One time, in my Before, I asked Mama if she thought ghosts were real. We’d read A Christmas Carol in seventh-grade English class and then watched the movie. And all the chains on the first ghost that came to haunt Scrooge scared me.
“That’s a very Western idea of ghosts.” My mom grinned as she spoke to me. “We don’t have those same beliefs. Of course, there are stories of jinn and other supernatural creatures, but I think the ghost in that story is more like a… uh… a symbol. An idea.”
“An idea?”
“Yes. That your wrongs can haunt you. They can hurt you as much as they hurt others. No one expects you to be perfect. Just do your best to be a good person. The person we know you are,” she said, and kissed me on the forehead.
My mom always smelled like the attar she had in a small glass bottle on her dresser—like a layer of something woodsy over a sweet flower. It was in her scarf and her hair. It was her. It was like the incense we burned. Sometimes on Fridays she and Baba would burn bakhoor in the small brass incense burner Mama had brought with us from Iraq. It had belonged to her grandmother and was one of the only things we had from back home. Sometimes she let me carefully light the charcoal disk the bakhoor wood chips sat on. I liked watching the smoke curl through the curvy slits in the burner and waft through our apartment.
Now I imagine myself like that smoke, slipping through cracks, filling a space, a whiff, then nothing. But a little bit of that incense stayed in everything—I could sniff it in the fabric of the sofa and the curtains in the living room, even my pillowcase sometimes. Maybe I’ll be like that smoke. Maybe I can make a part of me linger everywhere, too.