LEONARDO
About parents.
Leonardo, do you see those grape leaves out there? My father used to clean them one by one, every other afternoon. I remember, for years, as soon as the season came for those leaves to grow and impose their silhouettes in our garden, he would spend every other afternoon outside, a wet cloth and a bucket of water at his side, massaging those leaves. My father cared for them almost as much as he cared for my sisters and I. The radio would be playing from behind the iron bars of the patio’s window, Um Kolthoum’s voice invaded every room, the breeze sent chills up his arms and my father hummed to the beautiful sound.
It is indeed beautiful, her voice, and her message, but it always bothered me how centered were the lyrics around love and heartbreak. These songs lasted for 45 minutes at a time, and my father’s head swayed in a drunken state of frenzy, in a zone of disconnection with everything that is physical but his precious leaves.
The image of my father outside, in his robe, with grey hair and a shaved beard, sitting by the entangled branches will always define serenity for me. It reminds me of the smell of jasmine, and of my mother bringing out her small prayer mat to sit on the patio and watch him while she silently read some verses from the Quran. How could she focus on prayer when the music played in the background? Perhaps it is only because in my household, Um Kolthoum is the final prophet and her sound is holy.
My fixed memory of them is that image; simple, satisfied, fulfilled. I think that at some point my brain decided to block all the other memories I have of them and leave them to be frozen in motion in that perfectly summery scene. That way, my heart heals itself, and I could go on to live.
When I chose to leave, I had to also choose how to remember them. I am no fool, I know that even when you leave what hurts you, it can still get to you, so for my own sake I chose that memory to be the only truth about my parents. One rarely summarizes decades in one picture, but I did just that, after all there is no use to remembering anything other than that. My father was always old, and my mother was always praying, and I was always watching.
We haven’t spoken for the years when I was gone, it started as my choice, and then with time they came to realize that we had nothing to talk about, we had nothing in common. Even the love was not reciprocated; I admired them, I respected them, but never could love them. It is brutally difficult to love a parent, trust me, I know. We were taught that it’s so simple, that it’s instinctive, natural, and we have no choice but to love a parent. But to love, is to actively and consciously choose to forgive and forget continuously, it’s a commitment to always find goodness in the pain. That, I could not commit to.
When I was a teenager, I tried so hard to love them that I started to hate them, it felt like swallowing glass and expecting my throat to bear the scratch. As you can imagine, it only made me bleed my voice out, and I started to despise them for that, to blame every little inconvenience on their existence, somehow in my head I ended up believing that if anything hurts then it must be because of them. I was ruled by my hatred for them, blinded by this excruciatingly deep disappointment where I felt abandoned, and I blamed them for every single day where I had to protect myself from the world that they were supposed to protect me from.
So as soon as I could afford it, I left. I am not going into the details of why and how I decided to leave, it is the accumulation of circumstances that ruined both me and my parents joy in life that lead to that point. I did what was right for me, despite all the second-guessing and what ifs. It broke my heart, really. You might wonder how is that possible when all my life I’ve waited for the moment where we were no longer connected? Well parents, Leonardo, have a grip on us. It doesn’t matter if they’re dead or alive, if you’d known them or not, it doesn’t matter if they’ve loved you or hated you, if they’d made your life a living hell or if they’d smothered you in affection, parents will always have a grip on us. To be born into this world automatically sets the weight of parenthood on our shoulders, whether we admit it or not, we become accountable to these two individuals who made us, and even if in our most lucid moments we come to realize that we don’t owe them shit, we aren’t brave enough to remain that lucid for a long time.
Detaching myself from them kept me afloat, I lost sight of meaning in anything and everything, and that is the most liberating experience I’ve ever went through. To submerge myself in absurdity, to embrace the necessity of emotions in nature, to hold the power of choosing my purpose, has made me strong and resilient. I have no regrets.
We tend to forget that our parents have lived a whole lifetime before us, that they were once our age, that we’ve only known them once time has worn out their light. We tend to forget that they too were children who cried in their beds late at night, humans with passions and a thirst for newness.
But I remember, Leonardo, and that is why I left. Because I am no monster, I am not cruel, and as dim as they’ve become, a part of me will always look at them and see a little boy and a little girl who lost sight of who they are.
