a taste of Greek

by Amira Shaban (Jordan)

I didn't expect to find Jordan

I am taking a walk through the streets of a European city, I’m lost and frail. I don't want to be here. She is not alive anymore and I am still here. She’s on this steel bed and it is my duty to cleanse this body. I grab a bar of unscented soap and a warm wet cloth. I brush her hair with my fingers; I search her eyes for words. I clench her palm for forgiveness; I kiss her shoulders for love. I was in the presence of doomed expired flesh, in an average functioning bundle of flesh, both on a journey outside human bounds. I have gone elsewhere, wiped out of this dimension into another that I have yet to explore. Her favorite outfit was picked out; I dress her up and put a brown scarf around her neck. I have lost sequence of events, order of sanity; I am an earthly orphan abandoned by gravity, I am still stuck in a container of bones and flesh, mind and heart on the hunt for meaning. I arrive at the hospital. I have no expectations. I know her face, how it is gently placed with wrinkles, her hands that have held guns, tomatoes, cigarettes, and prayer beads. The blue veins on her knuckles, each their own story, and off course, her painted toe nails. I uncover her. My heart is pumping hard. My body is my heart. She looks defeated. I touch her face. It was coldly rude. This hypothermic stiffness that electrocuted me with horror almost mocked my body heat. Despite that, I kiss her forehead as strongly as I can. I am chugging pitch red Wine to drown the tears. She slept in my bed for a year, she’s been asleep in my bed with me ever since. I check on her rattle breath as I stumble across a long dark drunken hall, a black hole of sorrow. My stomach is churning and turning. I throw up passionately, its red and all over the place. I cry for her pain. I despise my own. I watch her until dusk, and I realize a year later that hearing her groan throughout that night in was a glorious howl and it was her last call, announcing her departure is soon to come. She wakes up, we are all around her but this isn't a room for surrender. Her stomach is churning and burning, not figuratively. This is generational cancer finally catching up to her. Her protruding bones are wrapped with a yellow and green checkered blouse. The visual memory never befriends time, and it weakens for details, but she smells like cinnamon when she’s happy, and like mint when she’s furious. I navigate my memory through smell. She throws up and its pitch black. It’s violent, out of control and it reeks. I check for my own breathing. I like this smell of malignancy and conceit. Its death, in a plastic bag, on her blouse and on mine. My mother panics and everyone is loud and scared to step a little closer to this imposer taking over my grandmother's body. As if she is a bomb that's about to stop ticking, they scatter around the house. I wipe her chin and face, I am in a constant search for her voice amidst this chaos, but I can't even seem to find mine. We call her 'yaya', a Greek old woman with a rough miraculous background. She managed to build a life for herself and her seven children after being widowed at a young age. In this mortal world Yaya is my anchor. In a world where I lose myself in dream lingo, I am always struck by the dance of the dead in the depths of the skies but I watch her only. I drench the soil she rests in with Turkish coffee, as the scent of it hydrates my euphoric grief. I travel through my memory back and forth until I find passion through loss, right next to her grave, I am writing myself into a season of bloom.