Tirza ~ May 5

 

Unintentional criminal commits invisible crimes seen only by her victims and for which she shows no remorse.

 

I was clueless.  The invisible crimes I was unwittingly committing created in me a guilt without root.  I was in the dark, not being able to place it, what it is, where it is, how it is.  Its only evidence was a dampness and unease that began prickling my skin before seeping into my pores without permission,  filaments that would weave themselves into the core of my being as invasive and impossible to root out as the dandelions from my lawn. 

 

I must have been four years old, because the setting was the grassy hilltop above our house in Turkey.  I was lying in the high grass, hiding because my brother and his friend were nearby and if they saw me I knew they would make it part of their game to turn me into the enemy they had to catch and punish.  I was looking at the sky when I realized my mother was walking by, so close to me I thought she had found me.  And what a good moment to find me!  Instead, she kept walking right past without seeing me.

 

I loved my mother more than anyone. I would tell everyone who would listen how beautiful she was, how she sang, how she embroidered. It was like I had a crush on her.  But I spent most of my time with Kadria, the Turkish woman who came every day, who brought fish to swim in the sink, baked as I played with leftover dough at the kitchen table, and let me wash dishes by pulling a stool for me to stand on.

 

Sometimes, I had done something so wrong that my mother wouldn’t talk to me for the whole day, and sometimes into the next.

But that wasn't all.

It was in Turkey that the neighbors, two American boys, took my glasses away and stomped on them, because I had “killed Jesus''.  Where, one night, we had to sleep over at my friend’s Nimet house, because Turks were looking for us and the Greeks.  Where my brother stoned a pregnant gypsy girl who was thirteen like he was because,  Kadria tried to explain to me later, “she slept with a man.”  My parents slept in the same bed, and sometimes when I climbed in with them, I also fell asleep with a man.

 

The beginnings of my life as an unintentional criminal.