Free Something Like Beautiful by asha bandele Page A

grew bigger and more complex, and they required my presence. And I was, present. I was present at least during the day, during the hours in which responsibilities spiraled way over my head. I wrote and edited articles, books, maintained a modicum of my political activism, took Nisa to gardens, to museums, to libraries and playgrounds. I worked out, learned how to make (though I rarely did) organic baby food. I visited my parents most Sundays, traveled several times with Nisa in her first years of life to report stories or give lectures.
    I was in the world. I was in it until the sun went down and the baby went to sleep and stories were filed and the phone calls were returned, and then, not immediately, but after a time when the pain swelled so large it felt as though I could not move or think, conscious or not, I fell into a half-life, a life checked out, a deported life, a life sent away by sweet wine, glasses and glasses of it, sweet wine and cigarettes. They transported me, but where? They allowed me to pass out, to not think about what had gone away. They allowed me to sleep without dreaming until the alarm went off and it was time to rise and pretendto be more than I was, more than I was perhaps even capable of being. It was time to pretend that nothing, not the separation, not the deportation, nothing, cut or crippled me.
    But before this, before I can recognize the way my sadness is forming a fence around my heart, before we’re headlong into some new, distanced reality, Rashid calls me. It’s September of 2000. Nisa is five months old.
    â€œI know things are hard, baby,” he begins, “but they’re going to get better. I’m going to beat this thing and be home with you and Nisa.” I hate to hear him say this because I am trying to come to terms with the new configuration of my life. I am trying to consider how to have new dreams. And yet I cannot stop listening.
    â€œWe’ve been issued a date for a trailer,” he continues. “Please. Just come up. Let’s spend some real family time together. Let me take care of you and my daughter. Let me spoil you for two days, baby,” he says, and I’m right there again, right in the center of hope, right back in a life I thought I’d have to leave behind. But maybe. Maybe things will work out. Maybe we can love it all away.
    Maybe he has a real plan he can only tell me in whispers, alone in a trailer on a prison compound. Maybe we are meant to be together, a couple, a family. Maybe we can overcome the deportation order. Maybe the law will change. Maybe parole will work out. Maybe everything we promised each other and believed during our long courtship and five-year marriage will come to pass. I tell him what I always wound up telling him: Yes, baby. I’ll be there. I pack up food, clothes, diapers, sheets, toiletries, the baby, and me. I hire a car and head up to the prison.
    How do you know, do you ever really know, that the last time with someone is really the last time? Is it ever possible to conceive such a thing when it is late and quiet and the entire of the world has briefly contracted, and now, now the world is no bigger, no more complicated than a size that you and your tiny little family can manage, and he is touching you? He has spent the day touching some part of you and Nisa, almost in disbelief that you are alive and real, not some hologram, some mirage. We could not have conceived then, neither Rashid nor I, that our first conjugal visit as a family would also be our last. I’m sure of that.
    During that visit, that easy, that calm, that beautiful, that life-giving visit, Rashid watches everything Nisa and I do with the eyes of someone who has gone blind and through some sudden miracle—not a medical one so much as an otherworldly one but a miracle nonetheless—he has been regranted the gift of sight. The way I breast-feed, the way Nisa nestles in my arms, flapping her arms, studying her