For one enormous moment, she saw it: the sky on the first day of the world, when it was borderless. When there were no walls, bars, or fences, no lines between land, air, sea. When it was all still endlessly crystalline, endlessly blue, endless.
When people were people and all people were people, and when two kissed, any two anywhere, stars exploded, for one enormous moment, bathing the world, all of it, in simultaneous sunrise and sunset.
In one enormous moment, in someone else’s room, she saw a human story, every human’s: beauty and terror, both. Breath, sun, and death, and what it means to be alive. So complicated, and at the same time, so simple. She had forgotten. Through the ceiling, she saw sky, and above it, the only thing that mattered.
Thrust. It swept her up, and she let it. She pushed the arms that held her wide open and ran to her son’s room. No trumpets sounded when she entered.
There it was. It was not here, was nowhere, everywhere. It was Hadi and Naseem. It was, like air, anywhere.
It was beyond all seas, all frontiers, all countries, all beliefs. That longing, that pull that had always been there, that was freedom. Freedom that carries birds from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego. The same on which those birds fly back when winter is over.
Freedom, intoxicating with possibility. Landscapes so rich in color and smell they sublimate all senses. She cried, joy and gratitude and hope, the last with urgency, the same that compels migratory birds to beat their wings. Hope, that absurd, unfounded, only human capacity to believe, against all reason and all odds, that all would be well.
An hour later, beyond seas, frontiers, and countries, Hadi Deeb shouted into the phone: “What did you say?!”
“I said Amman, Beirut, Vienna, Berlin! It doesn’t matter! Let’s go to Paris! Let’s meet in Istanbul and take the train…”
“Sama, have you lost your mind? None of those places will give us visas!”
“Then we’ll go somewhere that will! And if not, I’ll meet you at some border and we’ll live in a tent!”
He could not see her face. She was joking, or simply mad.
“We’ll have a picnic!”
Simply mad.
“Are you listening to yourself?!”
“Look, Hadi! Look at this!”
His phone beeped. She had turned the video on.
“Look at his face! Look at him breathe! Look at his eyes; they’re open! I told you they were blue! Can you see him?”
He could. He could see, and it was impossibly beautiful.
He saw his son, his wife, himself somewhere. Not in a place, but a moment, a flash of present that contained infinity. In suspension, midair, nowhere, over the Atlantic, groundless and directionless. And to his surprise, it didn’t scare him.
He saw the cosmic majesty of their randomness, that they existed, the three of them, against all probability and circumstance. Then, the cosmic awareness of their impermanence. He saw the sky over the border, at the threshold of night and day. Liminal, infinitely so, crystalline, every shade of blue, studded with stars he did not have to see. He knew.
There are as many loves as stars, shooting across the sky; over the walls men draw on maps, indifferent to those. Loves and stars and birds go where they want, like air, like a breeze. A skyful of loves. And Venus, goddess of love, mornings and evenings, patron saint of the stateless and transient.
He saw planes ascending, descending.
“Paris, you say?” he said, and heard a burst he thought was tears.
“Paris…”
It was air.