cassie mckay 4 eva

It’s when they’re alone with their daughter that Trinity thinks about the person she married, about the woman that sits cross-legged on a Persian rug by the back door, letting her face warm in the dawn of the sun as their daughter tries to catch the rays with her hands.

It’s hard to quantify a person into a single sentence, a simple word or thought that can succinctly put them into a box, a category of preconceived notion and ideas, without detracting from the truth of them in some way or another.

Baran is impossible to put away.

Trinity had thought about it for a long time, long before they were married, long before they had had Christine - the kind of box Baran might be put into.

There’s categories to her, of course there are, elements that make up who she is. Doctor. Mother. Wife. Trinity, in the life they’ve made together, has the same.

But there’s more to Baran than that.

There are so many versions of her that Trinity hadn’t met, so many versions of her that no longer live in the real world and are carried in the distance of a memory or the faded pages of a journal.

Trinity thinks about those versions, the fissions of what’s left behind, the little flashes that leave as quickly as they arrive, like flickers on a film reel, here for a moment and gone the next.

She thinks about the passports that sit in a drawer in the office room; her American one sitting on the bottom, Baran’s German one that says Reisepass on it lying on the top and her American one wedged between.

She thinks about the journals they keep, hers thin and forgotten about, Baran’s full and weathered and loved. Postcards of Tehran, Yazd and Persepolis. Flowers pressed and dried into the pages, handwriting neat and scrawled in fading ink. Adventures and memories and songs. Old receipts and excerpts from books she’s read.

She thinks of the photos that scatter their home, of worlds so far far away from their own, of people that Trinity and their children have never known, of a Baran that no longer exists.

Baran doesn’t talk much of her time in Kabul but Trinity sees it in her, the pain, the old fear that is sometimes jostled into her features like a deck of cards about to fall. There is a Baran who is afraid and alert and despairing, and Trinity does not know her, does not understand or see the blood that stains her bones, the smell of soot and sand in her nose.

Trinity thinks of the little girl she might’ve been, the fragments of her that are so different from the one that sits in her lap. She thinks of a tiny Baran with short curly hair and big Bambi-like eyes, crying out for her Mama when she’s stuck with another needle, clinging to her Baba when it’s over, making him promise not to let them do that to her again. She thinks of a Baran that is tiny and terrified of everything around her, of the fingers that poke and prod, encased in sterile rubber, pulling anything they can from her. When Trinity finds photos of her, maybe at five or six, she runs the back of her fingers along her cheek and wipes away the tears.

She smiles on the Baran that she gets to keep.

The Baran that loves flowers and carries them home until they’re bursting out of her backpack. Roses, cowslips, borage, tulips; anything she can find.

The Baran that lies out in the little patch of garden they’ve made for themselves and naps on the flat swing they bought, basking in the sun.

The Baran that smiles and laughs with their children as if it were as easy as breathing.

Trinity often wonders what keeps her here, what makes someone who’s lived as many lives as Baran decide to stay and to settle.

Sometimes she wonders if it’s just another cycle, that one day this Baran who kisses their little girl’s cheeks will too fade and disappear like the rest of them, confided and kept into a picture frame on a mantelpiece, gone and forgotten about.

Other days she wonders if this is Baran’s end, if this is the life she settles to go out on and will lie in the sun until it sets and fades along with her, pulling her into the warm darkness of the summer nights.

She couldn’t put Baran into words.

She was so much more than that.

She was the smell of cherries in the morning, of fresh linen and dark-chocolate, of dried ink and crushed petals.

She was the sound of bare feet dancing along a sand-bitten floor, whispered and dying, the stretch of sinew, reaching out and longing.

She was the sun burned into a set of eyes, warm and reverent, bright and unyielding.

She was the hands that held her daughter close and tasted the salt of her tears.

She was the mouth that smiled and laughed and bit, that tasted blood and wine alike as if they were no different.

No words could’ve pinned her down.