by Deno Trakas
Romantic words came to me, a line from Cummings, but I checked it and simply stared for a moment before I spoke. “Here’s the truth: your eyelids are scarred, and they aren’t pretty, and they might heal or they might not, but your eyes are the same beautiful eyes as before. That’s you. You have other scars, bad scars, physical and emotional, and they might heal or they might not, but inside you’re the same beautiful Azi, and I want to be with you.”
“But Nadia”—
“Nadia is a wonderful friend, but not my messenger from mystery—remember?”
“I remember everything,” she said, meaning everything.
“I’ll try to help you forget.”
“Okay, you talk small truth but not big truth. Big truth is sex. Yes?”
I wasn’t expecting that, didn’t think I’d ever heard her say the word, and it took me a minute. “You mean you’re afraid you might not be able to have sex?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, I could say it wouldn’t matter, but the truth is . . . that would be difficult. But you don’t know what you’re going to be like in a month or a year. You might be completely healed and happy and bouncing around in sexy clothes, fighting off all the men in town.”
“Or no”—
“We don’t know what will happen—that’s the truth. Right now I’m here for you, for whatever you need. But you’re free to choose—you can have me as a friend or whatever or nothing. You decide.”
Finally, finally, her face relaxed, she kissed me on the cheek and snuggled under my arm, pressed her face to my neck and her chest against mine. I breathed deeply—Azi smelled like autumn, dry and faintly smoky. The tension in her body seemed to ease, her breathing slowed, and in a few minutes I was happy to realize she had fallen asleep.
Some of Nadia’s apartment neighbors had hung wreaths and lights on their doors and windows, and I thought idly that I should celebrate Christmas properly this year with Azi and Nadia. I’d missed Halloween because of my distraction with comps, and Thanksgiving—when was it? Missing a holiday was no big deal, but missing two of them said something about my disconnection from my local world. But here it was: not a brutal jail in Tehran, a treacherous icy mountain, or a threatening black Gulf, but a perfectly pleasant late-autumn afternoon on the front steps of a well-trimmed apartment complex in Columbia, South Carolina. Maybe it was just the place for Azi, Firoozeh, to start a new life. And maybe not. That future remained uncertain, the past might always scratch at the door, but with luck, Insha’ Allah, we’d be safe, and we’d be together.
Almost an hour after she left, Nadia turned into the parking lot. When she got out of her car she waved, and I called, “You need some help?”
Azi woke, sat up, and looked around, momentarily confused about where she was.
“Yes,” Nadia said, “I buy everything in store. Come, give me hand.”
Smiling, imagining bags and bags of groceries and gifts, opening them in Nadia’s kitchen, making an impromptu celebratory meal, I said “Okay.”
