12-25-2020, 05:33 PM
The Flight Before Christmas
Grapevale Airport, Kerlile
27th November 1960
“We are experiencing delays on all outgoing flights. Please remain inside the airport for security reasons. Further information will be available in due course.”
The announcement played yet again. It had been three hours, and nothing had changed. Aamina Najjar stroked her daughter Farah’s head and leaned on her husband Matt’s shoulder, trying to calm her breathing. Farah was asleep, she was only two years old and was the reason they were taking this risk.
Aamina had been the daughter of a Serrielan immigrant to Kerlile, a woman who’d been seeking equality. Aamina, on the contrary, found the Matriarchy a rather oppressive place to live. So, she was taking her family back to Serriel. Her husband’s family was native to this area, but he seemed exceptionally keen to get out of the country, so there’d been no argument. She had three sisters who could stay to care for their mother.
The flight had been booked for months, and nobody had said anything. They’d packed and planned, said goodbye to their friends and family members and made it to the airport on time, ready to set out and seek a new life. Yet about half an hour after arriving at the airport, the notices about delays had started and nobody was being allowed to leave. Aamina had no idea what was going on, but it scared her.
“This is a customer announcement. All foreign nationals are asked to make their way to Terminal 4 immediately. Repeat, that’s all foreign nationals to make their way to Terminal 4 immediately.”
“You still have a Serrielan passport, hm?” Matt said to her softly.
“Um, yes,” Aamina looked down at the passport she was clutching hard to her chest. “But you don’t, and neither does Farah.”
“Go find out what’s going on,” he nudged her gently. “We can wait here.”
“But…”
“Go. It might be the only way we can get any information.”
Reluctantly, Aamina kissed Farah on the forehead and Matt on his cheek, whispering I love you in his ear. Then she reluctantly wove through the crowds following the signs for Terminal 4. When she arrived, a small crowd was gathered, chattering amongst themselves in a multitude of languages. A woman asked her for her ID, and she showed the passport.
“Wait here please, Ms Najjar,” the airport employee said.
“Can you tell me what’s going on? I’ve a husband and child who are Kerlian citizens, I don’t want to be separated from them. Farah, my daughter, she’s only two!”
“I see,” the woman frowned. “You are not a Kerlian citizen yourself?”
“I…” Aamina hesitated, noticing something in the woman’s eyes that frightened her. “No, I never filled out the paperwork.”
“What was your intended destination?”
“Serriel,” she replied, concerned by the use of past tense.
“All three of you? Vacation or immigration?”
“The latter,” Aamina said, feeling a panic rising within her.
“Unfortunately, that won’t be possible. The Council has temporarily forbidden the travel of Kerlian citizens outside of the Matriarchy for security reasons. All foreign citizens are also required to leave immediately.”
“But you can’t do that!” she cried out, loudly, causing much of the crowd to turn to her. “My baby’s a Kerlian citizen, you can’t just… I need to stay with her!”
“That will not be possible, Ms Najjar,” the woman said firmly, and two more behind her, holding large weapons, turned to face her.
“No,” Aamina said, then began to walk back over to where she’d left Matt and Farah, but someone grabbed her arm.
“All foreign nationals must leave Kerlile,” the woman repeated.
“I’ll… I’ll take Kerlian citizenship! I want to stay with my daughter!”
“It’s too late for that. Citizenship applications have closed. You must leave now.”
“No…” she began to struggle, desperate to get back to her family, but she was restrained, dragged further away towards a waiting aircraft, screaming and crying as they separated her from her family forever.
*
Hazelton, Primrose Region, Kerlile
23rd November 2020
Yasmin Najjar downed another shot of vodka as she lay on her friend Kate’s couch. After her university course had been cancelled thanks to the traitors that called themselves “reformists”, she’d moved in with Kate rather than go back to living in the government-provided accommodation for those not in work or study. She hated those places, they’d lived in them far too often when she was growing up.
“Ah, Yasmin, where do you get that?” Sofia, Kate’s flatmate said as she entered the kitchen, putting down a couple bags of food and tossing the three ration cards onto the counter. “They’ve not been selling alcohol for several weeks now.”
“Stockpile,” Yasmin replied absentmindedly, downing another shot. She liked to remain in a state of constant tipsiness, lest she be forced to think about the deterioration and impending destruction of the country she loved.
“Goddess, you stockpiled that much?” Sofia said, putting away the meagre amount of food she’d collected for the three of them. “Have you considered applying for a different course, or a job?”
“Leave me be,” Yasmin groaned. “I’ll join the military once we know which divisions will take what side.”
“There’s not going to be a civil war,” Sofia shook her head. “And if there was, you traditionalists would likely lose. You need a better life plan than dying in a futile conflict to preserve a dying regime.”
“Traitor,” hissed Yasmin, and she tried to stand up to face the filthy reformist woman but fell down. Perhaps she was more than a little tipsy.
“Goddess, Yasmin,” Sofia grimaced, and helped her back onto the couch. “This isn’t healthy, you need help. Do you want me to try and contact your mother again?”
“She’s… busy with the church,” Yasmin coughed a little, her throat was dry from the alcohol. Sofia poured her a glass of water and handed her it. She took it, despite her dislike of the weak little reformist. “The anti-patriarchy fightback.”
“The extremist church groups, yes. Farah Najjar, yes? I’ll look her up on the contact database. Any other family?”
“No, grandfather was executed, grandmother traitor… she left to go back to Serriel and be a slave to men. Refused to take Kerlian citizenship to stay with Mum.”
“Yasmin? Yasmin, stay with me… Goddess, how much have you drunk!?”
Yasmin slipped down onto the floor once more, unable to keep herself up, no longer really aware of what Sofia was saying to her. She thought of her poor mother, who’d been abandoned by her own mother as a toddler, a mother who cared more about being able to swan around the patriarchal countries than stay with her. A traitor, a self-misogynist, a woman with no ambitions… not like Yasmin. Yasmin had ambitions. And they’d been destroyed.
“Yasmin Najjar?” a voice said, from far away. “Yasmin? We should take her to the hospital, just as a precaution…”
“No, I’m fine,” Yasmin sat up, staring blearily at what appeared to be a pair of paramedics. They were trailed by a man, a trainee on one of the new male employment programmes. Yasmin turned away in disgust. “I just need to… get to bed…”
“She can sleep in my room tonight,” Kate said. When had she arrived back?
Yasmin was guided to Kate’s room and lay down on the bed. Kate entered, and pulled the blankets up over Yasmin, and kissed her gently on the forehead, as her mother used to do, then stroked her hair and switched the light off on the way out.
*
25th November 2020
“Remember two years ago, those Christians?” Kate laughed, pouring more water for Yasmin as they sat eating dinner. Kate and Sofia had confiscated her alcohol stash. “I bet they released them all now, funny how things change?”
“Weaklings,” Yasmin muttered under her breath.
“Indeed,” Sofia nodded to Kate. “Why, two years ago, nobody would have dared refer to the Council as ‘weaklings’!”
Kate and Sofia laughed as they ate their small dinner. There was enough, but hardly more than that, with the strictness of the rationing. Yasmin grumbled and looked away. Yesterday, they’d both tried to suggest new courses to her, but she didn’t want to listen. Kate herself was taking this well, her own course had changed rapidly. Kate was loyal to the Council, of course. Yasmin, though… Yasmin was loyal to the idea.
“The Council are the guides and protectors of the Matriarchy project,” Yasmin interrupted the laughter with a scowl. “At least, they’re supposed to be. Now they seem to be allowing a darkness to swallow our nation.”
“A darkness!” Sofia laughed. “Must you be so dramatic? We’re changing with the times, aren’t we Kate? And about time too, what happened two years ago was disgusting.”
“A bit too much, sure,” Kate admitted. “The boy they shot… they shouldn’t have done that. But they were just following their orders.”
“Not an excuse,” Sofia shook her head. “They should be prosecuted for murder.”
“Traitor,” Yasmin said to Sofia but without malice in her tone. “We will certainly be on different sides of the coming civil war.”
“There’s not going to be a civil war!” exclaimed Kate. “If things were that bad, you two wouldn’t be able to sit around a table together. No, people disagree, sure, but… I imagine this is what it’s like in the democracies. People support different political parties and whatnot. It’s interesting.”
“I suppose we’ll find out,” Yasmin grumbled. “Given that Democracy Bill the Council are going to pass. I wonder which of them sold out.”
“Which Women’s Party Councillor decided to suddenly support reform, you mean?” Sofia laughed at Yasmin’s word choice. “I don’t know… it’s interesting! My money’s on Chiu, we know she supported the EUCDA amendment and they were discussed together.”
“But Hart was against EUCDA, someone else must’ve voted with Chiu and the reformists,” argued Kate.
Suddenly, the political discussion – unthinkable only two years earlier – was interrupted by the ringing of the landline, causing all three to jump. Kerlian residences had compulsory landlines, but they weren’t often used, apart from to contact government services. After office hours on a Friday, it was unlikely they’d get a call. The trio looked at each other, then Sofia picked up the phone.
“Hello?”
Yasmin watched as Sofia’s eyes became increasingly wide, and the phone slipped from her grasp. It was an older model, still attached with a cable, and it swung near the phone as Sofia stepped backwards and slipped down the wall until she was seated on the ground.
“Um… Yasmin… it’s for you…”
“You look like you’ve just seen a ghost,” Yasmin remarked. “Who is it?”
“Your… um… your grandmother. Calling from… um… from Serriel.”
“What!?” Kate and Yasmin said in unison. They looked at each other.
“Is that legal now?” Yasmin asked. “Calls from abroad?”
“Since November,” Sofia said, still pale and staring at the wall from where she’d half-collapsed.
Yasmin crept forward and gently took the phone, bringing it to her ear.
“Hello?”
“Yasmin? Hi! Your mother gave me this number, I’ve always wanted to speak to you and now we can!” the woman on the end of the phone said, her voice full of joy.
“You are… Aamina? My grandmother?”
“I am! It’s so wonderful to hear your voice! Your mother and I had a wonderful talk last week. I’ve missed her so, so much. She told me all about you, about how I have a granddaughter! I’m so happy! Maybe I can come and visit once the visa paperwork gets sorted?”
“Why in the name of the Goddess would you do that?” Yasmin snapped. “You abandoned my mother to go and become some man’s slave! You abandoned the women’s revolution for a patriarchal land thousands of miles away! Why the hell would we want to see you?”
“That’s not true, Yasmin,” soothed her grandmother through the phone. “I didn’t abandon your mother, that’s only what she was told. I wanted to stay, but I was deported. I tried to get back to her, but… she’d been taken into state care, and Matt had been executed, and they called me a traitor. I wanted to be there for your mother, please believe me.”
“No, you refused to take Kerlian citizenship and stay!”
“I tried, they refused to give it to me,” Aamina said sadly. “And then they stopped giving me information on Farah – on your mother – and I had to give up. I remarried, I made a new family, but I never forgot your mother.”
“But they wouldn’t deport a woman who wants to stay! They wouldn’t take a girl away from her mother unless the mother was a misogynist! They wouldn’t!”
“They teach you to believe these things, but… Yasmin, Kerlile was a beautiful idea. But in the end, it didn’t work as it should have. Can you see that?”
“I…” Yasmin gripped the phone harder, she was shaking. “I don’t know…”
“Let me tell you about my own mother, your great-grandmother. She was in an unhappy marriage to my father in Serriel. She wanted freedom, and she wanted freedom for me. She brought me and my sisters to Kerlile in search of that freedom, and for her, she found it. A society where women could do as they wished. But for me… I didn’t see freedom. I saw a fence around the border, I saw people being taken away for criticising the government. I wanted for Farah what my mother had wanted for me… but I failed. And for that, I’m so, so sorry.”
“But…” Yasmin couldn’t work out what to say.
“The world changes, every year is different to the last. One person’s freedom can be another person’s prison… if we’d left a day earlier we would have left as a family and everything would’ve been different. Yasmin… I don’t have long left. I’m old. I don’t have many regrets, but having to leave Farah is the only thing I can’t forgive myself for. I would love to meet you, and see my daughter just once more before I die.”
“Grandmother…” Yasmin found herself on the edge of tears. “I… I’d love that.”
“Really?” Aamina sounded so thrilled, even though her own tears continued to fall. “Maybe you can come here…”
*
Najjar Residence, Serriel
25th December 2020
They’d stopped over in Laeral to get a connecting flight, and the airport had contained such sparkly and beautiful decorations as Yasmin had ever seen. Such things did not often exist in Kerlile, and it made it even stranger to see that it was for Christmas. The very thing that had caused so much trouble two years earlier. There had even been a Santa. It was all so new to her, the freedom to travel… freedom in general.
When Farah Najjar saw her mother for the first time since the age of two, she was overcome with emotions. She’d spent her life believing this woman had abandoned her, but in that moment, she knew it couldn’t be true. She embraced her mother, searching her memory desperately for traces from before. Aamina had grown old, she was in her late 80s, but she hugged her daughter tightly without any frailty.
Yasmin, still wary, and feeling sick from the flight, shook her grandmother’s hand. They were invited inside and given food and drinks. Yasmin smiled ever so gently as her mother and grandmother talked, telling each other of their lives, which should never have been lived apart. They sat close, and invited Yasmin to sit with them. She snuggled closely to her mother and wondered at how the world could change so quickly.
The three women sat together, sharing their stories, a thousand miles from Kerlile, and together at last despite all the attempts to separate them.
Grapevale Airport, Kerlile
27th November 1960
“We are experiencing delays on all outgoing flights. Please remain inside the airport for security reasons. Further information will be available in due course.”
The announcement played yet again. It had been three hours, and nothing had changed. Aamina Najjar stroked her daughter Farah’s head and leaned on her husband Matt’s shoulder, trying to calm her breathing. Farah was asleep, she was only two years old and was the reason they were taking this risk.
Aamina had been the daughter of a Serrielan immigrant to Kerlile, a woman who’d been seeking equality. Aamina, on the contrary, found the Matriarchy a rather oppressive place to live. So, she was taking her family back to Serriel. Her husband’s family was native to this area, but he seemed exceptionally keen to get out of the country, so there’d been no argument. She had three sisters who could stay to care for their mother.
The flight had been booked for months, and nobody had said anything. They’d packed and planned, said goodbye to their friends and family members and made it to the airport on time, ready to set out and seek a new life. Yet about half an hour after arriving at the airport, the notices about delays had started and nobody was being allowed to leave. Aamina had no idea what was going on, but it scared her.
“This is a customer announcement. All foreign nationals are asked to make their way to Terminal 4 immediately. Repeat, that’s all foreign nationals to make their way to Terminal 4 immediately.”
“You still have a Serrielan passport, hm?” Matt said to her softly.
“Um, yes,” Aamina looked down at the passport she was clutching hard to her chest. “But you don’t, and neither does Farah.”
“Go find out what’s going on,” he nudged her gently. “We can wait here.”
“But…”
“Go. It might be the only way we can get any information.”
Reluctantly, Aamina kissed Farah on the forehead and Matt on his cheek, whispering I love you in his ear. Then she reluctantly wove through the crowds following the signs for Terminal 4. When she arrived, a small crowd was gathered, chattering amongst themselves in a multitude of languages. A woman asked her for her ID, and she showed the passport.
“Wait here please, Ms Najjar,” the airport employee said.
“Can you tell me what’s going on? I’ve a husband and child who are Kerlian citizens, I don’t want to be separated from them. Farah, my daughter, she’s only two!”
“I see,” the woman frowned. “You are not a Kerlian citizen yourself?”
“I…” Aamina hesitated, noticing something in the woman’s eyes that frightened her. “No, I never filled out the paperwork.”
“What was your intended destination?”
“Serriel,” she replied, concerned by the use of past tense.
“All three of you? Vacation or immigration?”
“The latter,” Aamina said, feeling a panic rising within her.
“Unfortunately, that won’t be possible. The Council has temporarily forbidden the travel of Kerlian citizens outside of the Matriarchy for security reasons. All foreign citizens are also required to leave immediately.”
“But you can’t do that!” she cried out, loudly, causing much of the crowd to turn to her. “My baby’s a Kerlian citizen, you can’t just… I need to stay with her!”
“That will not be possible, Ms Najjar,” the woman said firmly, and two more behind her, holding large weapons, turned to face her.
“No,” Aamina said, then began to walk back over to where she’d left Matt and Farah, but someone grabbed her arm.
“All foreign nationals must leave Kerlile,” the woman repeated.
“I’ll… I’ll take Kerlian citizenship! I want to stay with my daughter!”
“It’s too late for that. Citizenship applications have closed. You must leave now.”
“No…” she began to struggle, desperate to get back to her family, but she was restrained, dragged further away towards a waiting aircraft, screaming and crying as they separated her from her family forever.
*
Hazelton, Primrose Region, Kerlile
23rd November 2020
Yasmin Najjar downed another shot of vodka as she lay on her friend Kate’s couch. After her university course had been cancelled thanks to the traitors that called themselves “reformists”, she’d moved in with Kate rather than go back to living in the government-provided accommodation for those not in work or study. She hated those places, they’d lived in them far too often when she was growing up.
“Ah, Yasmin, where do you get that?” Sofia, Kate’s flatmate said as she entered the kitchen, putting down a couple bags of food and tossing the three ration cards onto the counter. “They’ve not been selling alcohol for several weeks now.”
“Stockpile,” Yasmin replied absentmindedly, downing another shot. She liked to remain in a state of constant tipsiness, lest she be forced to think about the deterioration and impending destruction of the country she loved.
“Goddess, you stockpiled that much?” Sofia said, putting away the meagre amount of food she’d collected for the three of them. “Have you considered applying for a different course, or a job?”
“Leave me be,” Yasmin groaned. “I’ll join the military once we know which divisions will take what side.”
“There’s not going to be a civil war,” Sofia shook her head. “And if there was, you traditionalists would likely lose. You need a better life plan than dying in a futile conflict to preserve a dying regime.”
“Traitor,” hissed Yasmin, and she tried to stand up to face the filthy reformist woman but fell down. Perhaps she was more than a little tipsy.
“Goddess, Yasmin,” Sofia grimaced, and helped her back onto the couch. “This isn’t healthy, you need help. Do you want me to try and contact your mother again?”
“She’s… busy with the church,” Yasmin coughed a little, her throat was dry from the alcohol. Sofia poured her a glass of water and handed her it. She took it, despite her dislike of the weak little reformist. “The anti-patriarchy fightback.”
“The extremist church groups, yes. Farah Najjar, yes? I’ll look her up on the contact database. Any other family?”
“No, grandfather was executed, grandmother traitor… she left to go back to Serriel and be a slave to men. Refused to take Kerlian citizenship to stay with Mum.”
“Yasmin? Yasmin, stay with me… Goddess, how much have you drunk!?”
Yasmin slipped down onto the floor once more, unable to keep herself up, no longer really aware of what Sofia was saying to her. She thought of her poor mother, who’d been abandoned by her own mother as a toddler, a mother who cared more about being able to swan around the patriarchal countries than stay with her. A traitor, a self-misogynist, a woman with no ambitions… not like Yasmin. Yasmin had ambitions. And they’d been destroyed.
“Yasmin Najjar?” a voice said, from far away. “Yasmin? We should take her to the hospital, just as a precaution…”
“No, I’m fine,” Yasmin sat up, staring blearily at what appeared to be a pair of paramedics. They were trailed by a man, a trainee on one of the new male employment programmes. Yasmin turned away in disgust. “I just need to… get to bed…”
“She can sleep in my room tonight,” Kate said. When had she arrived back?
Yasmin was guided to Kate’s room and lay down on the bed. Kate entered, and pulled the blankets up over Yasmin, and kissed her gently on the forehead, as her mother used to do, then stroked her hair and switched the light off on the way out.
*
25th November 2020
“Remember two years ago, those Christians?” Kate laughed, pouring more water for Yasmin as they sat eating dinner. Kate and Sofia had confiscated her alcohol stash. “I bet they released them all now, funny how things change?”
“Weaklings,” Yasmin muttered under her breath.
“Indeed,” Sofia nodded to Kate. “Why, two years ago, nobody would have dared refer to the Council as ‘weaklings’!”
Kate and Sofia laughed as they ate their small dinner. There was enough, but hardly more than that, with the strictness of the rationing. Yasmin grumbled and looked away. Yesterday, they’d both tried to suggest new courses to her, but she didn’t want to listen. Kate herself was taking this well, her own course had changed rapidly. Kate was loyal to the Council, of course. Yasmin, though… Yasmin was loyal to the idea.
“The Council are the guides and protectors of the Matriarchy project,” Yasmin interrupted the laughter with a scowl. “At least, they’re supposed to be. Now they seem to be allowing a darkness to swallow our nation.”
“A darkness!” Sofia laughed. “Must you be so dramatic? We’re changing with the times, aren’t we Kate? And about time too, what happened two years ago was disgusting.”
“A bit too much, sure,” Kate admitted. “The boy they shot… they shouldn’t have done that. But they were just following their orders.”
“Not an excuse,” Sofia shook her head. “They should be prosecuted for murder.”
“Traitor,” Yasmin said to Sofia but without malice in her tone. “We will certainly be on different sides of the coming civil war.”
“There’s not going to be a civil war!” exclaimed Kate. “If things were that bad, you two wouldn’t be able to sit around a table together. No, people disagree, sure, but… I imagine this is what it’s like in the democracies. People support different political parties and whatnot. It’s interesting.”
“I suppose we’ll find out,” Yasmin grumbled. “Given that Democracy Bill the Council are going to pass. I wonder which of them sold out.”
“Which Women’s Party Councillor decided to suddenly support reform, you mean?” Sofia laughed at Yasmin’s word choice. “I don’t know… it’s interesting! My money’s on Chiu, we know she supported the EUCDA amendment and they were discussed together.”
“But Hart was against EUCDA, someone else must’ve voted with Chiu and the reformists,” argued Kate.
Suddenly, the political discussion – unthinkable only two years earlier – was interrupted by the ringing of the landline, causing all three to jump. Kerlian residences had compulsory landlines, but they weren’t often used, apart from to contact government services. After office hours on a Friday, it was unlikely they’d get a call. The trio looked at each other, then Sofia picked up the phone.
“Hello?”
Yasmin watched as Sofia’s eyes became increasingly wide, and the phone slipped from her grasp. It was an older model, still attached with a cable, and it swung near the phone as Sofia stepped backwards and slipped down the wall until she was seated on the ground.
“Um… Yasmin… it’s for you…”
“You look like you’ve just seen a ghost,” Yasmin remarked. “Who is it?”
“Your… um… your grandmother. Calling from… um… from Serriel.”
“What!?” Kate and Yasmin said in unison. They looked at each other.
“Is that legal now?” Yasmin asked. “Calls from abroad?”
“Since November,” Sofia said, still pale and staring at the wall from where she’d half-collapsed.
Yasmin crept forward and gently took the phone, bringing it to her ear.
“Hello?”
“Yasmin? Hi! Your mother gave me this number, I’ve always wanted to speak to you and now we can!” the woman on the end of the phone said, her voice full of joy.
“You are… Aamina? My grandmother?”
“I am! It’s so wonderful to hear your voice! Your mother and I had a wonderful talk last week. I’ve missed her so, so much. She told me all about you, about how I have a granddaughter! I’m so happy! Maybe I can come and visit once the visa paperwork gets sorted?”
“Why in the name of the Goddess would you do that?” Yasmin snapped. “You abandoned my mother to go and become some man’s slave! You abandoned the women’s revolution for a patriarchal land thousands of miles away! Why the hell would we want to see you?”
“That’s not true, Yasmin,” soothed her grandmother through the phone. “I didn’t abandon your mother, that’s only what she was told. I wanted to stay, but I was deported. I tried to get back to her, but… she’d been taken into state care, and Matt had been executed, and they called me a traitor. I wanted to be there for your mother, please believe me.”
“No, you refused to take Kerlian citizenship and stay!”
“I tried, they refused to give it to me,” Aamina said sadly. “And then they stopped giving me information on Farah – on your mother – and I had to give up. I remarried, I made a new family, but I never forgot your mother.”
“But they wouldn’t deport a woman who wants to stay! They wouldn’t take a girl away from her mother unless the mother was a misogynist! They wouldn’t!”
“They teach you to believe these things, but… Yasmin, Kerlile was a beautiful idea. But in the end, it didn’t work as it should have. Can you see that?”
“I…” Yasmin gripped the phone harder, she was shaking. “I don’t know…”
“Let me tell you about my own mother, your great-grandmother. She was in an unhappy marriage to my father in Serriel. She wanted freedom, and she wanted freedom for me. She brought me and my sisters to Kerlile in search of that freedom, and for her, she found it. A society where women could do as they wished. But for me… I didn’t see freedom. I saw a fence around the border, I saw people being taken away for criticising the government. I wanted for Farah what my mother had wanted for me… but I failed. And for that, I’m so, so sorry.”
“But…” Yasmin couldn’t work out what to say.
“The world changes, every year is different to the last. One person’s freedom can be another person’s prison… if we’d left a day earlier we would have left as a family and everything would’ve been different. Yasmin… I don’t have long left. I’m old. I don’t have many regrets, but having to leave Farah is the only thing I can’t forgive myself for. I would love to meet you, and see my daughter just once more before I die.”
“Grandmother…” Yasmin found herself on the edge of tears. “I… I’d love that.”
“Really?” Aamina sounded so thrilled, even though her own tears continued to fall. “Maybe you can come here…”
*
Najjar Residence, Serriel
25th December 2020
They’d stopped over in Laeral to get a connecting flight, and the airport had contained such sparkly and beautiful decorations as Yasmin had ever seen. Such things did not often exist in Kerlile, and it made it even stranger to see that it was for Christmas. The very thing that had caused so much trouble two years earlier. There had even been a Santa. It was all so new to her, the freedom to travel… freedom in general.
When Farah Najjar saw her mother for the first time since the age of two, she was overcome with emotions. She’d spent her life believing this woman had abandoned her, but in that moment, she knew it couldn’t be true. She embraced her mother, searching her memory desperately for traces from before. Aamina had grown old, she was in her late 80s, but she hugged her daughter tightly without any frailty.
Yasmin, still wary, and feeling sick from the flight, shook her grandmother’s hand. They were invited inside and given food and drinks. Yasmin smiled ever so gently as her mother and grandmother talked, telling each other of their lives, which should never have been lived apart. They sat close, and invited Yasmin to sit with them. She snuggled closely to her mother and wondered at how the world could change so quickly.
The three women sat together, sharing their stories, a thousand miles from Kerlile, and together at last despite all the attempts to separate them.
LIDUN President 2024 | she/her | Puppets: Kerlile, Glanainn, Yesteria, Zongongia, Zargothrax