wishes

The word “wish” comes from the Proto-Germanic word “wunsk-” “to desire or strive for.” I am a thousand wishes compacted into one body and sanded down to be smooth. I am striving, I am desiring, I am yearning.

I think everything is a desire for something else. My dad wished he wouldn’t have kids, now he wishes his kids will have kids. My mom wished she would have twins and instead had two kids born on different Coptic holidays. My grandmother wished she could go back to Egypt. In the nursing home she told my mother in stuttering Arabic, “Let’s escape from here.” I wish I could escape from here too.

WISH 1: Blowing out candles on a birthday cake.

Last night I dreamt my mouth was painfully clamped shut, my teeth grinding against each other, pushing them back up into my gums. I reached into my mouth with my fingers and pried my teeth open with my fingertips. I had something to say, something to tell the people in my dream, something I don’t remember. I pushed my tongue out, hoping it would be a pillow for my teeth to rest on. My teeth slammed shut again, and I bit my tongue off. I wanted to turn back time to reattach my tongue.

A part of me has always wanted to turn back time. Sometimes I lay in bed and feel time flowing over me like water. I can almost convince myself that I am sixteen years old and innocent. The difference between being twenty-two and sixteen is having to convince myself that I am okay, that I am not at fault, that I am moving forward into a wonderful life. I’ve always been depressed and dying in a tiny, unidentifiable way, but I am older now and trying to revive myself.

Lately, I have been measuring everything in time in a backwards way. Time as a unit of measurement, time as a length of hair, the time between my house and my fiancé’s apartment, the time it takes for me to gather up the courage to say my own name, the time it takes for the light from a star to reach my eyes. How looking back into space is looking backward in time, or is it looking forward? I always forget which way in time I’m looking when I stare up at the sky.

I want to go back and make R- alive again. I want my toxic teenage friendships to have become gentler and more stable. I want to have spent more time with my grandparents. I want to have known Arabic sooner. I want to have known Eric sooner. I want to have been nicer to my mother. Most of all, I want closure to be a thing that exists.

WISH 2: Seeing a shooting star

When I was six years old, I really liked Peter Pan. I remember watching the live action Peter Pan movie from 2003 and convincing myself that Peter Pan would come for me one day on the condition that I only cried once that day. Crying once in a day was an impossible task to me at six years old. I cried a lot, every day, about everything. My parents have been telling me I was sensitive since I was three years old. It’s true; I am very sensitive. I skinned my knees, dropped glass cups, hid behind my mom’s leg in public, talked with a childhood lisp, and cried and cried and cried.

Eventually, I did cry once a day and at night, as I fell asleep, I realized Peter Pan did not exist.

WISH 3: Tossing a coin into a wishing well

Sometimes when I eat a food my sister doesn’t like she asks me for a taste to be sure she still doesn’t like it. When I eat shrimp she says, “I wish I was the kind of person who liked shrimp.” I wish I was a different kind of person too. I wish I was the kind of person who liked the rain, but the overcast makes me depressed.

I didn’t know there was a word for the blanket of gray clouds that so often covers Michigan. I was having dinner with my dad and a friend of his from work, and his friend said, “I can’t stand the overcast.” I wish I was the kind of person who could stand the overcast, the kind of person who saw the tender layer of clouds and felt protected and warm.

I don’t like the rain though, I like the sun. I wish it was sunny every day, even in winter when there’s a thick layer of crunchy snow on the earth. My ninth-grade biology teacher Mr. Sherman told me “There’s nothing more beautiful than the snow glittering in the sun.” He always wore Hawaiian shirts and when he retired all the students wore Hawaiian shirts to school on his last day. I think of Mr. Sherman when the snow covering my lawn winks at me.

WISH 4: Breaking a wishbone

When I was ten years old, I waited with my mom and sister inside the lobby of Bahia Plaza. It was pouring outside, coming down in sheets and knocking the leaves off of the palm trees outside. My dad was parking the car on the cobblestone outside, running into the building, slipping and falling on the cement. He got up and ran inside and then collapsed onto the tile floor.

When you break a bone, it’s not the fracture that hurts, it’s the pressure and sharp edges of white that lean up against your muscle that hurts. I can’t imagine what that feels like. Once in high school a boy playing soccer slid across the field, his bone popped out of his leg. My grandmother broke her pinkie toe and never got it fixed so it always stuck out at an angle. My fiancé broke his leg when he was a child and never got the bone properly set. He says his leg hurts when it rains, when it’s cold out.

In the rain, my dad broke his humerus, the bone that connected his shoulder to his elbow. He had to have surgery in Brazil where the doctors ran a scalpel along his arm and inserted a metal bar into his arm. He has a dark pink keloid on his upper arm. The puckered flesh looks shiny and looks like a river, like an opening in the earth.

The word wishbone is more common than the word furcula. A furcula is a wishbone. It’s found in birds and dinosaurs, and it is to clavicles fused together in the shape of a bottom-heavy V. Furcula means “little fork” in Latin. The idea of breaking a bone for luck fascinates me, breaking this fragile crescent of a bone, this river delta of a bone.

WISH 4: Blowing dandelion seeds

When I was born the doctor had to rotate my head to face forward so I could come out properly, so I could be birthed properly. I feel sorry for my mother and for myself, that my first action as a human being was to cause her pain.

My first memories take place in England. I remember me and my older sister popping Christmas crackers and how she would always get the goodies wrapped inside. I remember thinking that one day I’d catch up to her in age and surpass her and then I’d be older and stronger.

I remember pulling a paper out of the printer and causing stripes of ink to run jagged across the page. It was a photo of my dad smiling in front of a car. I took the ruined picture to my dad on the couch and showed it to him, confused. He explained that he was printing something and that he could re-print it if he wanted to. I felt worried that the picture would turn my dad into dissolving ink in real life, that he’d shift and fade into the air like he was on the paper.

I was worried my dad would disappear frequently. Once when I was three, I asked my dad if he would ever go to war, he said no he wouldn’t ever go to war. I’m not sure where I learned about the idea of war from. I think it would have made more sense for me to worry about everyone else disappearing, willingly.

My mother insists that she carried me so often as a child that she had stretch marks on her left forearm. I don’t remember that. She says she used to play a game with me where I’d lay on the soles of her feet with my belly, and she’d lift me in the air like I was an airplane or a body blowing in the wind. I don’t remember that either.

What I do remember is my mom crying a lot. When she talks about England now, she says me and my sister were cute kids and that she wishes she enjoyed it more. She says she was lonely and wanted to move back to Canada to be with her parents. I vaguely remember thinking that she didn’t want to spend time with me. Once she apologized for not complimenting me enough as a child.

I have always got the impression that my mother is shifting away from me, that I am being birthed again and again, and as she is pushing me away from her body, I am fighting to not be born.

The little therapist in me says that I inherited my depression and abandonment issues from my mother, but I don’t think that’s fair. I think I would be the way I am no matter who raised me and no matter how, but it’s something I have to convince myself of and it’s something I will never totally give myself up to. Now I crawl into bed next to her and cry until I can’t breathe. I do this at least once a month. I do this during a particular time of the month, and I wonder psychoanalytically if I subconsciously resent my mother for forming me into a girl’s body in her womb.

WISH 5: The clock reads 11:11

I wish I could make time move faster until I am married and working in private practice and baking bread on the weekends and throwing a dinner party at a kitchen table I bought and going out for coffee with my husband and having a husband and having the husband be Eric and and and—

I am so glad all my wishes align with all of Eric’s wishes. Maybe marriage is when all your wishes fall into place like a Venn diagram that is one circle with thick lines. Maybe romance is just wishing for something so hard it happens, like when I lay in bed and pretend my pillow is Eric’s shoulder and that if I focus a little harder it will be his shoulder and time will bend forward like folds in fabric, and we will be in an apartment, in OUR bed, wearing wedding bands, underneath a cloud of blankets.

WISH 6: Blowing on an eyelash

If I blow on an eyelash that is not my own, do I still get to keep the wish?