The air is hot and heavy when you walk out of the plane and you know that you are finally home because you should not be smelling cigarettes this deep inside the airport, but you do. The windows are big and the sun is pouring inside and it looks like no one ever sweeps the tile floors because what would even be the point? Everyone is carrying sand between their toes through and through. The employees are all wearing sandals, even the ones with guns, and you realize that you have never actually been to an airport like this. You realize that there is only one place that can feel like home, and it is right here, in this liminal space where we are always parting and uniting and making promises and breaking them again and again and again. The security officers and the men at the information desk are slumped against the walls, blowing smoke into the faces of men, women, and children. No one seems to mind it but us. It is our first time back in three years, and our first time back after the civil war, and we are directed into an office where three men are standing in either corner, staring us all up and down. I think it is because we have American passports, that we are brought in for questioning. Mama already told us not to say anything before we even landed. Our accents would give too much away, and we do not know what that would mean for us. So Mama talks, and Jalal and I just stand there and listen. The country has been rattling with violence since the war began, and there are signs of it before we are even outside of the compound. Plainclothes security officers have AKs slung across their shoulders, and there are bullet piercings on the off-white walls and the ceilings. The sense is different now, but it never stops feeling like home. When we head outside, I catch a boy about my age smiling at me, and I look away, but I must have smiled, too. Khali picked us up from the airport and drove us home to Hay al Andalus. On the way, we do not drive past one block without passing a revolutionary mural — murals reminiscent of Omar al Mukhtar, of Libyan resistance against Italian colonialism. In others, Gaddafi’s face is quashed under a boot; red, black, and green fill in quotes in calligraphic script by resistance leaders: we do not surrender, we win or we die. There is even a mural of Che Guevara near the Internet cafe we begin to frequent when the cable at home grows too unreliable for what we are used to.
Hnena and Jdeda are home and Mama is crying again, kissing their hands and their foreheads and caressing their heads, holding them like she is afraid she will never see them again once she leaves, and my heart is so full and it feels like I made it to the place that I have aimlessly been running toward for so long. By some stroke of luck, I am finally home. I have a place here and it is bizarre in the most beautiful way. This agonizing absence of homeland, followed by return, makes me want to feel and smell and hear everything and so I take off my shoes and let my feet sweep the hot sand. I kiss Hnena and Jdeda and I kiss my uncles and smell Khali’s cologne that he probably bought in Rome and I am tickled by their rough mustache against my cheek and I kiss my aunties and we hold each other for a long, long time, until they feel like they have compensated for all the years they were exiled from my life when I am in America. I run up the four flights of stairs with the black railings until I am finally opening the door to get out again and I see the city, a city that looks like everything and everyone was made from the earth. There are construction workers a few houses down, and I am with Sijoud when they wave in our direction and smile. We smile back and return our salutations. I do not feel like I have been away for all this time. It feels like these men working the house, like Hnena and Jdeda, like the boy from the matar, have been holding this story for me, just waiting for my return. I want to stay here forever. I beckon to Sijoud to go for a walk with me, and she seems as excited as I am. We go back downstairs and beg our mothers to let us go out until they finally do. We are only allowed to walk around the block once, then we have to go back inside. Aunty told Mama that a lot of girls have been getting kidnapped since the war ended. There are even gunshots and they come at random times of the day, so I am already grateful for this walk and no one is out now in the neighborhood but I get happy when I see somebody because I am home I am home I am home. And no one is sitting on the block, waiting for me to walk by to ask me where I’m from. Everyone already knows. My hair is curly and frizzy and the humidity is making it bigger like it is a flower that is blooming and that is when one of the men on the street calls me shafshoofa, but I do not mind. I do not even know what it means until my cousin laughs and fills me in.
I love everyone here like we are all family. This is exactly what it feels like. I am imagining my life with him and him and her and them and us and I want Mama to stay here. I want her to tell us that we are not coming back to America. She is talking about the possibility of this happening, and I am already talking about cutting up my passport, of throwing it into the sea. Mama tells me not to make jokes about that. The country is too unreliable, she says. We could be stuck here forever. But I do not miss America. Everything I miss, everything I have missed, I am finally here for. Sammy’s wedding is going to be at the end of August and this is the first family wedding I am going to be here to go to.
I am looking at Khaltu Sharifa and her body is moving like someone is shaking her in a fit of rage. She is not able to drink from her small glass of water without spilling the half of it first, and that is when Mama weeps. Mama told me stories about Khaltu, stories that I have a hard time picturing in my head because the only picture I have is the one that is in front of me now. Who was she before? There is a piano in her house and it feels strange to see this, but I am not sure why. Khaltu has dozens and dozens and dozens of books that decorate the walls of the house. My favorite thing, though, is the painting of Omar al Mukhtar right by the doorway to the living room. Khaltu’s husband left her and her kids. I do not know the whole story, but it makes me sad because Khaltu did not deserve to be left. I stare at her, trying not to stare too long, trying not to stare in the wrong sort of way. Khaltu tells me she loves me for the first time, and my heart goes in a circle. I do not know what or who I am or why or how she loves me, but I am flattered and I want to tell her that I love her, too, but for some reason I do not think that she will believe me. I am spending most of my time there talking to her caretaker, Zaytouneh. She is from Somalia and she speaks English, so we talk. And I ask her lots of questions and we only stop our conversation when it is time for salatul maghrib. Zaytouneh tells me that she is trying to get to Europe. She is trying, but what she really wants is to find her way to America. She says, Libya is not my final destination.
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We leave Khaltu’s house and the sun is so close that it is beating our backs. I look out in the distance because I see water and I think I see rocks too but I’m not sure. Mama laughed the kind of way that you do when you are sad. They are not rocks, it is trash that people dumped on the rocks, sitting for the water to pick it up tonight. A lot of things are different here but it is home. And I am learning how to love it in a different way because you just cannot love Libya in the same way that you did before the war happened, because people changed, the country changed, the landscape changed. I am falling asleep to the sounds of bullets but the gunshots and the fighting is happening so routinely these days that it is impossible for me to be afraid anymore. Hada al haya.
I am sitting on the beach in Khoms biting into the peaches that I washed in the ocean. I am standing tall on the rooftop breathing in the air of Hay al Andalus. I am buying that pink-beige mumtaz brand ice cream from the guy next door and my skin is all sweat and the heat is making it taste better than it probably actually is. I am sitting in al dar al arabiyyeh eating kusksi with usurti and nothing else matters. There is no war, no murder, no refugee camps, no kalashnikovs, no gangs, beyond this moment.
I am here.
We are home.