Heritage Homecoming

Savoring pre-socializing downtime before getting my makeup done at best friend Brenna’s wedding, November 2018. The only thing I was hiding from in a bed was small talk. Photo by Nikhole Steras.

CAPITOLA, CA – June 13, 2025. I opened my eyes too early on my one workday without an alarm, betrayed by my own body. This Friday the 13th’s dawn spilled bright and rude across our bedroom, threatening to yank away the darkness I wasn’t ready to give up. My husband was quiet and prepared. Scrubs left outside our bedroom door, shoes by the entrance, jacket on the hook. He kissed me good morning, whispered “get some sleep, it’s still early,” and left for work.

I never left my bed. Laptop warm against my chest at 6am. At “breakfast” time, crumbs from the leftovers of my week-old birthday cake scattered across the sheets like rubble. At 45, exactly one week after my birthday, I’m eating leftover sweetness while wearing my red Goodles shirt, twisted around my ribs like a flag I can’t unfurl.

I could turn off my phone, but the sensations stay. English feels safer in my mouth than the Arabic that cuts my throat. “Quarterly budget” rolls smooth while “west bank” stings my throat diagonally. My Baba’s hill where he hiked and hunted exists only in pixels now, the orchards of olives I taste every year but have never seen. Olive oil from my land, my birthright, arriving in bottles across an ocean.

A video on my screen, #Gaza, I brace for images of kids I can’t unsee, but instead it’s two tweens in Palestine dancing dabke to a TikTok trend. Rubble behind them, but they don’t mention it. They’re smiling, just kids dancing. And on trend. 

When hunger hits and I have no energy, willing to eat week-old cake alone in bed in my T-shirt and underwear while pretending to be an adult on Zoom meetings, sometimes not bothering to turn off the camera, angling it to show just part of my face so people don’t know where I am, that’s when the only thing I can make is Goodles mac and cheese. It reminds me of my grandma, something warm like her gold-adorned wrists wrapping around me, that sense of safety even when everything outside is different. Even when you’re a child realizing the world is actually crazy and scary, grandma lets you stay grounded in this cocoon. That’s mac and cheese today.

So I dove deeper into the laptop screen, the kinder one with deadlines instead of airstrikes, quarterly reports instead of casualty counts, problems the size of my solving. My Palestinian family texts updates while my coworkers send neat corporate emails. Then a third enters the party of notifications. It’s my best friend Brenna texting from San Jose about her Iranian husband Sohrab. Sohrab’s parents are in San Jose, his uncle and aunt in Sunnyvale, but his sisters are in Iran. Sohrab’s  aunt was visiting Iran from Sunnyvale and now she’s stuck there, at a gas station for hours trying to get gas because everyone is fleeing at once. I imagine an apocalypse movie, how she feels as an American trapped there. I don’t want to imagine. I have products to launch, reports to turn in, plans to complete.

Let the machine cradle me. Let spreadsheets sing me to sleep. In this digital cocoon, crisis means missed deadlines, not missiles. Here in my red shirt, in these unwashed sheets, I’m finding shelter in the system I once thought was the problem. The machine became my blanket when the world felt too heavy to hold.