grief, and the shoulders that choose to carry it.

i was thirteen the first time i realized my mother was a person.

we’d been sat in the living room, talking and pretending to understand each other the way daughters and mothers do. i said something cutting in response to a probing question she’d asked and i remember her laughing at me, big and brash like her hair.

what?

you so often remind me of Salwa. she was feisty like you. i can just imagine the pair of you ganging up on me, thick as thieves.

was feisty?

she died when they bombed her grandmother’s house at the start of the qah. she was meant to have dinner with us that night, but her fate was calling.

that was the day i learned that even my mother cried.

61 people were killed in the first twenty-four hours after the somali civil war started in luuq. my mother remembers them all.

Nasir was killed by his father-in-law, the government soldier. he always bought fruit from the one-legged swahili woman who sat near the masjid.

Mahmuud was killed in an airstrike they say had been meant for the local police station. he loved to fish, and to flirt.

Hibo was shot running away from the troops who’d ransacked her family house and killed her parents. she used to bully my mother in school for being chubby, but my God what a way to die.

Dirie shot himself in the face after he heard what they’d done to Dhuh. they’d looked nothing alike, but everyone still used to mess their names up.

she wakes some nights drenched in warm sweat, shaking arms slick with her panic. i’m fine she says but i’ve heard her calling for strangers i’ve never met, casualties so big and wounding i know i’ll never hear their stories. dead lovers, perhaps. distant cousins. i see the way she watches the videos coming out of palestine now and see the air get trapped in her chest. i watch as she stands perfectly still in front of the TV as they replay an earlier attack on a housing block in gaza.

as she watches an entire residential block get leveled and crumple live on air as if it is made of sand, i see her shoulders shake with the effort of containing her screams.

the bombs are meant for hamas, they say. not civilians.

i know she’s thinking of Mahmuud because I’m thinking of Mahmuud.

14,000 children killed.

the number plays on loop at the bottom of the screen and every time i see it, a little bit more feeling leaves my body. she can detect my heartbreak from a mile away, the way that only the mothers of daughters do, so she gathers me up in her lap.

do not weep for the dead, my love. pray for those of us who live. for those of us who have to remember.

she sends me a WhatsApp later of a little girl being buried by her older brother.

her name was Seehan, it reads. she wanted to be writer, like you.

i realized then that my mother would never forget the names of these children either. i learned then that one day i’d be calling seehan’s name in my sleep. sadness is the price you pay for remembering, but isn’t it better to be weighed down than empty?

perhaps my shoulders are frail but i’d rather risk them breaking than die untethered to loss. to lose is to have loved.