My sister wakes up a few minutes before her alarm goes off. My mother wakes up a few minutes later, when she can sense my sister opening her eyes a few minutes before 6 am. She gets up to drive her to the train station, because it’s still cold outside at 6 am in the morning. She catches her train to med school.

Simultaneously my father’s brain misinterprets exhaustion as unlimited power. Sometimes he can’t move his hands when waking up because they are swollen, soaked in labour that keeps up borders, which don’t let him out and his siblings not in. We are ashamed that we pay men to strip them of their clothes, money and phones. So, all the families in my town send their families bags full of tablets and pills as compensation for killing their children.

The families in my town and my parents made it look too easy when my father dips the plain piece of bread in this green tea for breakfast. He leaves to spend every morning in supermarkets, where he buys food for preparing dishes to sell for take-away and delivery. The preparations start at 10 and the cooking at 11 am. My mother stays to spend all her mornings carrying out housework. To what extent she considers the apartment her home, to carry out homework, I am not sure. She joins my father at 11 am and both work together with a Pakistani baker who we were not able to kill on his way to us.

So, they offered him a job. Probably because they share the same work ethic or hairy arms and chest or maybe even the misogyny. They cook and sell their food every day until 11 pm. Then they scrub the oven and stove. I wonder how some say it is ineffective and filthy that their droplets of sweat fall onto the surfaces, while they scrub, when it is the purest form of sweat that their bodies can produce. My parents go back and then make food for themselves which they eat sitting in the living room in front of the TV.

My father sits on the floor leant against the couch, on which my mother tucks her legs up. They learn that there were two inaugurations in their home country this morning. And Zalmay Khalilzad handed over all women’s lives. Hearing the explosions and seeing the TV image shake, they understood the reason for the sense of anxiety that has been following them the entire day. A form of anxiety that they have felt in the past and which you can only survive when you betray all.

 

 

 

Bild: Malte Vgnd CC