DILARA SÜMBÜL

Smaller, Still

cum mortuis in lingua mortua — with the dead in a dead language 

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We moved into the old servant’s quarters when the earth was still mothed and flowered. It was a faded place that kept a glimmer of its old heartbeat, a place where many people like us must have gotten down on their hands and knees. The summer we were there, my entire atlas was the green that lined the estate. If I’d lived previously, I didn’t know it then. My mother had taught me to cast things away, bring my hands up to my face and let the knowing shrink. The great war had just ended. I stopped tasting tin lids and started knowing quiet nights where the clouds passed peacefully. 

During the day, I made tracks in the well tended forest, tucked myself into the soft grass lining the willows that kept the estate’s borders hazy. I could have nested out there, but instead I slept on the cool slates of wood in our borrowed room and watched dust turn in the sunbeams. 

* * *

I chose my new name at the courthouse in the city. The earliest appointment was before daybreak, so at four we folded ourselves into train seats, watched slate sick streets upon streets until we were in the rush of the city. I made lines in my forearms on the wooden edge of the desk, pressed down with the pen hard enough to kill the ink. At the time it had seemed like another of my mother’s ancient remedies. How I brought the folded papers back to the office, how they took them and remade me entirely. There would be no more huddled persons in my name like the memories I disremembered. I was a new thing that day, creased into patterned fluorescent dreams. 

It was the winter before my late start at university, and when I walked out down the marble stairs my mother was waiting for me. We waited for the train back and stood on a residential street, and when she admitted to the sickness, my mother lit a cigarette and spoke very slowly. We were two trenchcoats huddled on the frost-slick street, casting fog with conversation and we spoke till her cigarette stub glowed, like burden-swollen water drained until relief. I should never have been a mother, she told me. I was pinched into my shoes, into my body. 

In the remaining silence we stood and watched the windows on the street flicker into the light, this unfamiliar place blinking. We would never speak my name again. It was so early then, we were sure it was a mercy.

* * *

I spent time just like I’d been taught, forgetting my old name and my mother’s last words to me. I walked around the first years of school in a kind of disbelief, still young when the sky began to shutter from the stress of our new industrial humanity. Those first years, I knew beginner’s archeology, local streets, and Sylvie’s routine intimately. 

I faltered at new people but still let her become Syl to me. I offered to take her to work at the theater on the nights she didn’t feel like walking. And she felt something I tried not to, would sometimes stop her long rants and the lively arcs of her arms to speak gently to me. 

She’d asked me once if something had happened. Leaned in and put her hand on my arm where I felt carved out acutely. And I’d let myself look wounded, because some part of me craved the pity. But the answer was unspeakable, another separation between her and me— that I was a temporary placeholder where a real person should be. I imagined all of my family to be this, watermarks crumpling the paper, wrinkled into their own echoes. 

But one night we’d stopped on a road lining the park on a calm slate skied evening, and she turned and caught the light, illuminated in her slacks and her pale coat and rendering me completely unable to speak. Like something being revealed to me. She was so serene in the light, so calm and so unthinking. And I knew no matter how physically close to Syl I was, her even reality would never find me. I wanted it— would keep sitting near her to catch the glimpses, as unloving as it was. I might have loved her then, but my thoughts were too murky in the tepid waters I kept time in. Sometimes I felt my own absence so keenly it hurt to look at her. I turned back to the road as something burned in my chest. 

I put my hands on the wheel where the light dappled skin and watched as it caught my wrists, my pulsepoint beating. I was some shaken, nameless creature, but I still started driving. I drove and saw the roads reinvent us, watched the tunnel press my hand into hers and prayed it would keep. 

* * *

Last week, I heard the social club’s fireworks send themselves off into the night and knew it was time to leave. And it felt like twelve again, looking out a thin, battered window and watching my father bend into the earth with something like a shattering. How I first saw the sunlight reaching for me, invisible pillars lighting the dust shaken away from where it was supposed to be.

As a child, hidden in the softest of the green, I forgot what it was to love my father. It kept a grey mark like ash in my chest where the knowing used to be, carved a new rib over my heart. Still, I thought that despite it I’d answer some day, tell Sylvie whatever she wanted as long as it was her asking. Like I could be rebuilt in someone else’s image if I just got close enough, or play-acting devotion to someone wholehearted could make it catch on me. 

I flicker into dreamless sleep at night. I spend walks through the halls taking vows quietly, carve Syl away but keep her passing rustles dear to me. In the mornings, I make tea. I decide it’s not enough. I drink it boiling. I can’t fully remember the estate, but it must have been in the North, and I don’t know where I’m from, but it must have been worth leaving. I close my eyes. I try and see the same soft green. 

I’m keyed open by the half lit memory of warm, cologned cotton. Again, I know I lived in a small sloped house that always let the cold in, that I’d fray my sleeves soft outside and sing carols in the winter, pray to elms in the yard and hear my mother whistle doing laundry. It’s still lodged within me like a blessing, like the stubborn thing I took a match to long ago. I write my first name down in spite of myself and fold it into my pocket for safe keeping. Knowing it again traces something inside of me— old hairline fractures like freckles and the reverberations of old, far off dreams. 

But now I’m aware again that when I was five years old, my father would hold me in his lap and sing, something in a lilt I don’t remember. I should’ve known I wouldn’t survive losing that. When I blink, I know again that we huddled down in the basement with the votive candle we’d been saving. It hurt to swallow, and my mother’s dress smelled stale from sweat, and the adobe wall we pressed ourselves against was the only calm thing imaginable to me. 

At first, as a child, I didn’t get the trick, held my hands to my face and begged for something to reach me. Now it’s been years, and I’m a member of an unspoken country within a country, of a rib within a ribcage that is still somehow unknown to me. Again, I shrink, a spool in my mother’s arms, her eyes, a blink.

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