My mother laid out my red shoes, the ones with the buckle. She said, tomorrow wear the good ones. I thought that meant we were going somewhere nice.
She packed a bag and then she took things out of the bag and then she packed it again. Three times. My father stood in the doorway and did not say anything, which he never does.
We left when the sky was the color of the inside of a shell.
At the airport there are more people than at Eid. More people than at anything. We stand between two walls of wire and men’s backs. Sometimes we move a little. Then we stop for so long that I sit down on my heels and look at the ground.
On the ground there is a bottle cap. A green sandal with nobody in it, smaller than mine. A line of ants going somewhere.
Farida-jan writes a number on my hand with a black marker. It tickles and I laugh and she says hold still, in the voice she uses for prayers.
The number is 14.
I ask what it is for. She says, so we know where you are. I say, but you can see me. She says, so that everyone else knows too.
There is a sound. It is not like in films. In films it is one clean sound and you know what it is. This is flat, like a heavy book dropped on a table in another room. It comes in threes and fives.
The first time I think it is a truck. My uncle’s truck does that and he says excuse me to the truck, as a joke, and I laugh every time.
The second time I see.
There are three young men by the wire. One is holding his phone up over his head the way you do when you want a picture of something tall. I have time to think that he wants a picture.
Then the flat sound, and he sits down.
That is what it looks like. He sits down the way you sit when you have been standing too long. The phone goes out of his hand. The other two sit down after him, one and then one, and none of them put out their hands.
That is the part that is wrong. When you fall you put out your hands. Everybody puts out their hands. I have scars on both of mine from putting out my hands.
Everyone pushes backward and my feet come off the ground. Farida-jan’s arm is across my chest like the bar on a fairground ride.
She says, look at my face.
I look at her face. I have seen it every day for two years, at the school in the basement that we are not allowed to call a school. There is a mole beside her left eyebrow. I never noticed it before. I notice it now and I think, I will remember that mole for a long time.
I ask if they are sleeping.
She says yes.
The plane is grey. It has no windows for people. Its back is open and down like a mouth and people walk up into the mouth and it does not get full.
Farida-jan crouches down and holds my shoulders too tight.
She says, you can go on this plane. Or you can stay and we will try another day. But if you go, your mother and father cannot come. Not today. Maybe not for a long time. Do you understand what a long time is?
Behind her people are saying go, go.
I think about the number on my hand, and how it will wash off, and then nobody will know where I am.
I think about my mother saying wear the good ones.
I think about the men who did not put out their hands.
I think about how for a whole year everyone has been saying soon and later and when things are better, and how those words have started to taste like the water in our bottle, warm as a bath, wet and doing nothing.
I do not have words for the rest. What I have is a feeling under my ribs, cold and exact. There is a door, and it is open, and it is going to close. One life is behind it, and one is in front of it, and I cannot see either one. But I know that if I stay, everything will keep being soon, forever, until I am old.
I say, I’m going.
There are no seats. There is floor, and legs, and hundreds of people sitting with their knees up. The light comes in from the open end in a long bright wedge, and the wedge gets narrower, and then it is a line, and then it is nothing.
Somebody gives me a sweet. I hold it. I do not eat it.
The floor pushes up against me the way the swing pushes at the bottom, and keeps pushing, and I understand that we are going up.
I look at the back of my hand.
The 14 is still there. A little smudged at the top of the four.
I am not going to wash it. I am going to keep it, and when I see my mother, I will hold up my hand and say, look, this is my number; this is how they knew where I was.
This is a true story I have derived from an interview. The girl cannot disclose anything about herself because if she does, her family back home will be shot dead. The story itself is also adapted.
I chose to open this journal with this story to give you a perspective. How brave these girls can be, how traumatized they can be. Yet they are the nicest people I’ve ever met and are pioneering a decent life in the place they fled to.
If you want to get more stories, perspective, and analysis based on real interviews, stay tuned.
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