Atonement on Yom Kippur, Parts I and II.

Dedication

The fact that I
am writing to you
in English
already falsifies what I
wanted to tell you.
My subject:
how to explain to you
that I don't belong to English
though I belong nowhere else,
if not here
in English.

:: Gustavo Pérez Firmat ::


I.
I was fifteen and four years into learning English when I asked for the antonym of sin. Maybe I ought to have questioned that this was a question that had the power to stump the adults in my life... The best they could come up with was "favor" as if that was a favor, an inaccuracy in diction, a construction of verbal fiction in my then non-fiction world of fifteen. When you're fifteen years into the world, sin seems a simple enough word. Wrong is wrong, and see, wrong doesn't yet feel so right that you wonder who set up these dichotomies in the first place when you look at the mirror and see your face in the morning because when you are fifteen, it's already hard to see your face in the mirror no matter what the time of day. And when I was fifteen, it was easy enough to sin against the protagonist of this non-fiction book translated from the Turkish by the author into a language that is nobody's mother tongue, in a country with the population of one…

Yes, when you are fifteen, it's easy enough to sin.


II.
Today I wonder what it takes to forgive myself for sinning by giving more love than I could ever ask for. I was strong: my own country with its borders wide open for all refugees vulnerable enough to seek a haven on this land, this olive skin that bears a hint of the silver green of the trees I saw on clandestine road trips along the Aegean Sea, the home that will always be my destiny -if not my destination away from this alien nation whose language I know but never fully understand-. My borders were wide open for all refugees – no passport or visa necessary, no lines to stand in behind the red line, no fingerprints on pads that never get disinfected between scans, no Internal Naturalization Service to force assimilation into unnatural self-selected isolation. I was strong, my borders wide open; I let the exiles ask me questions upon entry. “Do you feel home?” a nomad asked as he entered, and I answered a different question because I did not know what home felt like: “I feel whole.” But maybe that was an honest lie and I will atone for my tone and my paradoxes tonight.

Today I wonder what it takes to forgive myself for sinning by giving more love than I could ask for. I wonder what it takes to be strong enough to ask; answers are easy to give when someone else has already posed the questions. And I need to forgive me for giving by sinning for more love than I could ever be given from nomads running from questions about their own living.