Through

Gliding like giant fish past our villa, sometimes Dubai’s city buses, with their whirring, unsettle me—the long sigh of the air conditioning let out as exits unfold their mechanical arms and passengers spill onto the sidewalk. When we first arrived in the United Arab Emirates eighteen months ago for my husband’s job, I tried hard (as I always do) to counter the vertigo of changing country; to assuage the dizziness of arrival that comes via the exhaustion of jet lag and shock of new weather; to mask, temporarily, the sadness of departure with the excitement of a new city, language, people. After more than a decade of cycling through foreign-service tours, I’ve become accustomed to the rhythm of uprooting, the inevitability of the next destination. This post, however, I’ve had a harder time going through the motions. Between breakout sessions on Emirati customs and what’s what on local schools, I’ve struggled (for the first time) to make small talk with other trailing spouses at the consular orientation—the chatter tediously the same. I know that adaptation rests in yes, in forcing myself to show up until the bright side eclipses the old life’s absence: that grocery-aisle familiarity and routine that accompanies feeling settled. But I balk at the “Welcome BBQ” invite. Reluctant to stand in strangers’ living rooms nursing a cocktail to cut the nerves, I decline to join the book club. With each post, the act of starting over feels increasingly absurd: an endless parade of hellos and goodbyes as I march past moving trucks and crates, pieces of me deemed too precious to risk shipping, headed for safekeeping in a concrete storage unit. Sometimes I wonder if home is simply a syllable, a single note, an out-breath—say it’s so, and it is. Or maybe it is until it isn’t? Until it’s taken away. This doesn’t feel like home, my teary-eyed daughter whispers halfway through our three-year run in Dubai. How can I argue otherwise? When Millie moved house, she adds, she got to stay at Rye. This, I know, is lament: a plea for our former life in England, for playmates in striped uniforms and muddy wellies surging across the pitch. This, I know, is the register of loss, a child’s introduction to grief. But as I hug my daughter in the darkness of her new bedroom, I’m distracted by her use of the British idiom. How, born in Amman, Jordan, and taken to Oxford as a toddler, my girl carries with her not the American colloquialism that reflects her citizenship but that of England—the only “home” her young memory holds. Moved house. The words stick in my mind. I try to picture their literal equivalent and suddenly, à la Dorothy Gale, our hunter-green door, windows, and walls are being whisked from their Oxford foundation as we’re swept over London and across the Channel, past Europe, Turkey, and Iran, to land here, near Kite Beach, where we reside in the boat-shaped shadow of the Burj Al Arab. I wasn’t much older than my daughter when I first saw Return to Oz, the ’80s fantasy-bordering-on-horror that revisits Dorothy at an asylum where she nearly undergoes electroshock therapy to rid her of “delusions” about a dreamed-up Emerald City. More sinister than its 1939 counterpart, Return follows the Kansas farm girl after she escapes her psychiatrists and is swept into a river, later waking in an inverted Oz whose citizens have turned to stone. What’s happened to everybody? Dorothy asks, though it’s clear that—not a happy little bluebird in sight—the rainbow is over: yellow brick road a pile of rubble, there’s no going back, only through.

I remember Return to Oz—a younger me marveling at its darkness, how I was certain that, despite the narrative’s fantasy veil, it revealed something true about the world, though I couldn’t quite articulate what. That crumbing Emerald City Dorothy returns to suggests neglect, her neglect. It’s a twisted, nightmarish version of nostalgia. What happens to a place, or our sense of a place, if we’re not there to care for it, attend to it with our worry? Or what happens to a self, our sense of a self, if we leave the roads we’ve known? There was something about Princess Mombi that I couldn’t shake. At the time, I was simply disgusted—thought her long hall lined with the heads of younger women and her ability to switch them with her own were simply evidence of a deranged mind—a bored, youth-obsessed, middle-aged sorceress. But I found it inconvenient, awkwardly wicked, couldn’t imagine the aim of such an elaborate endeavor. Then, I saw it as the power of transformation. Now, I see it as the power of perspective. Indeed, one might say the whole film is about perspective—that all stories of return are about that. In the original Wizard of Oz, I thought the famous switch from a sepia-toned Kansas to the garish hues of Technicolor implied a threshold between the real and the imaginary. I think I read it wrong: it’s a doorway between the known and unknown, but all of it real, all of it potentially beautiful or catastrophic. This changes the ending for me. When Dorothy awakens in her familiar bed, surrounded by the people who love her, we’re supposed to feel happy for her. But if Oz wasn’t a dream, then how can she possibly go back to living as a nice girl in Kansas? And what of the people who shared her adventure—Tin Man, Scarecrow, Lion—who suffered and rose to triumph with Dorothy, only for her to return to the Plains, believing her old life was the better one? Perhaps that felt true in the moment, but it was only a trick of perspective. People are not static. Time is not static. Dorothy’s better old life would no longer exist, as it would rely on her being the same old Dorothy. Now, I am harrowed by that scene: Dorothy waking up to the comfort of all her black-and-white certainties, pretending that what she experienced was a dream—she didn’t walk those roads, she didn’t know those people—so that she might be accepted once again into her small life, by making a claim that is ultimately, irrevocably fleeting: There’s no place like home.

With the girls in my town—or, the women who, in the 1990s, were still those girls in babydoll dresses and knockoff Docs, soccer uniforms and teased ponytails, and mouthfuls of orthodontia—I went through things: driver’s ed, confirmation, typical teenage crises (first loves, first breakups, first times breaking curfew and getting caught), copious orders of french fries, tubes of Lipslicks, cans of Aqua Net and Rave. In cars borrowed from our parents, we sped through Saturday nights, heading nowhere, really, our nostrils filled with the stink of cows that outnumbered the general populace. Sometimes I’m baffled by who I was then—part of me conspiring from the passenger seat about the coolest way to ask Mikey Lincicum to the Backwards Dance, the other half quietly plotting to disappear. If we aren’t there, does a place cease to exist for us? Or is it that we, ourselves, cease to exist, if we’re no longer an active part of that place? I turned sixteen senior year; by August I was gone. Never having attended a high-school reunion, I flew from London to Los Angeles three springs ago, before driving 172 miles to the funeral of my childhood friend who shot himself twice in the chest. A remarkable homecoming: my parents, relocated; grandparents, long deceased. Nothing to tether me to the grid-work of the town where I was brought up but anxiety and love, estrangement and recollection. Of buildings and trees, fog and heat; of the long aisle of St. Aloysius down which I queued toward the body of Christ, or the northeast corridor of Blain Park where, in the final weeks before university, my friend and I promised never to let each other go back to where we started. He did, in fact. Go back. After his first divorce. Just for the summer, he swore, still in his early twenties—six months tops. The morning of the memorial, I put on a black dress. A girlfriend did my makeup in front of a mirror where, twenty-six years earlier, we’d primped for winter formal. The room held the same sunken bathtub and pink buddleia wallpaper latticed with vines. Through venetian blinds, I recognized the valley’s particular light. I even recognized the shadowy self reflected back, the shape of my face and eyes. And yet I was an animal turned to stone: monument of what was or could have been, caught in a scene that played out as classmates chattered, debated mascara, gossiped about names that once mattered. They’d stayed put. I’d moved. Through the state, at first. Then through the country and, later, the world. No, this wasn’t shock—the anxiety of trying to navigate loss—but the determination to see something, or rather, some beloved someone, through. Who decides where home resides? Is it a matter of hope? Or hurt? Is it a calling? A place through which you move? Or is it a place that continues to move through you, however far you go?

These days I don’t go far: on afternoon walks, I don’t even leave my neighborhood, its border as circuitous as a villanelle. Sometimes I break the rut and simply saunter (sans terre, without land or home), but more often than not, I walk my circuit because it requires no thought. Although I know nothing in the universe is static, when I pass the same houses in the same order, my mind feels firmly grounded in the known. It’s then that I let my mind wander, that I scroll through my phone, passing your name, remembering I can’t call, our time zones too far apart. I also pause at another friend, his death an expanse I can’t traverse. I’ve been considering why I keep his number—a thumbnail photo next to his name, his large brown eyes looking up at me. Maybe some part of me likes the illusion: I could just ring and hear his voice. Maybe I like the punishment of being the one alive. Maybe this is just my small vigil: walking in circles, remembering him. Does everyone have a practice like this? I think of El Día de los Muertos, Obon, the Hungry Ghost Festival, the ancient Samhain festival during which communal bonfires mark the start of the dark half of the year, when it was thought the border between the living and dead thinned enough to let spirits pass. We don’t want to forget. We want to believe there is somewhere an unlocked door that our dead might open. This belief is rooted in grief but also in the desire to transcend our own ending: if it’s not over for them, it won’t be over for us. Memento mori: Latin for “remember that you [have to] die”—a phrase that made me laugh the first time I heard it because I think of my own death every day. Who never thinks of their end? Perhaps that’s another effect of the pandemic we’ve been living through: who doesn’t think of their own death now? But even outside crisis, in times when I’m merely sauntering around, the scent of white blossoms; the clouds hovering in blue; the solid, sweet damp earth make me remember I’m going to die someday. The thought always sunders me. All these traditions that claim the existence of an afterlife—I hope they’re wrong. To be taken from the earth entirely, my consciousness and memories intact, everyone and everything I love just beyond a thin veil of space and time I can see through but not touch? If I believed in Hell, that would be it. When I’m dead, at least let me be done with longing. Let me remember nothing of home.

Three a.m.: puke streaks the rug, toilet’s outer bowl, a wall. My nine-year-old, whose temperature has spiked past 103, cowers near the trash bin. Mama’s here, I say, rushing through darkness. We’re seventy-two hours into my husband’s month-and-a-half trip to Kuwait, where he’s filling in for another officer at the embassy. Alone in Dubai without the support of a spouse or family, without a single friend or even our neighbors’ names, I begin to panic about what to do with my youngest should her brother’s fever surge. The hospital is twenty minutes away; I haven’t driven at night since last month’s eye surgery. If I call an ambulance, will they let my daughter ride with us? Would it be smarter to Uber? Given the UAE’s Covid safety measures, will Uber even take a passenger who’s visibly ill? Once he’s back in bed, paracetamol swallowed, damp washcloth covering his eyes, I wait for my son to drift into sleep before returning to mop up. The bathroom tile yellows in the glow of the night-light. Maybe because it’s pushing four a.m., maybe because I’m half-delirious myself, I start fantasizing about life over the rainbow—picture Toto passed out in the field of poppies, wonder how Baum’s plot would’ve shifted had Dorothy been swept away not with her beloved dog but an infant and toddler. The idea, I know, is absurd. Bottle of Formula 409 in hand, I snicker imagining Judy Garland’s middle-aged double dragging her son and daughter down the yellow brick road, refusing the Munchkins’ lollies, stopping to change a diaper in the corn field, coaxing her young son through the twisted shadows of the haunted wood. Little ones in tow, would she have had time to chat up the Scarecrow or Tin Man? The Lion? Made it to Emerald City? I tear off another paper towel. Perhaps the trouble is that I’m less Dorothy than Aunt Em—wringing her hands, waiting for the one she loves to come home. Or am I the Witch? Souring the air, then retreating to rooms where no one wants to go. Still, if I click my heels, I wonder where we’d land: DC? Oxford? San Francisco? Amman? (The list of former addresses prattles on . . .) I’ve tried, as we’ve logged one destination after the next, to find something my children can hold onto, something meaningful enough to counter the geography of impermanence. It’s not nostalgia I worry will hurt them; rather, the opposite: their sense of strangeness and estrangement, the gulf of remoteness I feel deepening each time we leave a city to court the unknown; or the likelihood that after all we’ve been through—neighborhoods, time zones, landscapes, languages—there exists in this world no one place where they can fully recognize the history of themselves, no road familiar enough to travel in any weather, no home beyond the murky stuff of dreams or memory to which their future selves might return.

Through the day. Through the door. Through the rooms where our children live and must believe—as we did when we were children—that they are at the center of their stories, the protagonists of the narrative that matters. Everyone does this, of course, but it’s easier to see in children, animated by their various and changing passions, those who entered the world through us but can never see us, not really. Not yet, at least. We say I love you, but if we’re lucky and the love stays, it evolves to mean something different than what we first meant. Old love hides inside new love, time inside time, place inside place, until we wake one day to find what we knew of ourselves archaic. It’s the same with language, I suppose, which holds within it a record of loss. What a word means is almost never what it meant, though sometimes its etymology echoes through. Take, for example, the lost meanings of through: a channel for water; a slab of stone to seal the coffin (as in through-stone); a small valley shaped like a trough; and my favorite—obsolete, from the Scottish—through, meaning a sheet of paper. Of course, unromantically, I’m writing this on a screen, not a page in the physical sense. Perhaps that’s what makes an actual page romantic: the physical thing that pulls you through—passage to another mind. That connection. The possibility of holding that connection. This is why friends and lovers exchange letters: to read and reread is to pass through, again and again, the thoughts of the beloved, to traverse the most precious of landscapes . . . or, anyway, this is how love has always seemed to me: not a feeling but a place—or a feeling that becomes a place. Perhaps it could be the same for your children? For you? In the map of my mind, shadowed green and stone, people I love become places inside me. One’s a mangrove forest rooting itself in a river. One’s a sea town built of white stone. One’s a crater blast beside a terraced garden. A Midwestern field. A city of emerald. A long brick road. This is to say, I don’t think I’ve ever unloved or truly lost anyone—even the bad loves, the places in which I shouldn’t have lived, those places remain inside me. Is it better or worse to be the author of love’s ruins, its keeper? If I could remember my way back to each place, I know I’d feel it all again, but out of sync, so I just don’t return—the path erased by dormant grief. In this case, the murky barricade of the past and its cumulative losses is a gift. No way to return means we lose not only what was bright but also what was unbearable. What do people say when they begin to articulate what they’ve learned from a crisis? After everything that we’ve been through . . . These thresholds allow us to acknowledge what is broken or timeworn, to find a new way forward. No through-thought, no through-road. May the fear of disconnection dead-end in our minds. May we build roads only to those that we think of as home . . . which brings me to another obsolete through: to convey or transmit (information) by means of an intermediary. So, language itself as transitive—all communication a kind of movement—though this usage was last written down in 1753: “whos sentens thorowed we wryte . . .” Whose sentence through we write. Yes. This sentence through which I write my way to you: through this screen, these wires, this code.

Read more from Issue 19.2.