These Wandering Dreams

Content warnings: implied xenophobia, implied Islamophobia, descriptions of blood/minor injury.

Ayla found the egg buried in her sock-drawer.

It was a small and rounded thing, with a smooth shell of emerald-green. Likely made of some sort of marble, if she had to guess, but the egg itself wasn’t heavy. It felt light as fog and fit easily in the palm of her hand. Glistening, milky pearls dotted the surface of the egg, arranged in neatly spaced-out circles that wound around it.

“Ayla?” her mom, Jessica, poked her head into the room. Ayla looked up to meet her eyes, dark irises meeting electric-green ones. “Are you packing?”

“Yeah, mom,” Ayla said hastily, hoping her mom wouldn’t notice how little she’d accomplished so far. The family was leaving Turkey and moving to the USA in just a week now, after all.

Jessica caught sight of the egg in Ayla’s hand, and her mouth fell open in disbelief.

“Where’d you find that?” she asked, delighted. She scurried over to her daughter and plopped down onto the carpet across from her, reaching out to take the ornament. “I can’t believe you kept this!”

“I don’t remember keeping it,” Ayla admitted, furrowing her brow. “Or even where I got it.”

“At a garage-sale,” her mom went on, her eyes sun-warm and flickering with the lights of distant memories being dusted off. “Back when we lived in the States, remember? It was the weirdest thing to ask for, but you insisted. To this day, I still don’t get the point of it – is it a decoration? For Easter? Why an egg? Anyway, you were obsessed with it. You were convinced that it was going to hatch one day.”

Ayla raised her eyebrows. She was sixteen now, so the thought of buying a fake egg at a garage-sale and expecting it to hatch one day made her face heat up with embarrassment.

“You thought that, if you kept it safe and warm, a swan would come out of it someday,” her mom cooed, reaching out to ruffle her caramel curls. Ayla winced and batted her hand away, grumbling. “Or a phoenix, maybe? You never could decide on the bird.”

Her mother handed the egg back to her, smiling fondly. She looked so peaceful in that moment, all the stress of the move melting away, like snow disappearing as the spring sun slips in. Then she glanced around the room, spotting all the cardboard boxes yet to be filled, and heaved a sigh.

“You’ve got a lot of packing to do,” she said, shaking her head. “Better get to it. I’m gonna go check on the twins, they’ve probably built another one of their box-forts by now.”

“Where’s Baba?”

“He went to get more boxes,” her mom laughed, and then her well-trained eyes swiveled over to fix on the plate and glass on Ayla’s desk, homing in on them like some sort of futuristic, scanning-technology at work. “What’s this mess?”

She swept over to them, hover-looming like a hawk, and snatched them up.

“No glasses without coasters, Ayla!” she sang, her voice stressfully-shrill, as she left the room. “You’re going to leave a mark!”

“Sorry,” Ayla murmured, curling her fingers around the egg once more. It felt cool to the touch, like a handful of fresh, crisp-smelling snow.

This won’t be the Durmaz family’s first time moving.

            The first time they moved, they’d packed up their life in the USA and relocated to Istanbul, Turkey, where Ayla’s father, Emir, was from. In the US, they’d lived in a small, sleepy town in Jessica’s home state for the first few years of Ayla’s life, back before the twins were born.

As a child, she’d known that her Mom had been raised Christian and her Baba Muslim, but neither of them were religious, so it wasn’t something she ever thought about. It was just another thing young-Ayla knew, like how two plus two was four or how ice was just frozen water. The family celebrated Christmas and Easter and that sort of thing, but it was more of a fun family-thing rather than a religious one.

“You can pick whatever you want to believe in,” her parents had always said. “Or nothing at all. Learn, explore, and find what works for you.”

Ayla only found out about the prejudice her father had faced in that town when she was older. Her Baba, strong and stoic and steady as stone, had never mentioned it. Her Baba, who’d ask child-Ayla what shape of pancake she wanted in the mornings (snake, she would say, because it was her favorite animal) back then, who’d brushed and braided silky, royal-purple ribbons into her hair before every school-day, and who took her to soccer-practice on the weekends and boasted to all the other parents about her.

“My daughter could play professionally,” she’d hear him saying. “She plays better than I did when I was young. Last year, she scored the winning goal of the season, did I tell you that?”

In hindsight, though, Ayla should’ve suspected something sinister afoot in that quiet, little town. Once or twice, kids had flat out told her that they couldn’t play with her or invite her to their house because Ayla’s family didn’t go to church. Once or twice, neighbors with plastered-on-smiles and glassy eyes would knock on the door and offer the family some “spiritual guidance”.

            Ayla has just two memories of being in church. One took place at Christmas, when their family had gone to see a traveling choir perform in a nearby cathedral. Ayla, warmed by the heat of all the bodies crowded inside the hall and lulled by the haunting hymns, was asleep within minutes.

It was only while leaving the stuffy building and stepping out into the snowy night that young-Ayla had felt anything remotely spiritual. Watching thick, lacy snowflakes, like pollen caught in springtime winds, drift down from the starry heavens, sent a warm, cosmic thrill through every fiber of her body. A hazy humming, soft and comforting, like there were homesick star-atoms stirring inside her.

The second memory Ayla has of church is, looking back, a disturbingly-funny one. A close friend of the Durmaz family had asked them to attend an important event at her church, and they’d agreed. So, come that Sunday, they were sat there, silently, faces mirroring the solemnity of the people in the pews around them. Ayla’s mother wore a pretty dress, seafoam-green and patterned with white roses, that matched her eyes. She looked polished and graceful beneath the sunlight streaming in through the stained-glass windows, as she swept into the church, ignoring any gossip or stares directed her way.

At some point, Ayla had left to join the other kids in a playroom while the adults finished the service. She was sitting there playing with a model-Noah’s Ark, when her fingernail, which she’d accidentally slammed in a door at school a few weeks ago, fell off. Horrified, she watched as blood bubbled up and began to drip down her skin.

            She ran, sobbing, from the playroom and towards the room where the service took place. Threw open those gleaming, dark-mahogany doors and bolted down the aisle, making a beeline for her parents. Bleeding copiously all the while, the oozing droplets adding to the poppy-red of the carpet leading down towards the altar. Her mom went to lead her outside, but her father seized the opportunity for a break.

“It’s okay, Jess. I’ll take her,” he said hastily.

She allowed her father to lead her out of the hall, ignoring the scandalized looks of the people around them. Ignoring the priest’s frown, and the way his icy, blue eyes followed them on their way out.

Maybe this time, Ayla reflects as she packs her books, it will be different.

            They’re moving to a different state in the US, this time. A big city, too, instead of a small town. Maybe people will be more tolerant there. People might be used to meeting people who are different in some way. There are probably lots of people like me, in such a place. Bicultural kids. Families like ours, dual-faith, or maybe even with more than two religions in them. People from more than two countries, even.

We can’t be the only ones.

In Istanbul, they’d started to celebrate her Baba’s holidays too.

            In their own way. Their family didn’t fast for Ramazan, but her Baba told her the story behind the holiday and brought them to a festival that took place at the end of it. He told the family about Kurban Bayram and even if they didn’t observe the traditions associated with the holiday, they had their own celebratory dinner at home. Ayla was just happy that there were twice as many holidays in their household now, because on top of the new ones, they still celebrated her mom’s holidays as well.

One day, in the library of the international school she attended in Istanbul, she found a worn, clothbound book of myths from around the world. When she brought it home and showed it to her Baba, he taught her about Turkic mythology and the old, shamanistic beliefs.

“Have you heard of Ay Dede?” he asked her from where he sat in his reclining-chair in the family’s living-room. There was a lime-green, plastic bowl sat in his lap, filled with the apples he was peeling for a pie Jessica was making.

“No.”

“In English, you’d say, ‘Grandfather Moon’ or something like that,” he said, continuing to peel the apples. “In the old mythology, he was the moon god.”

“Like Máni?”

Emir raised his eyebrows, looking at her over the silver, wiry rims of his reading-glasses.

“Who?”

“He’s the Norse moon god,” she explained, flipping to a page in the book and holding it up for him to see. She tapped on the illustration of him and his twin brother, Sól, a pretty, painted image of them soaring through the skies together. “Like, from Viking-times?”

“Yeah, sure,” her Baba said, shrugging. “Why not? Lots of cultures across the world came up with moon gods and sun gods, that kind of thing. All these stories to try and explain the world around them.”

He handed her a wedge of peeled apple; she took it and chomped on it, thoughtfully, while he continued to slice, with practiced precision, the remaining apples into identical pieces.

“You know, your name has the word ‘moon’ in it,” he said with a smile.

“It does?”

“That’s right. ‘Ayla’, it means the circle of light around the moon. The moon’s halo.”

A week later, on the airplane, a flight attendant asks Ayla what she’d like to drink.

“Sorry, what was that?”

The flight attendant, hearing her accent, switches to English and repeats his question. It’s meant to be a kindness, but it feels like citrus in a cut. Before she can answer, though, one of the twins, Yaz, jumps up onto her seat and shouts that she wants ice-cream. Actually, a strawberry milkshake and also cookies, her younger sister declares, in perfectly-accented Turkish.

Embarrassed, Ayla tries to maneuver Yaz back into her seat, but the flight attendant just laughs and informs her that, regrettably, they do not have milkshakes onboard.

“Hold on, let me help your friend here first,” the man says, still in Turkish, before turning back to Ayla.

“That’s my older sister!” Yaz singsongs, and the man looks surprised.

“Oh, it is?”

“Yeah, but her Turkish isn’t so good,” Yaz explains, with a comically-solemn look in her glittering, green eyes. Their mother’s eyes. “She didn’t grow up here.”

Yaz, probably trying to be helpful, turns to Ayla.

“Want me to order for you?” she asks her older sister.

Ayla rolls her eyes.

“I’m okay,” she says drily. “I’ll order for us.”

“Okay. I’ll wake Yusuf, or else he’ll whine later on that he didn’t get anything.”

            By the time they’ve gotten Ayla’s soda, the twins’ orange juice, and an assortment of snacks, the flight attendant has moved on. The twins are whispering amongst themselves again in hummingbird-quick Turkish, laughing at some inside joke Ayla’s not privy to, and sharing a bag of pretzels.

Ayla, who’s always been afraid of flying, clutches the armrests when turbulence hits.

In their new house, she’s unpacking when there’s a knock at the door.

“Ayla?”

It’s her Baba, and she calls to him that the door is open. He comes inside and hands her what looks like a bunch of cloths tied together into a ball. She raises her eyebrows, searching his face for traces of mirth, for some sign that he’s joking, but he looks completely serious. There’s even something like badly-hidden pride lurking in his dark eyes.

“Uh, Baba…” she begins, reaching up to awkwardly scratch her head. “What’s this?”

She begins to try and untangle some of the cloths; when she yanks one of them off, she realizes that they’re socks.

“Oh… thanks,” she says, uncertainly. “I mean, I have socks, but I guess-”

“The socks are protecting it,” he chuckles. When he laughs, the crow’s feet at the corner of his wide eyes grow deeper, the little lines more pronounced. Beneath the bright glow of the newly-screwed-in, fluorescent lightbulbs, she notices, for the first time, the strands of gray amid his raven-black curls. “Here, look-”

He takes the mass and peels it apart, one sock at a time. Places them down, neatly, on her desk. When there’s only one left, Ayla notices something oval-shaped hanging in the toe of the remaining sock.

“Here,” he said, fishing it out with a Cheshire Cat grin. “I found this. I think someone threw it away while we were packing, but I remember how much you loved it. So I brought it with.”

He hands her the egg gently, gingerly, as though it’s made of spun-sugar.

“Keep it,” he says as he leaves. “It came all this way, didn’t it? Might as well keep it for a little longer.”

She doesn’t know what to say to that, so she says nothing.

It will be another six years before Ayla moves again, excluding her trip to another state for college.

            This time, she’s going to a country she’s only ever visited once. To a place where she has no family, no roots. She doesn’t know why she took the job, besides the obvious reasons: good pay, job security, that sort of thing. But she could’ve gotten a similar position in one of the countries she grew up in, could’ve finally created a sense of permanence in her life. But, she decides that, maybe, she’s become like a weathered, time-worn boat. She’s crossed huge distances throughout her life, and she’s weary from the constant movement; but, ultimately, she’s made for the voyage, not the destination.

Restless when resting.

Wanting unless she’s wandering.

Her parents reassured her that they’d come visit at least once a year, though this hadn’t made anyone less tearful at the airport. Even the twins, who were usually glued to their phones with iron-focus, had been blubbering, clinging messes that day.

            Unpacking is a slow process, with her productivity-levels fluctuating based on the time of day and her mood. Eventually, though, she’s all unpacked, save for one last box. At nighttime, she sits, cross-legged, on her red, green, and white Turkish carpet, a box-cutter in one hand and a glass of lavender-lemonade in the other. She hacks at the tape holding the box closed and pulls it open, then starts taking out the ornaments she’d brought to brighten up her small, unfamiliar apartment. A snow-globe with a miniature replica of a famous Turkish monument inside of it, a few turquoise, glass vases encased in bubble-wrap, and a decorative, metal butterfly with gem-studded wings.

Something rattles, like broken glass, at the bottom of the box.

Groaning, she reaches down to feel around for whatever’s broken. Her fingers latch onto what feels like a piece of marble, and she pulls it out; it’s emerald-green and smooth, like salt-softened sea-glass, against her skin. She makes sure that everything else is out of the box before tilting it upside down, letting whatever’s broken come raining down onto the carpet below.

The pieces of hatched-egg glitter, like emeralds, beneath the light of the moon.