The face of freedom is 18 years old

American flag, black and white Image by Istock Photo

By Maayan Sarna May 22, 2020

Editor’s Note: The Forward is featuring essays, poems and short stories written for our Young Writers Contest. Today’s entry was written by Maayan Sarna, a sophomore at SAR in the Bronx. You can find more work from our young writers here.

The face of freedom is eighteen years old and she is standing outside her childhood home with her hands stuffed in her pockets and memories fluttering around inside her like butterflies.

The face of freedom remembers. She remembers things that aren’t even hers, snippets of the language of her ancestors. She remembers struggling to raise children in a land that would never be home, the confused communication and arguments and door slams, the longing and praying and sacrifice. She remembers the steadiness of her grandmother’s hands, soft and smooth and folded like paper, and her tales of childhood poverty and the icy shock of waking at night to your mother, screaming from a nightmare, stuck in a loop of her memories; how sometimes her eyes would go dead and you’d know she was seeing horrors way beyond what you could comprehend. And it’s not the same for the girl, but she shares in this learned trauma; she remembers the long, tired journey across the world which left trembling calloused fingers, so that her child could live to see her child and her child’s child standing with a rod-like spine under the flag of a free country, of her free country.

The face of freedom has seen things she does not understand, things that lay waiting for her in the nighttime, stolen away between the bars of her ribcage, others’ stories that she’s worried over until her eyes stung. Bits of things she did not—does not—will never understand, like the shape of her friend’s father’s fist or the gap of time where someone close lost all feeling and somehow it was worse than the perpetual plague of sadness, or the learned shape of wide dark eyes when you’re talking to someone who recounts a memory so terrible that it has ingrained itself in every scene of their lives and still they can’t find closure. Bits of things like colored cloth or a stranger’s smile or a bird calling to its friend, like the girl on the subway cradling a ukulele or a couple joining trembling fingers and locking hearts forever. And certain wisps of unifying feelings, like how the sign of her religion sets her alight with pride, or the sight of a soldier is still enough to make her go soft, or her country’s anthem makes her dream of better days like being six years old again and watching Fourth of July fireworks like they’re the most magical thing she will ever see. An accumulation of others’ stories that, inexplicably, played a large role in raising her.

The face of freedom feels more than anyone has understood. Her eyes are alert under their color; her fingers are softer than her calluses. Sometimes she lies on the floor and traces her bedroom ceiling with her eyes, listening to the sound of rain or her brother’s voice or her favorite song. Sometimes she thinks of a friend’s trouble and tries to wrap all those terrible incomprehensible thoughts in her mind, gathering the bits from every dusty corner of her head, squeezing them together tighter and tighter until they’re small enough that they’re bearable. Sometimes she dreams of a house by the sunset with someone she loves who knows what she’s thinking so she never has to say she’s sad; sometimes she dreams of bending over a child, brushing the hair out of his eyes to find a face that mirrors her own. She collects the visions that ground her: her country’s flag, her sister’s face, wide-open skies. An unconditional smile. Sometimes she holds these visions too tight. Often she’s dreaming. Always she‘s feeling.

The face is freedom is barely a child anymore, and still it bewilders her. Flashes of her earliest memory crumble and fade at the edges, blurry like old photographs: someone’s holding her tiny hand in an ambulance; she’s clutching a newborn brother in her arms and blinking at the miracle of life; she’s lost in the castles of Harry Potter; she’s giggling at a sleepover even as homesickness makes her head heavy. Memories pulsating with feeling, too, as much as a child could feel, sitting on the curb as she watched her best friend drive away for the last time, watching the car clouding her in dust. Throwing away her dolls like the last mark of childhood. Looking down at her hands as if they were someone else’s and longing to go tumbling after a flying dream. Thinking of hazy warm hands and the dizziness of losing someone for the first time. And startling dark eyes as a boy calls her mine for the first time. It’s been twelve years since her gapped-tooth smile; seven years since she began to loosen her grip on the endlessness of childhood; five years since she started to believe in God again; four years since a friend betrayed her; two years since she and her friends drove through the night with wide-open eyes and wider skies just because they were young and alive and breathing; and even as she pulls her sleeves over her wrists she’s alive and young and breathing and it‘s been months since she started recognizing her face in the mirror, weeks since she’s begun lovingly folding her possessions into bags and it is now, and she is holding tight to the sky and shutting her eyes, and she is bending down to say goodbye.

(The face of freedom stands with a blue mask cutting into her face. It seeps into every conversation, the internal enemy. She has spent a week in bed raked with fever and coughs and guilt. She has blood on her hands from her unawareness. At eighteen she is already a murderer; even now that she has healed, little has changed. She wakes in the morning to the phantom sunlight; she sleeps at night with nothing to show for the long hours of fruitless attempts to busy herself. She is not living; she is surviving. And yet, she is free, for she holds the promise of an endlessly open future in the palm of her hand. Come the end of summertime, she will bid goodbye to the tire swing on her front lawn and her neighbor’s kid and her empty bedroom; to the patch of sky above her home and her loving friends and family and her childhood. Come the end of summertime, she will cease to grow and begin to build— and that is how she knows that she is free.)

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.

In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.

At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.

Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we still need 300 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.

Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO