The Sunlight

Our kitchen is wide and green and full of light. The air that fills it in the mornings is sun-color and sometimes I can almost enclose it in my palms, or at least run my hand around it and caress it. It feels so smooth that I can almost swallow it and feel it go down my throat and into my chest, warming and healing everything on the way.

Sometimes I sit there and stare out of the window absentmindedly, while the plants need watering and the dishes need washing. Sometimes I can almost hear them looking at me with a frown on their faces and whispering about me. But then they see my mom and a new hope glitters on their faces. They wait all day for the love. The peace lilies, rattlesnake plants, the plant that blooms an orange lily every year, the lavender, flowers I don’t even know the names of. The aloe vera plants, the leaves of which my mom used to squeeze and drip the juice in my nose as an anti-flu treatment when I was little. On the floor, the groups of little trees – pines, two avocado trees that she is so proud of. They told her avocado trees would never grow in Armenia. The climate was just wrong. But she planted them anyways, took care of them as they grew, and now even hopes for avocados one day. People tell her she’s being unrealistic, but then again, those are the same people that told her the trees would never grow. 

Once, when she was watering the trees and talking to them, I randomly asked her what she was planning to do with them once they grew into their full size. She chose to ignore the question, smiled to her plants, and began patting their leaves. 

“Our house is gonna look like a jungle, you know,” I said, “We can’t have people getting lost in our living room, trying to feel their way through.”

“That’s okay,” she replied, still patting her plants, like a mother to her baby. 

So that’s what the plants do all day; they just sit there, just being loved by the sunlight and growing. Why else would they grow if they didn’t feel the love on their skin? Even the thorny plant sitting separately from the rest. I hadn’t even noticed it there until one time, as I was dusting the windowsill, it pricked my finger. I jerked back and looked at it for the first time. It had thick branches that curved in every direction and had nothing but thick ugly thorns on every inch. 

“Why on earth would you buy this thing?” I asked my mom, annoyed. She stopped dusting the top of the fireplace and looked at me absentmindedly. 

“It’s called ‘the crown of thorns,’” she said. “That’s what they put on Jesus’ head when he was on the cross.” 

She went back to dusting the fireplace. I looked at the plant again and I could have almost cried. Months later, I began to notice tiny pinkish red flowers growing on its ends.


Our kitchen is not my favorite place in the world, but it’s where I always end up at. I sit there, at the table, doing homework or writing or watching YouTube videos that suddenly became so urgent, while my mom and Rosie hang out, cook. I would explain to you who Rosie is if I could. She is my mom’s best friend. She is practically my aunt, but not quite. She’s like my friend, but not quite. Rosie is just Rosie – her own category. We sit around the kitchen table in the evenings, while Rosie watches the news and my mom tries to concentrate on writing her blog-post.

“How can you listen to that all day?” my mom asks once in a while with a distasteful look. “It’s not even pleasant. Don’t we have enough problems in our own life, we need to go looking for the problems of the world?” Rosie usually just raises her eyebrows like a cat, without taking her eyes off of the screen, and continues watching. Once or twice she may have said that she needs to be informed about what’s going on in the world, but mostly she doesn’t bother trying to explain it to a woman who only watches period dramas with happy endings. 

“At least turn the volume down,” my mom relents. Rosie waits a few seconds before slowly moving her arm towards the phone and taking the volume down one click at a time. That way, it was by her own free will that she did that. 

My mom then turns to me and smiles, and then she turns to the table and the smile leaves her face. She sighs at the mess. But it’s not a mess; simply “categories,” I try to joke about it. Our table has categories. There’s the computers-books-pens-papers-cables section that somehow always ends up being there, despite my mom’s attempts to get me and Rosie to be more organized. Sometimes she runs out of patience, scoops everything up, piles them in the appropriate pair of arms, and sends them off to where they belong. Sometimes the pile is so unconquerable that, at the end of the day, she sighs to herself, says, “Our table has categories,” and walks away.

Sometimes we have the “hair salon” category. I can’t bring myself to do my hair in the bathroom or even in front of the hallway mirror, when I know that my mom and Rosie are in the kitchen, drinking coffee and tea respectively. I end up doing my hair while talking to them as they have their breakfast.

“Rosie,” I say. “You know, I had a prophesy last night.”

She looks up with an annoyed, but secretly amused look. This isn’t the first time she’s hearing one of my prophesies. “Yeah?” she says.

“Yup. Apparently you have to go somewhere at around 12:30. I don’t know exactly where, to tell you the truth, but you were going to pass by my university, so I thought you might as well drop me off. Feed two birds with one seed.”

My mom starts laughing.

“Mhm, sure,” Rosie says and sips her tea.

“Rosie,” I say. “You know what else? I know what you are thinking right now.”

“I’m sure you do,” she says.

“Yes. I know you really want to comb my hair, but you’re too shy to ask.”

“You wish,” she replies dryly.

My mom laughs even louder and pats Rosie’s shoulder. “Rosie is our joy,” she says. Then she turns to me and has a resigning smile on her face. “Give me the comb,” she says and takes it from my hand. 

We pull the chair close to the window and I sit sideways on it, feeling the sunlight on my back, and I close my eyes as the comb runs through my hair and the sun pats the places it might have hurt. Having my hair brushed is one of the pleasures in life I will never grow out of.

Afterwards, of course, the hairbrush and hairbands and every other hair-thing remains on the kitchen table, because I am late. I have to run out. I’ll put everything back in its place when I return – so I promise my mom. But, of course, that never happens.

The last category on our table is rather normal and expected – the food category. But it is full of things that should have been put back into the fridge, but never made it that far. The cheese starts turning yellow, the milk starts smelling bad, the bread starts drying up. I can almost hear them whispering through gritted teeth about me, that girl who takes them out but never puts them back in. But then they see my mom and sigh in relief. She saves them, just as she saves the plants (even the ones in my own room) when they need water.

Once, she left me alone with them for a week. I did water them, I promise, but they withered and dried up all the same. I didn’t even notice as day by day, the leaves of the avocado trees turned brown and began falling. I was told to water them and that’s what I did. I didn’t even realize I hadn’t been really looking at them until one day, as I was talking to my mom on the phone, she asked me how the plants were. I proudly reported that I had been watering them as often as she had instructed me to. I glanced at them and for the first time I noticed that the tallest avocado tree was almost naked. 

“Oh no,” I said. 

“What?” my mom asked, worried. 

“One of the avocado trees has lost all its leaves. But I swear, I’ve been watering them.” 

I didn’t know what I had been doing wrong. I guess they just missed her. They missed their sunlight. As did I.