My Country vs. My Country
When my country attacked my country, I cheered with enthusiasm and gasped in horror. “Now they’d get what they deserved, those bastards,” I said in the angry tone of the men I’d watched in black-and-white movies about World War II. Then I beat my chest and wailed and tried to pull out my own hair like I’d seen my grandmother do when my grandfather died. Of two minds, two hearts, and two stomachs, I walked around the house in a frenzy until I settled in the kitchen to make a breakfast of hot black tea and Lucky Charms.
If you are not a pilot or a drone operator or a person having their house blown up, there is not a lot to do in a war. I refused to give up my routines, even as bombs destroyed everything around my aunt’s house and then everything around my uncle’s house and then everything around my niece’s house, empires of rubble spilling out where there used to be hospitals, playgrounds, schools. Rubble rubble rubble.
My cousins and family friends fled to smaller, barely named towns that only appeared on certain maps. I went to the grocery store and the coffee shop where every single thing I used to live my life, water, income, food, clothing, shelter, was taxed at 8.25 percent, a mysterious portion of which was used by my government to assassinate the leaders of my government and turn whole cities in my country into rebar and concrete chunks.
These are the same cities with beloved riverside parks, where my cousins only last month posted pictures of themselves on Instagram posing next to budding trees, their faces free of wrinkles, and their hair without a single white strand, even though they are older than I am, while beside them, their children, toothless or partially toothed, just like my children, smiled into the camera. For a few days, I try not to buy anything, try to exist without being taxed, and I have found that it is nearly impossible not to buy anything; it is easier not to exist.
The days drag on. Between my country and my country, information trickles back and forth. State communications are full of bravado and scoffing, and I find myself listening to the news, thinking, Yeah, tell those bastards what’s what, those murderers, those killers of girls and corruptors of democracy. Then, with a simple shake of my head, I am disgusted and yell at the television or phone screen. “Who gave you the right to destroy my country? My country is a sovereign country. This war is illegal. All this destruction, for what?” And this back-and-forth, this split down the middle, causes me a great deal of indigestion, and I go to the neighborhood yoga class where you can drop in for five bucks, tax-free.
My aunt is there, not in my studio, but she teaches yoga in my country, and so when I do yoga, I always imagine her with me. We breathe in and out, up and down. I am in the back of the room next to a sweaty, nearly naked old man, and she is in the front with a group of women she practiced with in the park every week before the war. They are wearing headscarves tightly wrapped to show no hair, to draw no attention, and they all wear some version of a trench coat, as required by law. It’s not easy to do yoga in a trenchcoat, and when I bring this up to her, my aunt humors me and says you can do yoga anywhere, in any way, wearing anything. “Yoga is the ultimate state of flexibility,” she tells me.
During the corpse pose, we are allowed to meditate, and I think of my aunt and the last time we spoke, her voice glossy with panic and lies. “We are fine. We are doing okay. Everything is okay,” she repeated. “If only those bastards would stop bombing long enough so I could go to the bathroom!” I laughed a little at her comment, and she laughed a little, too, and then I started to laugh a lot, and I felt the hands of the yoga instructor press my shoulders down into the floor and say in a soft voice, “It’s okay, it’s okay.” Sometimes you have to cry.
I do my best to support my country. I curse the bombs and bless the pilots. Sometimes I bless the bombs and curse the pilots. There are times when the day takes me places and I am forced to stand on the exact midpoint of reality where the traffic helicopter will drop a bomb on me as I drive on the highway, or a drone strapped with a bomb is disguised as a bird flying near a skyscraper, or the homeless of my county wander beneath the overpasses and among the rubble, begging for money and food, but never for peace.
My youngest son tells me I look very tired. “Like dead tired, Mom.”
“Okay,” I respond. “War is exhausting.”
He stares at me for a long time and then asks if I think I can look into another person’s eyes, both eyes into both eyes? I shrug.
“Let’s try,” he pleads. Fine. We stare at each other, and I find my eyes have to hop back and forth between his eyes, one to another, hop, hop, hop.
“I need a nap,” I say.
“Good idea,” he says.
When I wake up, my country has declared victory, while my country has refused to declare defeat. Negotiations are ongoing. Negotiations have never gone on. Diplomacy has been a total failure. Diplomatic efforts have been a success, and it is only a matter of days. I rejoice, and I mourn. If we are lucky, it will go back to the way it was; if we are lucky, everything will change.