For- Qismat In- - Searching

Qismating. The act of arriving at the thing you did not know you were walking toward.

The walls are the color of worn toothpaste. Fluorescent lights hum a note just below hearing. Your mother is in room 317. The doctor has used words like palliative and months . You are not listening. You are watching a janitor mop the same square of linoleum for the tenth time. He wears headphones. His lips move silently to a song you will never know. Searching for- qismat in-

It is something that finds you.

And you think: Was that qismat? To be disconnected so completely that the only remnant of your love is a stranger’s child? Or was qismat the eleven minutes themselves—the fact that out of 525,600 minutes in that year, you had eleven that mattered? Qismating

Like the word hello from a voice you have never heard before, asking, without knowing it, to be remembered. — End of piece — Fluorescent lights hum a note just below hearing

One morning, you hear a word in a language you do not speak. A documentary about the Arctic. An Inuit elder says qimmirq —the act of waiting for the ice to break. It is not a noun. It is a verb. A waiting that is also a becoming.