I remember.

My cousins are over, from all over. Our house is full, with laughter and little sleep and late nights around my mother and my aunties as they take turns telling us stories from their past, the present and the future they hope for us. I'm overwhelmed. I feel so blessed. Watching my nephews and nieces, my cousins and siblings and my old man of a father interact has me remembering. My eyes betray me at times. I mean to smile with gratitude, but  they well up instead. alhamdulilah. Sometimes it seems, our bodies know better what our souls feel that which our minds cannot comprehend.

The walls seem to swell in order to hold us all. The floors slowly buckle from under our feet, weighed down with all that we had bottled up from our time apart. But even here, cradled in the arms of family I can still hear it, the echo that has yet to recede into the shadows. Once, sometime ago, I feared forgetting. Much hasn't changed with me since. But I feel older in the way that insides can feel aged like wine left in a cellar. Little did I know though, that the imprint of those memories would be forever interwoven into my organs, in that space between my ribs, holding what I once held dear safe from the outside. Some holes you learn to live around. You continue building your life along the edges of that chasm - the construction of houses and gardens and highways - yet ever aware of what once occupied that space. But you need the noise of that construction to remember how to live again. How to laugh again, to smile again, to feel happy again.

And for this I am grateful. Alhamdulilah wa bi hamdik.