These
are khaki days. They sleep too much and sing too little. Dull, no one calls the
brown-grey a favorite. No one dances to a khaki beat. These days do not
respond, they wait. For usefulness, for light, for the smell of dust to fade.
They hold sorrow in their seams. The mornings are exhausted and the nights are
restless. These are khaki days. They wait.
Laleh
sits on the steps to wait for these khaki days to fade into the shadows of
yesterdays and last weeks, three months ago, a year ago, “when I was a child.” Of
course, she isn’t a child now, though someday maybe she will have been.
These
days she is neither child nor adult, but some resplendent being, caught in a
place between home and everywhere else. Her life lived on the peripheral, not
in the news shows, the papers full of politics and war, reports of what her
country has threatened to do to all the rest. It is simply here, sitting on the
steps in a grey place, waiting for the world to say hello, to welcome her in.
This
fresh-wet morning she watches a brown bird bounce in the fresh mud, pulling its
wriggly breakfast from the soil. She is quiet. Quiet because there is no one to
talk to, quiet because there is nothing to say.
If
she were home, with her parents and her brothers, there would no doubt be some extraordinary
music escaping the stereo, cello strings or the ivory hammers of a classic
piano; she and her mother would dance a story about lavender, the color of the
walls in the kitchen, twirling about the living room, annoying the father who
just wanted to listen and the brothers who just wanted to play. If she were at
home, there would be the smell of milk tea wafting from the kitchen, warm and
waiting for lunch. If she were at home, the velveteen cat would be curled on
the sofa, longing for a delicate caress behind the ears, purring along with the
lavender music, dreaming of milk tea and cerulean forests, stalking birds and
pouncing flowers. If she were at home, the room would be illuminated, the incandescent
day-star pushing forth warm light onto the rug, its savory colors turning
gold-orange in the strong-soft light.
But
she is not home and the light is not warm. There will be tea with lunch, but
not milk tea. The cat which paws at her feet is not her velveteen cat, but sooty
brown, a sack of fur and skin and fleas and still licking leftover lunchtime
fish from its whiskers. Laleh reaches down to run her fingers through its fur
but it dashes off through the grass, off to coax the sparrow into chase, to frolic
with the day, chasing men with lunch pails, teasing children on tricycles.
Laleh
waits on the steps for lunch; she’s been sitting here since breakfast, watching
the free animals not tied to places that are home or not, and the people who
mill around the road, the central vein of this place, a highway of tricycles, a
pathway for plastic soles and the bread trucks. Everyone joins the path once a
day, becoming blood, alive, helping the vein to move, to keep this place
breathing beyond the barbed wire and guard shack, beyond strict cement walls,
even if they are painted orange. Once a day, they surge out of the burrows and
barracks for lunch, at least to gather their pans of rice and noodles, their
chicken or beef, the orange juice they
pretend tastes like milk tea. Once a day they remember to breathe, to come out
for air, into the steamy wet summer day, out of their daydreams and BBC News.
The
khaki days, Laleh sighs, and waits, wanting velveteen cats and the way her
father looked, cross, straining to hear the cello strings and piano notes over
the giggling of his smallest daughter, the way her brothers whined for quiet
and begged for soda not wanting tea.
Maybe
tomorrow they will come, maybe tomorrow the air will be clear and the worms
will rejoice, burrow deep into their soft-warm caverns with their families and
be safe.
*had to use special word and techniques, writing exercise. I will explore it more later.
