As the breeze from morning dew retreated back into hiding, he felt the weight of his sweaty, jet-lagged body get heavier. He walked over to the front desk and took out his passport and credit card. The clerk with droopy eyes looked down at the red cover and smiled in a quizzical way. ‘Welcome, Mr. Solomon Tesfay.’ His voice echoed, filling the hollow quiet left behind by partying voices.
Solomon could tell the clerk had stopped himself from saying what he was thinking. He understood what was not said because he’d become accustomed to being regarded with a special curiosity, particularly when he traveled to places where Black people were reduced to serving and cleaning white people’s mess. Sometimes they would ask him stupid questions, but often it was silent curiosity and judgement. When he was especially irritated, he would push them to say what they thought so he could rip them apart. But he never antagonized Black people even if their curiosity also felt intrusive. Because they dealt with the daily assaults of their society, which believed a Black man like him could never hold a professional job. Their curiosity wasn’t tinted with malicious entitlement. It was colored by hues of possibility they may never experience.
But he was too tired for all that. He looked at his watch: 4:07 am. If he had gotten in as scheduled, he would have been up by now, getting ready for his 5 or 10-km run. At home, his children would be coming back from school soon, and his wife would have dinner waiting for them. It was instinctive now, after all these years, to calculate time spanning oceans.
His notion of home was always fraught. Today, his home was a comfortable rented house in a country that did not belong to him or his family. When he was there, he was always up between 4 and 5 am. He once heard that in Chinese medicine, those were the hours that correlated with lungs and grief. He wasn’t always such an early bird, and it wasn’t by choice. In his 50s, he started having vivid dreams that were really panoramas of his childhood landscape with cameos from people he had long forgotten. The intense accuracy of those memories disguised as dreams would wake him from a deep sleep. His wife never woke and kept her stiff posture; she was stoic even in her sleep. He often gave himself a couple minutes in the dark to dislodge from the dream before getting back to reality.
In the dark, he wondered if this was the life he had imagined as he labored through his schoolwork at night? Or was it any future but the one that was predicted for him that he had been fighting for? In those first waking minutes, his mind quickly flipped the dream memory over and over, looking for hidden answers, but they never came because he didn’t know what the questions were. He wanted to crawl back into the dream, which was not like him at all. But there was something about these dreams.
He unlocked the door to a familiar room. Had he stayed in this exact room on one of his many trips to this city? They all looked the same, but there was always something – a small tear in the wallpaper glued back to imperfection or a stain trying to blend in with the carpet. How many guests did it take before the unavoidable signs of humanity started to show?
It had become a thing he did as he sipped on the 4 mouthfuls of scotch, he allowed himself to ease into the night after a long day of people. More than 4 might mean less tolerance for them the next day. Being alone had always been his default. As his body relaxed from a long day of meetings, he would scan the room to see if he could find remnants of previous guests. It was never hard. Here at a hotel that had long seen its glory days but still had status thanks to decades of economic decline in the country, this was an easy game.
As a swirl of ice melted against the backdrop of amber, he would imagine his children and wife in the house. When it was nighttime in this part of the world, it was morning at home. His wife would wake up before the kids. And when it was time for them to get up, she would yell up to them. Her quiet voice carried for only two reasons: to yell ‘wake up’ or ‘let’s go.’ He was still surprised by how her voice could reverberate through the walls when she needed to corral the children. The rest of the time, she only let necessary words slip from her mouth and when they did, they were small in volume.
Placing them in the world, in their time zone, and in their rented home was a thing he did, like looking for signs of people in these aseptic rooms. It was a game. He had learned to distract his mind because he knew how dangerous it could be without the distractions. Growing up, voices were low in count. There were the teachers and kids from school, but outside those hours, he didn’t hear too many other voices. He could have lost more than he had without these games he devised to trick the unforgiving reality of his origin.
He knew counting the cracks on the mud wall was no different than hiding in the high of chat as he knew other kids were doing. He understood that chat would only create a temporary escape from his parentless, shoeless, and seemingly futureless destiny. He always wanted it, all of it, to be different. So, he turned himself into the manifestation of the self-help books he now sees at American airports. He was doing all the things he saw on the covers about visualizing dreams, creating habits, and reframing thoughts way before he could ever imagine an airport full of people going up into the sky, so they could reach another part of the world. He didn’t give this much thought since he had spent the better half of his life traveling for work and being in more of the world than most people would ever experience. He didn’t exactly enjoy travel aside from the anonymity and solitude it gave him as a solo traveler. But when he took a moment to think about it from the limits of his childhood, he was amazed. This was his life.
He was now not just sleepy but hungry. He had two bags of peanuts and some crackers from the flight but was too tired to eat. His wife always said he returned thinner, even after a short trip. But tomorrow would be decadent by way of rich people living in a poor country.
He had agreed to join a colleague and his family on their yacht. His colleague came from a long line of white elites, and now he worked at an international organization, which put him in the untouchable echelon of his society. There would be a wide selection of different varieties of fish, oysters, meat, and liquor.
It was usually just his colleague’s family: his wife, three kids, kids’ friends, and maybe one or two other guests. But the food was always excessive and enough to feed a hundred people. He always wondered what they did with the leftovers.
He woke up a couple hours later and made a point to get up and run 10km. He pushed himself to make up for not running the day before. It was energizing to be on the streets of a city where he didn’t have any real connections, and every corner he turned offered something to take in. Being an outsider was another default state that made him feel at home because he felt most like himself when he was on the periphery. Even after becoming an insider through his accomplishments, he found ways to remind himself and others that he didn’t fully belong. It was freeing in a way that most people would not understand. He was unattached. If he were to be completely honest, he maintained his outsider status even with his family. He had obligations but never attachments.
This was his story, first by circumstance and then by design.
As he circled back to the hotel, he reached a euphoric state of sweaty exhaustion that he would later try to call up in his mind unsuccessfully. He had a similar feeling running barefoot on the sprawling hills of his childhood village. The weight of fate forgotten.
As he walked inside the hotel, the lightness he felt was interrupted by a sensation of being watched. He turned to look and saw the clerk who had checked him in a few hours ago. He scowled at him as the clerk self-consciously yelled, ‘Buenos dias, good morning sir.’ He walked inside the elevator without returning the greeting. He didn’t have time for unintentional racists who believed so much in their worldview that they easily made assumptions about Black people and believed it to be fact.
He covered every surface of his body with foamy white lather as he showered the sweat away. When his kids were younger, they were fascinated to see every inch of his brown body covered in soap suds. His wife always said showering was his playtime. He didn’t tell them that he didn’t always have soap growing up.
As he prepared to go out for the compulsory fun that he had come to see as part of the job, he remembered the cleaning lady who had turned to look at him when he entered his room. She looked away quickly, but something about her face was familiar to him, like he had seen it before. Had he seen her on a previous trip? He started to recollect his many stays at the hotel and soon realized it wasn’t that he’d met her before but that she looked like women back home. In his travels around the world, he had come to realize that you could find the exact face of someone printed on another human in another country.
He must have seen the photocopy of her face somewhere in his past. Brown-red skin, big eyes, a protruding silhouette. Distinctive features set on faces for generations. Would his children’s faces make up for the longing he feared was the fate created for them by war, migration, and ultimately, ambition?
Their faces may never blend. But as they got older, their features might at least let them know that they belonged to people somewhere, even if that place would never truly belong to them. His wife did her best to keep them speaking their language, but what good would that be when they got older, and they had no one to speak it with? But they would always have their faces. A dance of longing and belonging orchestrated by displaced features.
He would have been fine wandering the streets or using this free day to prepare for his week of meetings. But the yacht outing was happening because of him. He knew his colleague didn’t need a reason to host a party, but his arrival offered a perfect excuse. As much as he enjoyed his solitude, he didn’t exactly dread festive get-togethers. He was surprisingly good at them.
At home, they never had guests. Initially, after their move for his new position, they had occasional house parties where they would invite his colleagues. They were trying out a new identity in the new country. But some things you can’t change. His wife was uncomfortably aloof and maybe more so with people who were not her own, and he preferred a quiet home.
Their children never had friends over because he and his wife didn’t encourage or welcome it. The few times one of them brought friends over, he found himself pouting without meaning to. He never had friends growing up or a real home. It was probably why the little intruders put him in a bad mood. As he got older, he had started to examine things about himself more closely.
His wife came from a big family where her mother’s house was always the center of family gatherings. But as the eldest, she was sent to a missionary boarding school at a young age. His mother-in-law was convinced by white missionaries that it would be a good opportunity. His mother-in-law had never gone to school. That was the case for most women and men of her generation and yet there was a longing to know things in her like he’d never witnessed in anyone else. Every year she only managed to cobble together enough money to give this opportunity to one of the seven children she would end up having. His wife was chosen because she was the eldest.
But from what he’d observed over the years, he wasn’t convinced that it was the most fortuitous decision for her life.
He got out of the shower and dressed quickly. He went to the lobby and asked the same clerk to call him a cab. He had a look on his face, but this time Solomon wasn’t sure anymore what lay behind the expression.
When he got to the dock, he knew he was the last one. Music and laughter had already started to mingle in the air. He remembered why he had liked them right away. They were loud. They were touchy and affectionate in a way he had never experienced. It was an uncomfortable shock that soon felt oddly good to be around. That’s not how he was or how they were. People back home were never this free. Heavy on formality, fear, and appearances, they could never be this free, not even amongst friends.
What made one entire group of people one way and another completely different? His Polish colleague once told him that the Cold War had made his people cold and unwelcoming. He said that distrust was passed down to younger generations as protection. Their collective psyche got rewired with every occupation.
He walked over to the yacht and climbed up the stairs to the deck. His colleague, who was waiting right by the ladder, gave him a big hug with several hard pats on his back. ‘We’re happy to have you back, Solomon.’ He called over to a server and asked him to bring over scotch. The family came over to greet him warmly as they always did. His colleague’s wife, a charismatic woman with high-end taste, gave him a kiss. ‘You never age. Brown people are lucky like that.’
He took the scotch from the server, the only other Black person on the yacht. He felt the yacht move as it undocked. He went over to grab a seat next to his colleague, who had sat down with some other guests. They were childhood friends. ‘We are talking about the happy couple over there who just got engaged.’ Solomon looked over and saw his colleague’s son and a young woman. How old was he now? He had known him since he was 13 or 14. He couldn’t be more than 26, maybe 28 now. ‘We are very happy for them, but my wife wants them to have a long engagement since they’ve only known each other for seven months,’ his colleague shared.
‘What do you think, Solomon? How long did you know your wife before you were married?’ As he tried to remember, the couple walked over.
He told them that his wife was his student before she became his wife. I think he may have taught her for a year before they were married. She was only 25, but he was older, nearly 40. In today’s world, it would have been scandalous. But it wasn’t then. She was beautiful and quiet. His wife’s grasp of the material he was teaching was average, not exceptional, but she was more confident than her peers. It was her stoicism that had attracted him to her. Over the years, he saw that it was a cover for something that she would never share with anyone, not even him.
They teased him about marrying his student. He heard his colleague’s son respond to a question saying he hoped the love he felt for his fiancé would only grow with time like he saw with his parents. He was taken aback by the sincerity and vulnerability the young man showed as he said those words.
He and his wife didn’t think about love, at least not like that. Love was the practical care they gave one another, making sure they built a well-functioning life for themselves and their children. They didn’t need ferenj love, or did they? He couldn’t imagine his children saying something like that with such ease and feeling. He doubted that his children ever considered their parents’ relationship, and it was hard to imagine them sharing feelings of love or desire that they might have started to develop now that they were teenagers. Ferenj love said, ‘I love you.’ He could count the number of times he uttered those words to his children and of course never to his wife. He hoped they understood.
It was a customary rhythm. That is how he would describe what he had with his wife, and it worked for them. But he didn’t know her any better today than he did when they married. And she didn’t really understand him as well as she probably thought. She never asked for more than what he offered. She was convinced that asking questions was unvirtuous. The middle of anything did not exist for his wife. She prided herself on not being nosy, and even asking a question for clarity was dangerous to her sense of morals. It was part culture and part what her story created in her. It was hard to know how she felt or if anything interested her. Questions made connections between people, not answers.
He felt full when he returned back to his hotel room. He had enjoyed the food and letting himself go to the dancing sea and the tenseless language of pleasure. It was easy being around people who seemed, at least at the moment, fully committed to enjoying themselves. He loved seeing the well-matched freedom of family and guests, young and old. He made a note to try once again to get past the rigidness they had inherited. He had tried before but had failed, because he had insisted on the periphery for so long. It felt impossible to tap into that little part of himself that wanted people, let alone to call the shots and change a culture that had been cemented in the walls of their rented home.
With too much stimulation from the day, he couldn’t fall asleep. City lights flooded the dark room and lit up one corner. He thought about getting up to close the curtains, but then he may miss waking up with the sun to go on his run. He turned his head away from the light and closed his eyes before tossing back minutes later, unable to sleep. He looked once more in the direction of the light, knowing it was not responsible for his insomnia but something else. He noticed something small on the floor, at the edge where two walls met.
It was a miniscule piece of crumpled-up paper. He unfolded it without thought, expecting nothing. But there was something written in the tiniest print. He grabbed his glasses from the nightstand and walked over to the window to see what it said.
ቤት
Home.
Not Spanish, not English, but in his own language?
But he was too tired for all that. He looked at his watch: 4:07 am. If he had gotten in as scheduled, he would have been up by now, getting ready for his 5 or 10-km run. At home, his children would be coming back from school soon, and his wife would have dinner waiting for them. It was instinctive now, after all these years, to calculate time spanning oceans.
His notion of home was always fraught. Today, his home was a comfortable rented house in a country that did not belong to him or his family. When he was there, he was always up between 4 and 5 am. He once heard that in Chinese medicine, those were the hours that correlated with lungs and grief. He wasn’t always such an early bird, and it wasn’t by choice. In his 50s, he started having vivid dreams that were really panoramas of his childhood landscape with cameos from people he had long forgotten. The intense accuracy of those memories disguised as dreams would wake him from a deep sleep. His wife never woke and kept her stiff posture; she was stoic even in her sleep. He often gave himself a couple minutes in the dark to dislodge from the dream before getting back to reality.
In the dark, he wondered if this was the life he had imagined as he labored through his schoolwork at night? Or was it any future but the one that was predicted for him that he had been fighting for? In those first waking minutes, his mind quickly flipped the dream memory over and over, looking for hidden answers, but they never came because he didn’t know what the questions were. He wanted to crawl back into the dream, which was not like him at all. But there was something about these dreams.
He unlocked the door to a familiar room. Had he stayed in this exact room on one of his many trips to this city? They all looked the same, but there was always something – a small tear in the wallpaper glued back to imperfection or a stain trying to blend in with the carpet. How many guests did it take before the unavoidable signs of humanity started to show?
It had become a thing he did as he sipped on the 4 mouthfuls of scotch, he allowed himself to ease into the night after a long day of people. More than 4 might mean less tolerance for them the next day. Being alone had always been his default. As his body relaxed from a long day of meetings, he would scan the room to see if he could find remnants of previous guests. It was never hard. Here at a hotel that had long seen its glory days but still had status thanks to decades of economic decline in the country, this was an easy game.
As a swirl of ice melted against the backdrop of amber, he would imagine his children and wife in the house. When it was nighttime in this part of the world, it was morning at home. His wife would wake up before the kids. And when it was time for them to get up, she would yell up to them. Her quiet voice carried for only two reasons: to yell ‘wake up’ or ‘let’s go.’ He was still surprised by how her voice could reverberate through the walls when she needed to corral the children. The rest of the time, she only let necessary words slip from her mouth and when they did, they were small in volume.
Placing them in the world, in their time zone, and in their rented home was a thing he did, like looking for signs of people in these aseptic rooms. It was a game. He had learned to distract his mind because he knew how dangerous it could be without the distractions. Growing up, voices were low in count. There were the teachers and kids from school, but outside those hours, he didn’t hear too many other voices. He could have lost more than he had without these games he devised to trick the unforgiving reality of his origin.
He knew counting the cracks on the mud wall was no different than hiding in the high of chat as he knew other kids were doing. He understood that chat would only create a temporary escape from his parentless, shoeless, and seemingly futureless destiny. He always wanted it, all of it, to be different. So, he turned himself into the manifestation of the self-help books he now sees at American airports. He was doing all the things he saw on the covers about visualizing dreams, creating habits, and reframing thoughts way before he could ever imagine an airport full of people going up into the sky, so they could reach another part of the world. He didn’t give this much thought since he had spent the better half of his life traveling for work and being in more of the world than most people would ever experience. He didn’t exactly enjoy travel aside from the anonymity and solitude it gave him as a solo traveler. But when he took a moment to think about it from the limits of his childhood, he was amazed. This was his life.
He was now not just sleepy but hungry. He had two bags of peanuts and some crackers from the flight but was too tired to eat. His wife always said he returned thinner, even after a short trip. But tomorrow would be decadent by way of rich people living in a poor country.
He had agreed to join a colleague and his family on their yacht. His colleague came from a long line of white elites, and now he worked at an international organization, which put him in the untouchable echelon of his society. There would be a wide selection of different varieties of fish, oysters, meat, and liquor.
It was usually just his colleague’s family: his wife, three kids, kids’ friends, and maybe one or two other guests. But the food was always excessive and enough to feed a hundred people. He always wondered what they did with the leftovers.
He woke up a couple hours later and made a point to get up and run 10km. He pushed himself to make up for not running the day before. It was energizing to be on the streets of a city where he didn’t have any real connections, and every corner he turned offered something to take in. Being an outsider was another default state that made him feel at home because he felt most like himself when he was on the periphery. Even after becoming an insider through his accomplishments, he found ways to remind himself and others that he didn’t fully belong. It was freeing in a way that most people would not understand. He was unattached. If he were to be completely honest, he maintained his outsider status even with his family. He had obligations but never attachments.
This was his story, first by circumstance and then by design.
As he circled back to the hotel, he reached a euphoric state of sweaty exhaustion that he would later try to call up in his mind unsuccessfully. He had a similar feeling running barefoot on the sprawling hills of his childhood village. The weight of fate forgotten.
As he walked inside the hotel, the lightness he felt was interrupted by a sensation of being watched. He turned to look and saw the clerk who had checked him in a few hours ago. He scowled at him as the clerk self-consciously yelled, ‘Buenos dias, good morning sir.’ He walked inside the elevator without returning the greeting. He didn’t have time for unintentional racists who believed so much in their worldview that they easily made assumptions about Black people and believed it to be fact.
He covered every surface of his body with foamy white lather as he showered the sweat away. When his kids were younger, they were fascinated to see every inch of his brown body covered in soap suds. His wife always said showering was his playtime. He didn’t tell them that he didn’t always have soap growing up.
As he prepared to go out for the compulsory fun that he had come to see as part of the job, he remembered the cleaning lady who had turned to look at him when he entered his room. She looked away quickly, but something about her face was familiar to him, like he had seen it before. Had he seen her on a previous trip? He started to recollect his many stays at the hotel and soon realized it wasn’t that he’d met her before but that she looked like women back home. In his travels around the world, he had come to realize that you could find the exact face of someone printed on another human in another country.
He must have seen the photocopy of her face somewhere in his past. Brown-red skin, big eyes, a protruding silhouette. Distinctive features set on faces for generations. Would his children’s faces make up for the longing he feared was the fate created for them by war, migration, and ultimately, ambition?
Their faces may never blend. But as they got older, their features might at least let them know that they belonged to people somewhere, even if that place would never truly belong to them. His wife did her best to keep them speaking their language, but what good would that be when they got older, and they had no one to speak it with? But they would always have their faces. A dance of longing and belonging orchestrated by displaced features.
He would have been fine wandering the streets or using this free day to prepare for his week of meetings. But the yacht outing was happening because of him. He knew his colleague didn’t need a reason to host a party, but his arrival offered a perfect excuse. As much as he enjoyed his solitude, he didn’t exactly dread festive get-togethers. He was surprisingly good at them.
At home, they never had guests. Initially, after their move for his new position, they had occasional house parties where they would invite his colleagues. They were trying out a new identity in the new country. But some things you can’t change. His wife was uncomfortably aloof and maybe more so with people who were not her own, and he preferred a quiet home.
Their children never had friends over because he and his wife didn’t encourage or welcome it. The few times one of them brought friends over, he found himself pouting without meaning to. He never had friends growing up or a real home. It was probably why the little intruders put him in a bad mood. As he got older, he had started to examine things about himself more closely.
His wife came from a big family where her mother’s house was always the center of family gatherings. But as the eldest, she was sent to a missionary boarding school at a young age. His mother-in-law was convinced by white missionaries that it would be a good opportunity. His mother-in-law had never gone to school. That was the case for most women and men of her generation and yet there was a longing to know things in her like he’d never witnessed in anyone else. Every year she only managed to cobble together enough money to give this opportunity to one of the seven children she would end up having. His wife was chosen because she was the eldest.
But from what he’d observed over the years, he wasn’t convinced that it was the most fortuitous decision for her life.
He got out of the shower and dressed quickly. He went to the lobby and asked the same clerk to call him a cab. He had a look on his face, but this time Solomon wasn’t sure anymore what lay behind the expression.
When he got to the dock, he knew he was the last one. Music and laughter had already started to mingle in the air. He remembered why he had liked them right away. They were loud. They were touchy and affectionate in a way he had never experienced. It was an uncomfortable shock that soon felt oddly good to be around. That’s not how he was or how they were. People back home were never this free. Heavy on formality, fear, and appearances, they could never be this free, not even amongst friends.
What made one entire group of people one way and another completely different? His Polish colleague once told him that the Cold War had made his people cold and unwelcoming. He said that distrust was passed down to younger generations as protection. Their collective psyche got rewired with every occupation.
He walked over to the yacht and climbed up the stairs to the deck. His colleague, who was waiting right by the ladder, gave him a big hug with several hard pats on his back. ‘We’re happy to have you back, Solomon.’ He called over to a server and asked him to bring over scotch. The family came over to greet him warmly as they always did. His colleague’s wife, a charismatic woman with high-end taste, gave him a kiss. ‘You never age. Brown people are lucky like that.’
He took the scotch from the server, the only other Black person on the yacht. He felt the yacht move as it undocked. He went over to grab a seat next to his colleague, who had sat down with some other guests. They were childhood friends. ‘We are talking about the happy couple over there who just got engaged.’ Solomon looked over and saw his colleague’s son and a young woman. How old was he now? He had known him since he was 13 or 14. He couldn’t be more than 26, maybe 28 now. ‘We are very happy for them, but my wife wants them to have a long engagement since they’ve only known each other for seven months,’ his colleague shared.
‘What do you think, Solomon? How long did you know your wife before you were married?’ As he tried to remember, the couple walked over.
He told them that his wife was his student before she became his wife. I think he may have taught her for a year before they were married. She was only 25, but he was older, nearly 40. In today’s world, it would have been scandalous. But it wasn’t then. She was beautiful and quiet. His wife’s grasp of the material he was teaching was average, not exceptional, but she was more confident than her peers. It was her stoicism that had attracted him to her. Over the years, he saw that it was a cover for something that she would never share with anyone, not even him.
They teased him about marrying his student. He heard his colleague’s son respond to a question saying he hoped the love he felt for his fiancé would only grow with time like he saw with his parents. He was taken aback by the sincerity and vulnerability the young man showed as he said those words.
He and his wife didn’t think about love, at least not like that. Love was the practical care they gave one another, making sure they built a well-functioning life for themselves and their children. They didn’t need ferenj love, or did they? He couldn’t imagine his children saying something like that with such ease and feeling. He doubted that his children ever considered their parents’ relationship, and it was hard to imagine them sharing feelings of love or desire that they might have started to develop now that they were teenagers. Ferenj love said, ‘I love you.’ He could count the number of times he uttered those words to his children and of course never to his wife. He hoped they understood.
It was a customary rhythm. That is how he would describe what he had with his wife, and it worked for them. But he didn’t know her any better today than he did when they married. And she didn’t really understand him as well as she probably thought. She never asked for more than what he offered. She was convinced that asking questions was unvirtuous. The middle of anything did not exist for his wife. She prided herself on not being nosy, and even asking a question for clarity was dangerous to her sense of morals. It was part culture and part what her story created in her. It was hard to know how she felt or if anything interested her. Questions made connections between people, not answers.
He felt full when he returned back to his hotel room. He had enjoyed the food and letting himself go to the dancing sea and the tenseless language of pleasure. It was easy being around people who seemed, at least at the moment, fully committed to enjoying themselves. He loved seeing the well-matched freedom of family and guests, young and old. He made a note to try once again to get past the rigidness they had inherited. He had tried before but had failed, because he had insisted on the periphery for so long. It felt impossible to tap into that little part of himself that wanted people, let alone to call the shots and change a culture that had been cemented in the walls of their rented home.
With too much stimulation from the day, he couldn’t fall asleep. City lights flooded the dark room and lit up one corner. He thought about getting up to close the curtains, but then he may miss waking up with the sun to go on his run. He turned his head away from the light and closed his eyes before tossing back minutes later, unable to sleep. He looked once more in the direction of the light, knowing it was not responsible for his insomnia but something else. He noticed something small on the floor, at the edge where two walls met.
It was a miniscule piece of crumpled-up paper. He unfolded it without thought, expecting nothing. But there was something written in the tiniest print. He grabbed his glasses from the nightstand and walked over to the window to see what it said.
ቤት
Home.
Not Spanish, not English, but in his own language?
Naomi Abraham is a writer of Ethiopian-Eritrean descent. Her family immigrated to the United States when she was a young girl and then to Japan where she spent much of her childhood. Today she is the co-founder of Resonance, a social change strategic communications hub, where she works as a communications/story strategist. This story was developed from a film script she wrote more than a decade ago. The story is inspired by true events involving her beloved late father.
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