She’s just a kid. Kids don’t mourn their loss; they don’t know what their loss is. YET.
She’s just 2, she definitely won’t remember the tears. It only took the “kid” 2 seconds to stop being one. That’s exactly how much it took the bullet to end the symphony of olive love for her father. That’s exactly when there was no longer a father to wipe the fear out of the lonely heart. On solid ground, under the olive tree is exactly where the bullet made its mind to stop the heart beat.
Bullets are known for how triggered they get whenever they encounter a connection with something that isn’t metal.
77 years after, the “kid” is still 2. She didn’t know her age by her date of birth, she only counted from the moment that stopped all moments. She didn’t shed the tears that day. She wiped her mother’s. It was only that day. For the past 75 years she cried so much that the green in her eyes turned into olive trees.
Not just any tree, the tree she slept under in hopes to get enough of a father she never got to say goodbye to. In hopes to feel the home every day she’s reminded of not having.
“Father” is a word she was determined to use every day. “I have my father’s eyes” that was her way of showing us him. She’d always said that if we looked closely in her eyes, we would see him. She didn’t see him. That was her collecting the images of what she was told of how he looked like.
Her heart grew love for the tree instead of hatred. She sees hope in the tree that got to keep “father” for her. The tree she’s been sleeping under for 3 months now, next to her father.
The olive tree reunited the father and his little girl in a dimension we took shelter in believing.
“The elderly will die, and the young will forget”–unknown. This is me 3 generations after writing for a man that I’ve only known by his name, and all the things he could’ve been. All the trees he could’ve planted and prayed underneath. And most importantly all the love he could’ve given, and all the memories he could’ve made. But oh, dear me who dared disturb the bullet?
This is dedicated to my grandma and for her martyred father whom she loved the most. –October 24, 2023
