To the Woman who Raised Me

This is to the woman who raised me.
The woman who made me sit on her laps all day long.
The woman who never left me and gave me nothing but love since the day I was born.
This is not about my mother, no.
This is about my neighbor.

This old lady I will never forget, with her silver hair and her pearl necklace.
A lot of you would describe her as Tante el Ashrafieh.
She would wake up every morning and spend hours fixing her make-up. She would never get out of her room without perfectly red lips,
She was the typical neighbor, getting us underwear for Christmas and baking us sfoufs for our birthday.

As I sat on the couch, that empty couch she would always fill with her smile and joy, I remembered how I spent my childhood in her living room, building house of cards and watching Chef Antoine cook a chicken in a thousand different ways.
She used to call him every once in a while and share her little secrets with him.
But I realized that I only had happy memories of that place. I realized that the people around me also only shared happy memories.

I saw her daughters silently cry in a corner.
I saw the men keeping their poker face and trying to open up random subjects.
I was sitting there, trying to hold my tears, pushing my toes against the ground as hard as I could, pinching myself and avoiding eye contact.
Men don't cry.

I have been laying in bed for 10 minutes, letting the tears I have been holding for too long stream down my face.
For some reason, keeping that in my diary did not seem enough. I had to share it somehow.

What an ironic date the 20th of April is.
It is the day my grandfather has been buried, it is the day my neighbor will be buried.
It is the day I was born.

But if you think about it, during this day you get to think about nothing but the happy memories.

A smiling face on a photograph, a flower on a tombstone.
A candle on a cake.

The happy memories.