Nadia slept like a baby, dreaming herself sprawled on red sheets, her thirty-year-old nakedness supine in thick blue light, being licked slowly, so slowly, by grainy androgynous tongues. No, it was not a sex dream, but she knew that any attempt to describe it to Mikhail in the morning could fail to convince him otherwise. What she had dreamed was a calming. The tongues rolling like sun-warmed stones along the soft mound of her belly, her nape, her eyelids. Eyes shut in safe warmth. She felt as though she were being licked into place, coming alive again. When Nadia woke to the popcorn ceiling, she had the distinct feeling that the day was made for her, that it was holding her. Then she began to worry. It was not often that she felt such ease. And she was not even thirty—her dream had leapt her a year forward.

“I think I’m going to get my mom a laptop,” she told Mikhail over a breakfast of avocado toast. He was staying with her before his flight to Vancouver for a freelance gig. He would return to her in Toronto before he’d leave for Berlin again. “She needs one for her virtual yoga classes, but I know she won’t get it for herself.”

He nodded, said it was good of her. Good that she’d been using his Facebook to find out what her mom had been up to. Good that she was going to go visit. Mikhail was heading home too. Other people their age went to Berlin to rave and make art, but Berlin was home for Mikhail as of three years, when his mother regained her citizenship after it’d been stripped from her family during the war.

Mikhail and Nadia first met in Yayoi Kusama’s mirror room at the big gallery in Toronto. Nadia had been struggling to take a selfie that captured the halos and pinpricks of lights upon lights around her—“The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away,” as rendered by the artist.

“Can I snap you?” he’d said softly, walking towards her from behind, her dainty face floating on her phone screen. Nadia startled and instinctively stood taller, then handed him her phone. She imagined he was going to ask her where she was from, like most people did, supposedly to make conversation. She flashed a peace sign and he snapped her several times. Seconds passed in silence. He didn’t ask.

He returned her phone and she forgot to look at the pictures because he was gazing at her openly with his wide honey eyes and it scared her a little. He was a curator, in Berlin, he said. She caught a glimpse of his watch, a thick glinting snake with three time zones drawing faces against his wrist. He was from a place where several worlds ticked in sync. “What are you doing tonight?” he asked. She looked away shyly at the mirrored walls only to find an endless reel of the both of them inching towards each other.

That night Nadia took him to a party in a two-storey next to a fish shop in Kensington Market. He chose not to drink, but Nadia did. They held hands when the strobe cut the dark faster, when it was too packed to leave. And when they left at five in the morning they were infatuated.

“I just can’t live with anyone, you know?” Nadia said the next morning, his arms around her.

“Same,” he said. Then he asked if she was afraid of intimacy.

“It’s not that,” she said with a lilt in her voice. “It’s just—I don’t want anyone to make a home out of me.”

He sniffled a small laugh then rolled on top of her heavily and began tickling her. “I’m your new shell now and you’re my hermit crab. I’m going to make a home out of you, my little crab!”

Nadia laughed so hard she pulled out a clump of her hair while trying to fend him off.

*

It was August again and he was out buying fresh juice. As she placed the order for her mother’s laptop on her own laptop, she began reliving their past times together, growing scrambled with longing for him to stay. What had she said to him on their first night? I don’t want to make a home with any man? No, that wasn’t it. “I don’t want a home,” she said aloud to her hydrangea, frowning at her inaccuracy. “I don’t want to make a home of a man,” she said to her freshly clipped nails. She left the house and yanked at her ponytail on the way to the train, splitting it in two to make it tighter. She grew angry at her thick wavy hair. It was so unlike her mother’s hair—short and straight. So unlike her grandmother’s hair—long, silky, a plait swaying down her back. Not even like her sister’s hair, luscious and fine, like a muscle.

In line to pick up the laptop, Nadia wondered if other people felt the way she did, as if she were hovering two inches above herself at all times, striving to stand straighter and pulse back in place. The loners in the line were all on their phones, engrossed, scrolling, waiting. Why wasn’t she on her phone? She was feeling for it in her back pocket when she saw three teenage girls gloss each other’s lips in a close huddle ahead of her. Their mouths shone like the cut faces of a cave-deep ruby as they clicked in time to a secret tune that buzzed through the shortest one’s earbuds.

When Nadia was thirteen, a classmate she had met only once invited her to join a dance routine. Nadia was delighted. Her only friend in school till then had been Philip, the albino boy who loved chemistry and only spoke when he was spoken to. So Nadia joined her new friend and a dozen tennis-skirted girls circling their hips in a shady corner of the soccer pitch after school. She breathed hard to keep up with the twirling arms and stomping ankles dictated by the Bollywood song that had become an international hit. Two weeks later when the bell rang for morning assembly and the sleepy students filed into the quadrangle, somebody whispered about Nadia, right behind her, “She’s not really though. She’s not from back home anyway.” She heard the ting-ling of one of the girls’ dancing anklets and knew they had practiced without her. She had been uninvited and couldn’t imagine who might have said that. A face did not come to her accusingly. The only face that met her was her own.

She was almost at the front of the line to pick up the laptop when her phone buzzed. Mikhail: “got a spot on the standby. not gonna get to say bye to u if you’re not home in an hour 🙁 love u so much lil crab. i’ll text you when i get to Vancouvy!”

Nadia was not going to be home in an hour. She looked up at the high white ceiling and spotted a surveillance cam reflecting a dot of her own face like a rotten beige seed. She wondered what it was like to be watched over, not by a machine of loving grace, as the poet Richard Brautigan said, but by something else altogether. She thought of her grandfather and wondered if she was in his view. She had not gone to his funeral because she had been rebellious, refusing to step into mosque after she turned sixteen. It had been more than ten years. She hadn’t thought of returning, but what part of us isn’t like the ocean, rushing forth and back, dragging the shore.

The electronics department clerk waved at Nadia, her loose blue sleeve gaping like a mouth. Nadia tapped the order open on her phone and stepped into the fluorescent circle of light hanging over the counter.

“Nadia,” the clerk said.

“Rhianette,” Nadia said awkwardly, reading her badge.

Rhianette smiled. “Laptop for you?”

“Oh is that what it is? I do delivery, just picking it up for someone.”

Rhianette disappeared into the back room and Nadia stared at the thick plastic slabs of wall behind Rhianette’s till. Disposable, packable wall. Sandpapery, made to look like wood. Why did she lie to Rhianette? Too tired to make conversation, Nadia thought, too much effort. It was only two in the afternoon.

Rhianette popped out and rang her item through without a word.

“Have a good day,” Nadia said guiltily.

*

Nadia had picked up the laptop at the location closest to her mother’s house, but she took the green line and headed back home. She was irritated by the heat and the murky sounds that people made when they sat on the scuffed seats. She was angry at the empty soda can rolling on the floor from one cabin to another in its endless, vacant journey. She imagined Mikhail crinkling duty-free chocolates and self-help books at the airport, hulking planes angling for the sun-split clouds above his head. Then she decided that she would not reply to him. Not today, not tomorrow, not even the day after. It’s not like we’re together, she reasoned. What the hell are we anyway? We see each other, what, three times a year? And who knows about next year when anything could happen? When she turned thirty.

*

Nadia was alone on Friday evening. She ate another avocado toast for dinner, not caring to top it with the green pearl tomatoes Mikhail had set aside for her. On her fourth glass of wine, the nine o’clock news came but Nadia convinced herself it was midnight. The note Mikhail had stuck to the fridge remained untouched, though she had seen it flutter when she took out the bread, had known it was him, summoning her. She should text Tyler, she thought. Tyler, the sweet guy she’d met at a rave, who’d let her cut his hair after the only night spent together. Tyler had moved to Brooklyn.

Nadia flopped on the couch with her feet over the armrest, scrolling through old texts and the contacts on her phone with a haste that didn’t match the boozy ease in her body. There was Caleb. There was Thom. There was Azar, a girl she had slept with after catching the herby scent of Esfand, her mother’s incense, on her. She had not seen any of these people for two years, but Nadia felt like it had been yesterday when she was taking Mikhail to Kensington, dancing until the sun came up, kicking empty boxes on the way home and hoping the Jamaican patty shop opened earlier than usual, just for them.

She imagined that someone would text her anytime now that it was really midnight. “Nadia, babe!❤️ Got guestlist, wanna go dancing?” They might say. And Nadia would leave right away, her black dress at the ready on the doorknob. She reached for the remote, flipping through channels, unwilling to remember the day or the time—all her class work done, all her one-night boyfriends in other parts of the city, the country, the world, she alone, without any girlfriends. Not one. She settled on an episode of Planet Earth and began to grind the last bit of weed she had left.

When she was twelve she had marched into the alley behind mosque and changed into a short lilac skirt that flicked up when she squatted. She dipped two fingers into the small vial of a glitter-pot freebie that she’d stolen off a cheap British magazine and tapped glitter on her cheekbones. She waited for the boy with scary green eyes to appear in the window across the dusty road. He would light his cigarette and wait for her to begin, cricket ticking its lazy wickets in the background. She danced for him then, alone in the light of a buzzing lamppost. Soft steps and twirls. Too young and earnest to be sexy. But his sister had seen her from the window above and told Nadia’s mother.

Nadia thought her mother would understand. After all, wasn’t her mother always giggling over Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed’s adventures, eyes widening at their kisses as they stepped out of limos? Nadia thought her mother knew her, but she didn’t say a word after what happened, avoided Nadia’s gaze for a week until Nadia made herself stay home for a month.

Now Nadia slipped the scrunchie off her ponytail and leaned back over the armrest, watching a lioness trample dry savannah grass on-screen. Her hair had been wispy and straight, a little like her mother’s, then she turned thirteen and it was suddenly wavy and thick. She closed her eyes and sipped at her vape deeply, holding her breath long and hard until her thoughts dissolved. She opened her eyes and exhaled a pink cloud. The lioness stalked her kitty-like cub that limped with a porcupine quill in its paw. She clamped her cub in her majestic jaws and placed it on a mound of red dust, then she snapped the quill off and began licking the cub vigorously. Each lick raising its flesh in folds, the cub mewling with ache and love, overcome and toppling towards the lioness. Nadia dropped her vape and lay perfectly still, then she began to cry without making a sound.

*

On Saturday morning Nadia avoided her reflection in the windows on the yellow line to her mother’s house. She held the backpack with her mother’s new laptop close to her chest to avoid the chill that slipped into the train when the doors shuffled shut, and she was grateful. Grateful that she could buy her mom a laptop with money she had earned from writing. Grateful that she had a home. That her mother had never once threatened to disown her, even after a cousin had let it slip on a family picnic by the lake that Nadia was hospitalized several years ago. Her mother had called her from the picnic. “Honey, can I bring you some food? I made some pies. Chicken and cheese?”

She arrived to find her mother shuffling a deck of playing cards for a game of Bridge on “ladies night,” a tradition that had hopped across the ocean with them, safely arriving on Eglinton Avenue. Nadia had an unbearable urge to pat her mom’s hair but she settled into a hug and kiss and began unzipping her backpack.

“I got you something, mom,” Nadia said, handing the boxed laptop to her mother. Nadia’s mom put her cards down and peered at the image of the laptop on the box. A few seconds passed as she blinked at the box.

Frowning slightly at the box, her mom said, “You know, my own mother would have done this for me,” then she looked up at Nadia, her face soft and slack like a child’s. Nadia didn’t smile because a wholesome embracing calm stilled her core, the way light parts water, its long arms diffusing a uniform blue.

On the way back to her apartment that evening, she was giddy and yearned to text Mikhail.

“hi miki, sorry i didn’t reply sooner,” she hesitated, then tapped the little arrow to send. She typed again: “i saw my mom and gave her the laptop.”

Mikhail responded right away: “how did it go?”

“she saw her mom’s ghost in me! said her mom would’ve done the same thing for her…”

Mikhail said, “♥️♥️♥️ awwwwww that is so sweet. i’m so confused. but very happy you saw your mom!” 

A small laugh slipped out of Nadia.  

“sorry I didn’t text sooner,” she said again.  

“it’s ok,” he said, and then: “did u make up a story in your head about why I left? 🙃 u better be missing me!”

“omg hun, when have I made things up?”

A minute passed, breaking the stream of their steady texts. Nadia watched the doors press shut at St. George, the pea green tile reminding her of the hospital, where the walls were always green. Sea green. Mint green. Teal green. Meadow green. Aqueous chlorine green.

“what’d you get up to yest?” he texted.

“not much, just drank the bottle of wine in the fridge.”

“the bubbly?”

“the white wine, whatever kind of wine that was. tasted like piss tbh.”

“😂😂😂 bb that was bubbly, the kind without any booze in it.”

“what?! I am pretty sure I got DRUNK last night,” Nadia said.

“😂 nah bb, I wouldn’t bring you wine! geezus. you’ve been clean for a year! it was to celebrate that, but i had to leave!☹️”

Nadia tried to remember how long it had been since the last time she was in hospital but she caught her own gaze in the fibreglass, a precise silver light pricking a glow into her brown eyes.  

“hun?” he texted.

Nadia frowned then raised her eyebrows to reverse the frown, as if she had been taken by surprise. Her thumb hovered above the touch keyboard.  

“i miss u,” she typed, hesitating. She looked up and caught her face again, held it for a second, then hit send and let the seat hold her weight. 

“i miss u too,” he said instantly.

*

When Nadia got home she took a shower and microwaved a bowl of pasta, lathering it in caesar dressing because there was nothing else in the fridge. She sat on the couch and scrolled through the pictures on her phone, looking for the ones Mikhail had taken on the day they met. There were seven pictures, but they all seemed to be taken from a distance. A web of lanterns like luminous petals afloat in a dark cube. One after another. Where was she? Hadn’t Mikhail been so close to her—six feet away at the most? She scrolled through all seven photos again. It couldn’t be. Where had that picture gone—the one with her in the centre? She scrolled again. Then she saw her face alight in the third photo, almost indistinguishable from the soft yellow lamps around her. He had taken a panoramic shot so that her black outfit merged with the dark. In it her face was a soft beacon too, a small orb like the artist’s lights. She thought she had been at the centre of the photo, her face superimposed on the glow behind her. She had been wrong. Seeing herself in this chorus of light that seemed to hold her face up made her want to cry.

Who was she, this woman surprised by her own face? Who surprised her own mother by becoming her grandmother with the offering of a gift?

Nadia set her phone aside and reached for her laptop. She would write again, she thought. She would write herself in the future, become the dream that sustained her grandmother and her mother after her. Become thirty, stay sober, stay clean.­ Learn how to be loved.

She wrote, “Nadia slept like a baby, dreaming herself sprawled on red sheets, her thirty-year-old nakedness supine in thick blue light, being licked slowly, so slowly, by grainy androgynous tongues.”

Then Nadia set her laptop back on the coffee table with a clatter. She jumped up and grabbed her tote, slipped her winter coat over it. Dove into the sun-baked gulley behind her house, a shortcut to the main road, where the liquor shop’s fluorescence shone out in the gloaming. She began to sweat. When I’m thirty, she thought, I’ll get sober.

Shazia Hafiz Ramji was the winner of the 2021 Poetry and Prose Prize presented by the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, a finalist for the 2021 National Magazine Awards, and a finalist for the 2021 Mitchell Prize for Faith and Poetry. She is the author of Port of Being. Shazia lives between Calgary, Toronto, and Vancouver, where she is at work on a novel.

Image by Adrián Valverde @adrianvalverdem