Ararat
Children Coming Home from School
The year I started school, my sister couldn’t walk long distances. Every day, my mother strapped her in the stroller; then, they’d walk to the corner.
That way, when school was over, I could see them; I could see my mother, first a blur, then a shape with arms.
I walked very slowly, to appear to need nothing. That’s why my sister envied me—she didn’t know you can lie with your face, your body.
She didn’t see we were both in false positions. She wanted freedom. Whereas I continued, in pathetic ways, to covet the stroller. Meaning
all my life.
And, in that sense, it was lost on me: all the waiting, all my mother’s effort to restrain my sister, all the calling, the waving, since, in that sense, I had no home any longer.
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