An emotion of great delight

I’d been fighting tears all day, all week, all year; it was exhausting. I often promised myself I’d cry them free when I got home, that I’d find a safe place to experience my anguish in full, and yet, I seldom did. It was not an exciting extracurricular activity, not the sort of thing most kids looked forward to upon arriving home from school. So I held them in. They remained here, unshed and overfilling my chest, pressing painfully against my sternum. Always threatening.

He said, “God, Shadi, you’re so beautiful sometimes I can’t even look at you,” and I’d just stood there, my heart jackhammering in my chest, my eyes closing on a sound, a desperate sound that escaped my lips, shattered the dream. I’d come back to myself with a terrifying awareness, walked back into the house without a word, without looking back.

“You okay?” Over and over again, he asked me this question. He was staring at me ruthlessly, his eyes lingering on my face, the cut on my chin. I felt the friction between us as palpably as I felt the pounding in my heart. He was angry. Afraid. He stared at me with an authority I found surprising, with a concern I’d not felt in a long time. I watched him swallow as he waited. His throat was wet; the movement was mesmerizing.

When we weren’t fighting, we seldom had reason to speak. I always thought it would help matters to ignore her, and yet, for some reason, my silence only drove my sister crazier.

My sadness had made me noteworthy. Beautiful. Had imbued in me a kind of dignity, a weight I could not uncarry.

I became aware of my eyes because others had become aware of my eyes.

He met my eyes with brazen defiance, almost daring me to look away. I felt the heat of that look in my blood. Felt it in my cheeks, the pit of my stomach.

I stared up at the sky again.
Dear God, I thought, this was not what I meant when we last spoke.

I’d managed to reduce my entire person to a nonevent so insignificant my mother seldom even asked me questions anymore. Seldom realized I was around. I told myself I was helping, giving her space, becoming one less child to worry about—mantras that helped me ignore the sharp pain that accompanied the success of my disappearing act.

The crushing waves of grief that once drowned me had begun, slowly, to ebb, but my mother— Over a year later my mother still seemed to me not unlike sentient driftwood, bobbing along in the cool, undiluted waters of agony.
So I’d become a ghost.