{27:62}

I have a faint scar above my lip and I tend to pretend it’s a khaal. and I have another scar under my right cheek, from the time I fell on my face in a bazaar at Lise Mariam in Kabul when I was 13. I used to be a lighter skinned child but after going to Afghanistan when I was 7, my tan stayed. and it’s one of my favorite souvenirs. no one ever tells me I look Afghan, but our watandara always tell me my eyes give it away, straight from Paktika from my Kharoti lineage. I get my cheekbones and cleft chin from my mom, and she gets it from our Qarabaghi wala from the village. When my grandparents got married, my grandma begged my grandpa to get khals tatted on their wrists, and they both did. the slope of my nose tells you I’m Daudzai. my temper is often associated with the fact that I’m Pashtun, but if people continue to tell me that I’ll never work on my anger. my mom used to line my eyes with kohl when I was younger, she said the darker they were the more Afghan I’d look. and every year on Nowruz we paint khaals on our faces, and everytime my dad brings grapes from the grocery store he tells us nothing will ever compare to the angoor in Kabul jaan. when I was 7, I was staying at my great aunt’s in Qarabagh. no one ever tells you how tough Afghan women are. to get to her home I had to cross a stream by walking on a log with poisonous dart frogs underneath, but I was too scared to so my great aunt picked the frogs up one by one, and set them on the floor aside. she said they knew her. and then she killed a snake because it was in our path in her garden. later, my cousins and I shook the branches of the grape tree and the grapes landed in baskets. I ate 3 whole baskets full of angoor, Akila ama watched me and laughed and said i’d get a stomach ache. I had the worst stomach ache that day, then she gave me a beaded necklace she made herself. why does water taste better in the kilei by the way? I’ll never understand the science behind it. my parents have 7 kids, Afghans tend to have 9 back in the motherland. my younger siblings love anar, that’s how I know evolutionary behaviors are real. and I tend to call my Afghan friends jigarem more, my heart swells when people call me Sayedagak. I wanna say I identify as a Muslim first, then as an Afghan, but the people of the Ummah failed Afghanistan. and maybe it’s wrong to say that, but it’s the honest truth. I’ll never beg a non Afghan to consider my watandara worthy of life again. because this past year we realized, we’re all we have, and we’re all we’ll ever need.