You, the Nervous Wreck

You would later say that that incident was your breaking point. You wanted to go back to San Francisco and get a manicure, paint your nails blue, get a massage, get away. You said you ended up in your hotel room in Mytilene behind a locked door, under the sheets, noise-canceling headphones blasting Christa Ludwig singing Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder into your soul. What breaks us is rarely what we expect.

I had read the essays you wrote about Syrian refugees in 2012 and 2013. They were one of the reasons I came to this Greek island. You’d been working with refugees in Lebanon since the beginning, years before the crisis in Lesbos. You’d interviewed children whose entire families were killed, talked to survivors of massacres, met victims of torture. You interviewed a seven-year-old girl who showed you a drawing of her lost home hanging from a parachute. She said the parachute was needed to keep the house safe in case it had gone flying off with no one to look after it any longer. You talked to a mother in Oslo whose son was being beaten on a regular basis by the other boys in school. She told you Europe may have once been a sanctuary but no longer. Europe was like the light of a star that kept going long after the star itself had died.

Hell, I remember you wrote about the man who invited you into his tent near Zahlé. He was bedridden with the flu and kept smelling a potted sage plant, thinking it a cure. He wouldn’t talk to you about what happened to him even though you could see the bandages around both arms and chest. His son finally whispered that his father was slowly skinned while in the notorious Tadmor Prison in Palmyra, a government torturer had spent an entire day peeling layer after layer of his father. That did not break you, but a boy having to leave home to get an education did.