Her heart is beating faster and faster. His lips were softer than she imagined.
The bottle of wine she had downed is coursing through her bloodstream. Lightheaded enough to lose her inhibition, quieting down her ever-rattling mind. At this moment, she needed her body to speak.
Closer.
As he pulls her in, their bodies entangle in a selfish tug of war, which she ultimately triumphs. She discovered that when she drank enough to lose, she could become an assertive, dominant version of herself. Shame is a recurring theme of her life in this world. It covers her like a coat of varnish, except on nights like this, when she finally feels in charge of the present.
The two strangers lay in bed, painfully aware of themselves, a bit disheveled with the crisp air lingering.
Daniel broke the spell first as he stumbles to land both his feet on the ground and put on a shirt. He playfully says “You’re trouble!” in an accent unmistakable to her. She couldn’t help but wince at the sound.
Daniel often found himself in this situation. He was handsome enough in a bar, between drinks and flirtations, that his accent is not noticeable. But in the quiet, it reveals his lineage, giving away too much of himself.
No matter how often it happened, it never ceased to hurt. But Daniel knew the drill. He had outstayed his welcome. He quickened his pace and as he wrapped his fingers over the silver handle of her bedroom door, he felt her hand touch his shoulder. He turns to face her.
“Your voice,” she says, “It reminds me of my father. Would you sit with me for a little longer?”
His heart skips a beat. He complies.
It was not often his accent brought nostalgia; at least not in a woman like her. She bore no markings of their people; at least none visible to him.
She sits close to him, at the edge of the bed, sides touching, head tilted on his shoulder. He slowly extends his arm around her and holds her head against him. Her tears fall. Silent sobs at first, then louder from the pit of her stomach, that pit of darkness threatening to swallow the whole of her.
He knew this pain. It’s buried deep in him too. A pain he saw in all the people he loved. It’s the unending tears of surviving what was meant to have not been survived.
Her wails decrescendo into silence.
The pair sit, locked into this moment, unable to budge.
“Would you like to get something to eat?” Daniel asks an eternity later.
“Yes. Let’s order in,” she replies, thankful for the transition.
Realizing how hungry they were, they ordered a bit of everything with some fresh juice on the side for sustenance.
She excuses herself to take a much-needed shower, a moment under the water to compose herself.
Daniel sits on the sofa in the small living room. He hadn’t noticed her apartment in its entirety; only flashes of sight between breaths and falling clothes. It’s cozy here- with nothing sentimental.
She comes out looking refreshed and so very beautiful he thought. She smiles almost like she was reading his thoughts.
“You know we haven’t been introduced properly,” she says.
“I’m Daniel,” he answers quickly, feeling the urge to make her at ease, not knowing that he felt so familiar to her already.
“I’m Frəhiwot.” she shares. Her tone dipping at the e to pronounce it is as ə just as it was meant to sound. Just as she had heard it from her grandparents, and her mother.
Her name means the seed of life. Always mispronounced on purpose or forgotten through erasure.
The majority others would pitch higher at the “e” in their assumption that she was one of them. She never corrected it. While those who could not handle the longevity of her “foreign name” would accept the nickname she assigned herself. “Call me Free,” she would often say with a smile. Like a prayer bouncing from her lips to the ears of others in hopes a heavenly being might finally release her of this torment.
“Frəhiwot,” Daniel repeats perfectly in the language relegated to whispers. Here in this sanctuary they revive it with the words of her name.
This moment feels stolen from a world long gone, but here they were, hidden but surviving. Sometimes the revolution is waking up with your ancestors’ blood coursing through your veins. Here, in a room of two, they shift tectonic plates, jolting a layer of earth used to bury generations.
Another world had awakened when a phone begins to buzz to jolt them back.
The food they had ordered has arrived.
Frə tips the delivery guy and sorts the food at the dining table.
Sitting across each other and sharing this meal felt almost too intimate. Frə wanting to delve deeper into this moment unafraid said, “My family was from Zalambessa. I had only been there as a kid. I don’t remember much.”
“What do you remember?” he nudged.
She explains to Daniel that she traveled with her family in 2002 in the midst of no war, no peace stage between Eritrea and Ethiopia. “There was a sort of limbo that hung heavy in the air,” she tells Daniel. “We were crammed into a bus with countless others, journeying from Adigrat to Zalambessa.” At some point everyone was so silent. My uncle told us we have to cross through Eritrea to reach our family. I mean imagine that, someone with no context in some name of peace just drew up random lines. People just wanted to see their families.” Daniel agreed. “To many of us, these borders are arbitrary and senseless.” Frə shares memories of that journey that are hazy, a blur of impressions and emotions.
“But I do remember arriving at the border, my uncle pointing out the neutral zone, each side guarded by their respective soldiers. And then, a soldier from our side approached a home that had been reduced to rubble, and without hesitation, relieved himself inside.” This moment stayed with Frə for all these years, the indignity of it all.
“It wasn’t a home anymore though, was it? It was just rubble. Just bricks.” It was that normalization of the decay that broke her. Years later we continue to live in the justification of the unfathomable. Both Daniel and Frə knew that it was the cadence of these moments they bore witness to and the ones their families fell victim to which birthed this world. A world rotting within itself.
“How about you? Where is your family from?” she asked, hoping he would be brave enough to fall into this depth with her. “I grew up in Mekelle, but my family is from Irob.” He was a highlander of the ethnic group who struggle to build a life so close to a border where destruction frequently knocked. She wanted to know more, but it seems this was as far as he wanted to take her. She didn’t want to push.
They cleaned up and somehow ended up in the bed again. This time they felt naked even before their clothes came off. They were present, and beckoning themselves to expose more, reaching out for comfort in something unknown, yet familiar.
In the aftermath, they lay there for a while longer, in silence, the awkward of earlier replaced by comfort.
In the days to follow, they built a world around themselves. A vibrant aura of something neither of them had felt before. It was a world of two, filled with conversations that spin you around, an aromatic kitchen, and time that stood still for them; it was like magic.
One early morning Daniel came proposing to make breakfast. “Let me make you some Ga’at,” he proclaimed. She laughed thinking it was the start of their usual banter until she notices
him unpack ingredient after ingredient. “My mom taught me how to do it. It won’t take long,” he assures her.
Amused and unsure, Frə decides she would drink her cardamom and cinnamon spiced black tea, and watch the man she was falling in love with make her breakfast.
Daniel was an obvious overachiever, always going the extra mile. It was important to him that if something was done, it be done correctly, regardless of the task. It was not often he was able to share this version of himself with someone and he didn’t want to disappoint her.
After forty minutes of kneading, the dough was ready, glazed with the kibe and a spicy center dip. The scent of warm spices permeated the air, filling Frə’s small apartment with a sense of home. “ጠዓሚዮ, መዓረይ” taste it, honey, he said with a smile, and they both reached for the dough. Using their hands, they pinch off a small piece of the dough and roll it between their fingers, savoring the anticipation of the taste.
“Thank you,” she whispers.
But Daniel knew that it wasn’t just the food that she was grateful for. At that moment, they had created something special, a sanctuary of acceptance and compassion that offered a warmth rarely felt in this distorted world.
As the morning gentle sun illuminated the room, their chatter, soft music from Eyasu Berhe and hummingbirds filled the apartment. It was absolutely ordinary in the way she hoped her life would be but never thought really possible. In the rare moments of such ease, her mind wanders often to the dark place where this type of peace was not meant to be hers.
“Your mind went somewhere Frə, where are you?” he asks.
And in that dip of her name, he brings her back again to this place. Frə he calls her without fail, it’s never Fre, not to him, ever.
“What should we do me’arey, you know we can’t continue this way,” she managed to say but not with the frightened tone that played in her mind. This is a fear she knew he shared.
He asked her about the conversation they had had in that bar they met weeks ago. She had told him she was not staying here long, that she was leaving soon.
“Yes, but I always say that, but never leave. It’s mostly a drunken thing I say to men I don’t plan to meet again” she smiled mischievously.
With a reciprocated smile of mischief, “Let’s leave Frə. This doesn’t need to be our life; it doesn’t need to be our legacy.”
The following week they pack their suitcases and board a plane to begin their pursuit of distant lands. They didn’t allow themselves to say it out loud but they had been chased away, unable to make sense of the rot that engulfed what was supposed to be their home. Their lives didn’t feel like a choice but their love was. They held onto that for whatever it could give them. The pain of separation was both a burden and a blessing, breaking them apart yet allowing them to heal. Frə’s anger and deep sadness often boiled over, a reaction to the world’s insistence that some lives really did matter less.
She cries a lot.
In bathroom stalls.
In crowded places.
In between zoom calls with colleagues who ask “how are you?” as routine and not expecting an answer.
And when it felt like she couldn’t cry anymore, a fictional story would make her cry and she would feel grateful that the pain of living through all this hadn’t also taken her empathy with everything else it had taken from her.
Meanwhile, Daniel retreated further into their world, choosing their love above all else.
In this process of being elsewhere, they discovered something profound: the power of memories and traditions to heal. Through the dishes they cooked, they found traces of their grandmothers and aunts; through their language they found their loved ones’ terms of endearment, “መዓረይ honey, ሽኮር sweetness, ጅግና brave.”
They were still chasing something elusive, but with each passing day, they found themselves getting closer. And with every meal, and every memory shared, they took one step closer to finding themselves again, excavating the past from within.
It was in these moments of reclamation that they began to fill the emptiness inside them, a fleeting identity finding a home in their love.
One morning, as they lay enjoying the warm sunlight of their Sunday, nestled close together “መዓረይ,” Frə whispers reaching for Daniel’s hands, “I think it’s time to go back.”
Quiet and unable to meet her gaze, he whispers back; “I don’t know if I can.”
———
Image: MS Co-Pilot AI modified