Thirty Days

My parents died when I was fifteen.

Thirty days apart.

I still say it that way — flat, almost careful — because the sentence is heavy enough without decoration. First one. Then the other. A whole life rearranged in the space of a month. The house in Buziga that had held Friday stories and Valentine's fuss and locked doors and ceiling climbs suddenly had too much quiet in it.

Salma took it the hardest.

I don't say that to rank our grief. Grief doesn't work like that. I say it because it is true, and because she deserves to be seen in it. She was younger. She had fewer years of them to hold onto, and somehow that made every missing piece sharper. Where I went still and practical — the older-sister instinct kicking in whether I wanted it to or not — she broke open. Louder. Rawer. The sister who could turn a kitchen into precision and a joke into warfare suddenly had nowhere for the love to go.

People like to say children are resilient. Sometimes what they mean is that children keep walking. We kept walking. We ate. We slept in the wrong-shaped quiet. We learned which questions adults asked when they didn't know what else to say. We learned which ones we couldn't answer yet.

What I remember most is not only the losing. It is watching Salma lose them twice in thirty days — and realizing that the girl I used to argue with at breakfast was carrying something I could not lift for her, no matter how much I wanted to.

They loved each other like people who couldn't sleep on opposite sides of a door. In a way, that is the cruelest and most beautiful part: they left the world close together, the way they had lived in it. Thirty days. Almost still choosing each other.

I cook now with their hands somewhere in my hands — the patience, the warmth, the insistence that a table can still be a soft place. And when I think of Salma in those months, I think of a sister who loved them with her whole body, and had to learn, too young, what it costs to love that hard.

We are still different. We still are. Grief didn't make us the same. It made us honest about how much we needed each other.

Some stories on this site are about food. This one is about the reason the kitchen mattered after — because when the house went quiet, cooking was one of the few languages we still shared.