Two Weeks Late Forever

(a memoir in vignettes)

By Zymbul Fkara

1 

I love her the way you’re supposed to love a mother. Wide-eyed, wide smiled, eye tooth espresso-stained. I see her: my first Black Buddha—hair, a brew of cloud and lightning. I don’t remember this, but she tells me she carried me for more than nine months. I was born two weeks late. I guess I waited to be sure I was born out of the right woman. I selected well.

I met someone whose laughter was intertwined with ghosts that pricked with pain. Someone who knew the language of my ancestors and carried hurt the way joy is supposed to. We triumphantly live in a moment rewinding, looping, distorting—surviving over and over, the dumb shock of birth. Repeat: I love her the way you’re supposed to love a Black Buddha mother.

2

I feel the sun coming out. I’m so bare in the morning, I might as well be naked. I am naked. Under the covers, I hear my mother’s voice kicking against my wall. I think my room might be pregnant. It’s 3 a.m. She’s murmuring nighttime spells to my dad that break her. She’s awake from out of sleep, restless, with only the soothing of his half-mumbled replies. They’re a track that whizzes and distorts the night. The time to sleep is not now. It’s sometime later, never named.

I throw off my covers and pull on my red, white, and blue Tommy Hilfiger sweater, wearing the sounds of late-90s Black music like a soundtrack. I swing open my door, walk to my mom’s, and knock.

‘Could you quiet down? It’s 3 a.m., and I’m trying to sleep.’

Her, ‘Why don’t you turn your head around on the bed?’

I shake my head. ‘Excuse me?’

‘That’s not gonna stop the sound from travelling,’ I retort. ‘If you could move the conversation to your washroom when you wake up before work, that would be appreciated.’

I close the door and walk back to my room to recover. I take off my Tommy Hilfiger and get naked again, under the covers. I hear my mom murmur. The spell wasn’t broken.

I wake up my laptop and type ‘thunder rain for 10 hours.’ I turn it on, hoping to drown her out.

3

Sometimes, I think I’m her beautiful daughter, delivered to her as a son. I’m a rose as much as I am the thorns. I’m the crack in her concrete, while wishing for us to grow softer. It’s not easy when the spells have become ritual. The men that took this land scream at us to keep toiling. Even when they’re not in the home, they’re in the mortgage, the insulation spilling out the side of the house, the dandelion breaking out of the driveway. I’m so sorry I can’t quiet the voices down.

After my mother and father leave for work, I wake up to take my supplements. I take my estrogen and T-blockers. I don’t tell either of them what the spell has done. I just know we’re not allowed to fully celebrate. When I inevitably take off my screensaver, I’ll get a reminder. There’ll be something about Dwyane Wade’s daughter or Marlon Wayans’ non-binary child. The fight is not over, but I really wish we could rejoice.

4

Getting out of bed startles me. I’m not one for pants, so I wear long sweaters like dresses. I don’t twirl — dare I Marilyn Monroe someone, likely my adult siblings who still live here.

My brother didn’t go away to university like I did. He stayed home, learning to tie his durag to protect his hair. He became his own master chef in my mom’s kitchen. He’s partial to flavours and presentation in a way that’s poetic. I understand his scansion sometimes. Just eating his creations, I can hear his rhythm. The meter drags a bit before it snaps in place. Something about having hair on the verge of locs must make him lock in.

He’s changed — years from the violent threats to end it all in this house, he now creates. There’s laughter in his smile. He sneaks in jokes like students arriving late for class. He’s sly in a way that isn’t cunning. It’s taken him years to grow into softness. I can understand how hard it is when the soil is tough and Mom and Dad don’t notice. You can yell, you can scream, but you’re muted, like this sweater that’s not a dress. 

5

My sister sleeps forever — Sleeping Black Beauty. I can’t always feel it, but the air must be heavy. At times, even sulfurous. She tells me how she fights the covers. Their weight threatens to rob the day from her. When she’s able, she rises — still fogged up from something in our history.

I predicted this, but not like this/differently. I knew when she came to, it’d be hard. Twenty-one is not an easy age. Yes, you can legally drink all over North America, but sobering up to the harm of being Black and alive is hard. Injustice is the carpet and the rug is the burn. You stand on it knowing you’re going to get hurt. Still, you have to get up. You have to stand and walk when the air whispers in your ear to stay down. It’s not always a mom muttering in the night. Sometimes, it’s the echo after the silence that makes a sound.

 6

I don’t always want to disappear. It’s someone else’s thought — something they haven’t yet processed. It greets me like a visitor that I ask to go back to their home. My body should’ve never been a site for all this hosting. It rewinds me, loops me back, distorts me. I can’t just love; I have to crate-dig and discover. I look at the soiled records — bones and brownie-bite dirt. But there’s nothing edible about them. No curry. No oxtail gravy. No saltfish. Just a remnant of a body poking out of the sound.

Still, I feel heavy like a funeral — like grief is sitting himself down next to me. I don’t want him around, but he’s the only one coming until I save myself.

7

Romance is my life. After I dance and sweat with death, I meet with my friend for a workout. We spend anywhere between forty to ninety minutes with each other. She works out in an apartment that needs a love bigger than hers to sanctify it. I work out in a basement people in their thirties joke about living in.

We’re almost perfectly paired. I can offer her words of support from below the ground floor; she can offer me encouragement from just one floor up. There’s been so much love between us in simply showing up. Even when grief reaper visits her, she fights back—with every doctor visit, supplement, and email. She’s a star in a black briny night. My eyes reach up to float with her.

8

My dad is one spider eye short of understanding he’s a spider. He’s so gentle in his crawl down from his family tree. He prides himself on working hard since he was twelve — cleaning his mother and stepfather’s whole house to help them out. He won’t speak poorly about his stepfather’s cheating. It becomes a neutral bomb that explodes, but leaves no mark.

The unspeakable suffering of his sister under his stepfather’s care becomes a subtle mystery. Harm disappears into jackal-laughter the way someone uncomfortable being short of an eye laughs. It’s not all nothing, but the something is smoothed out. At the end of the day, it’s God who becomes the salvation and hero. God pulled him out. He found his wife, bought a house, had three kids, and found peace.

But what to do with the webs from his crawl? Surely, he must see how the network connects. Even when you knock out the middle of the web, it holds. Did he stop noticing the men who are telling us to work? Is the spell of the mortgage louder than the silence inside his threads?

9

Every day, I wake up in a bed without a partner. I spread like the sky changing from night to day, mouthguard still in. I relax my jaw slightly and open up to the possibility of swiping on one of these apps and finding someone. I can usually find someone and stay smiling for a couple days — sometimes even a few weeks — before it collapses again. The sparkly start and then the dwindle after.

Even the lightest parts of my fingerprints know this kind of darkness well. It matches my lips about to spread and smile before my eyes sink down. I’m reminded I’m full of water that wants to come out and baptise me. But sometimes, the water stings because I didn’t know I had micro cuts. They were the last of what made me in the two weeks I waited inside my mom. She had to wait till I was perfect for me to come out. I am two-weeks-late forever at thirty-six, but early enough to know that grief stays close.

10

Sometimes, the thought ‘I am a mistake’ comes out like a cicada. Even in the heat of the day, I don’t identify it as a mating call. It’s not one I can really answer with my body and presence. So I make melodies to fragmented beats — memories I can weave into.

I’ve made the choice to share myself with others regardless. My conscience releases me from the horror. In all the ways the men say ‘keep toiling,’ I keep digging.

Into the earth.

Into the shatter of my hopes and their glimmer.

Into the voice of my mother waking me up from slumber,

I dare to rise.

Again and again — rise.

The day must be met with a fervour as gentle and gut-wrenching as a baby’s cry.

Maybe my brother will cook something.

Maybe the smell will linger like a school crush’s whisper.

Maybe my sister will pull back the covers, ever stronger than any slumber that would want her.

Maybe my dad will find the eye that robs him of twenty/twenty vision.

Maybe they’ll see me fighting and draw arms with me.

The echo after silence doesn’t have to be so haunting.

It could be the signal that a new way of life is coming.

Grief is just here to make sure the old one doesn’t linger.

This essay is part of The Power Issue, published in November 2025.  You can purchase the Power Issue here.