1: Beasts

We cross two bridges to get to the hospital. 

One is called Lions Gate, though the only lions here are concrete sculptures. Vancouver, a  city where newspapers report on animals that are foreign to us―cougars in cabins, bears in backyards. A city that feels new, clean, and despite the drama of ocean and mountains, utterly tepid. But sometimes it’s nice to make a fresh start when you’re dying.

Somewhere across alpine ranges and prairies and tundra lies the city I chose instead, a lifetime ago. A place where they stabbed a mountain with a cross and called it Montreal. It is a grimy and lazy-eyed city, intricately trellised with vintage colonial artistry turned elegantly sour, and as we speak, it is beginning the long muscle-clench of winter. A winter that pierces my thin skin with jagged teeth, slow-syphoning every memory of melanin. A winter of wind slashing at cheeks, of dog piss on sooty snow through which I trudge in daily disgust. A winter I have loathed with such warmth that my loathing has become love. Montreal is 4,801 kilometers in the other direction.

Across ski trails and Mennonite towns and unceded Indigenous land and Boreal forest and Great Lakes. Across a decade of exile from the other side of two oceans, the other side of history, the other side of a child playing alone in the desert. Across a stumbling existence without tools or guidance, cutting a sorry path through scarred scrublands of indelible mistakes and breathless discovery. 

She was not with me on those adventures, but we made good use of fibre optics, unfurling mundane updates, terrible secrets and wicked wisecracks just under the surface of the earth’s crust, synaptic currents stretching across unmapped experience. I had left the tiny Arabian Gulf island our parents had settled in; she had returned there. We duked it out with our choices.

I will not write about the disease of concentric circles they call cancer. Even as my mind slowly re-orients its orbit, slowly turns to face a new direction off-compass. I will not write about the strange, repellent vulnerabilities simmering within family bloodlines, surfacing like bloated fish in a eutrophying lake, about how we each fight the children within us, as they steal glances like demons, like wayward djinn, out from our own faces and voices. How precisely we circumambulate that word, dying, furiously scratch it out, replace it with hand-written prayers in Arabic on scraps of paper, wrapped in leather, worn on necks and wrists, recited in the dark (in the light, at the beach, in the car). Living only, we will not tolerate deviance from this commandment, Please take a few steps, please take a few bites. 

No one asked for this. None of us played with ash or skulls. I might once have uttered a stray oath. She might have, too. Who doesn’t. There is no rhyme. There is no rhythm, there is no reason. There is no fact, no fiction, no fantastic four, no horseman, no horsepower, no sour taste in my mouth as she retches.

For now, I will refrain from writing about any of this. Simply, I will eat for two, or four, or whatever exponent is required in this new formulation. Watching blindly from the wings I will relish what I swallow whether or not she sees, swallow ever harder, ever fiercer, ever faster. Driving to the hospital past those concrete lions, named for a pair of nearby mountain peaks the Squamish Nation called Two Sisters long before the rest of us arrived, I will swallow in prayer, my mantra Let her live. 

Let my sister live.

2: Anti-climax

She does not. Instead, she specifically does the opposite of living, which is to say she dies, not that I am at all clear on what that means, being that “dying” is simply a euphemism for I have no idea. In fact, stringing together the facts I can only conclude that it means Suck it up buttercup, there’s no stopping the train. Life in all its muck-drudgery continues, and the gobsmacking glory and wild wonder of her is reduced to inchoate whispers only I can hear. 

Probably she is laughing somewhere. My sister, who has slid herself elegantly into the past tense, does not follow other people’s rules. 

3: Other lives

In our former life, surrounded by bloodthirsty 1980s Arabian Gulf expat banking society ladies, we concocted elaborate plans to age as gracelessly as possible into an unapologetic, rough-hewn spinsterhood. Our contribution to the next generation, we agreed, would be to mortify our eldest sister’s children with raucous commentary and conduct, to a horrifying soundtrack of bodily audio. Luxuriant facial hair, wildly clashing outfits, we would let ourselves go entirely, relishing the onslaught of collective pearl-clutching. We would bequeath our niece and nephew a legacy of rebellion, opening the gates of absurdity so irreversibly that those who came after us could never be denied choice. 

Of course it’s impossible to say, but I think she would have gotten a kick out of the babies. Not that they are babies anymore, but they will always be babies to me. Over-stretched babies who walk around on two legs uttering all kinds of sage nonsense like “Mama, where did you put the scissors,” and “Can I have my belated cookie,” and “What if you die before me?” as I struggle to comprehend how they have developed the manual and cognitive dexterity to manipulate thoughts and paper with such grace and sophistication. 

She would have taught them to swim, to catch a ball. She would have spoiled them with stories and strange and wonderful and unnecessary gifts to stoke their imaginations. She would have taken them on trips and hand-fed their whims. She would have ripped the throat from anyone who looked askance in their direction. She might occasionally have bared her teeth. 

4: Facts

One time, she laughed, full-throated, while galloping bareback through sand dunes under a full moon. One time she guided us safely home in a strange European city crowded with too many consonants and not enough English, holding hands with our shadows through falling light. 

One time she rebuilt the crumbling minaret of a forgotten mosque tucked behind Café Lilou, the most exclusive establishment on the island. The Café spilled with both aristocrats and the newly wealthy, who sneered elegantly across red velvet divans, under swaying rococo chandeliers. It was a paean to the dystopian desert baroque my sister so despised, frequented by the same clients who insisted she design their concrete homes with a perplexing admixture of Ionic columns and Louis XIV embellishment. It was built around the fiction of a Parisian bohemian who fled her broken heart for a remote, arid outpost, opening the café as tribute to her lost glory. 

It was wildly successful. My sister, the architect; Lilou, her last project. If you go there today and say her name, her former clients, their children, will stare blankly at you. The minaret is the only witness, and it stands solid in the background, silent observer to the folly unfolding.

One time she swam too far out into the Indian Ocean and was rescued by a tugboat that deposited her on an island found on no map, where she tamed a terrifying mythical beast which pledged loyalty to her for all eternity and granted her every desire. She gave all her wishes to the fishes, and they made her queen of the marine, and to this day she reigns supreme on the back of that sea creature. 

These are all true stories and of course I have forgotten the most important details. 

One time as we slept in a hotel room in Tangier, she suddenly seized my wrist and cried, “Good girl!” That was the night she dreamt there were angels watching her from the ceiling. Between Capricorn birth and Cancer departure, before she asked me in a chemotherapy haze, “What if we have the wrong names, what if my name was meant to be something different, what if my story has gone slanted because I have the wrong name.”

5: Flight

In the aftermath, I head back to the place where I was born, before the interlude we called life. There are no bridges in Toronto. No lions, no cougars, no bears. I’m ok with this, more so when I hear on the news that in Montreal, a great crack has opened up in the Champlain Bridge and is widening by the second. There is something oddly satisfying about this news, as though a phantom we always felt has finally made itself known beyond any shadow of a doubt.

In Toronto there is instead a tower, which I use to orient myself in this epilogue. Its presence is a reassurance, corresponding with my earliest memory. A single, immovable constant, proof that we happened, my family and I. 

It is fall again, and one grey day the babies are in the backseat and we are squeezing our grim way past 18-wheeler trucks and minivans with the tower behind us when there comes a squeal, “Mama, look up!”

The sky above is dark with an undulating carpet of birds, flapping furiously southward. Several thoughts crowd my mind at once, among them how long do they fly at a stretch and where do they sleep when they get tired and do they say goodbye and, of course, where is she, where is my sister now? Not because I think she is a bird, which she might be, but because her enduring absence is as impossible as the flight of fowl, the blithe avian defeat of gravity’s ham-fisted bluster. Lifting themselves without map or itinerary; fluttering, forming a skein, forging forward into the horizon. Making babies, mourning the dead along the way.

I’m thinking of what it means to be airborne and what it means to be earthed, how all the land was once connected and how you remember and how you forget. How her name meant happiness in Arabic, and even though it wasn’t our language either, there was never a fitting alternative. Now from the back seat, the babies are singing a song about the courage it takes to go home, and I am thinking, we only knew her one way but it was the one way we knew her. I’m looking up at the sky as I drive away from bridges and towers and mountains, surrounded by miles of flat farmland, singing goodbye, hello, I hope you found your way.

Laila Malik is a desisporic writer in Adobigok, traditional land of the Wendat, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit River. Her work has been published in various Canadian and international literary magazines, and her debut collection archipelago, is forthcoming with book*hug press, spring 2023. Earlier versions of this essay were longlisted for four different creative non-fiction prizes.

Image by Srinivasan Venkataraman @srinii