The Diary I Kept Through Thirty Days of Fasting
Hunger wrote the first entries; something quieter wrote the last.
On the first page of the diary I wrote one word, underlined twice: bread. My mother had been dead for eleven days, Ramadan started at dawn, and I, who had not fasted since I was nineteen, had decided to keep her month for her.
I should explain the diary. I couldn't pray. I had forgotten how... or more honestly, I had forgotten how to mean it, and my mother could always tell the difference, even from wherever she was now. But I have kept notebooks all my life.
Writing is the only kneeling I still knew how to do.
So I made a deal with the month: I would fast all thirty days, and every night after the fast broke I would write one honest page. No performance. Nobody would ever read it.
Day one, as established: bread. Also, in the margins, an itemized list of everything I would eat at sunset, revised four times before noon.
Day two: a full paragraph about the smell of my neighbor's toast coming through the wall at 7 a.m., written with the intensity most people reserve for love letters.
Day three was the caffeine headache. Anyone who has fasted knows day three. The entry is two lines long and one of them is profanity.
I want to be honest about my motives, because the diary forced me to be.
I was not fasting out of faith. I was fasting out of arithmetic.
My mother had kept every Ramadan for sixty-one years. She died in March, three weeks short of the month, and the incompleteness of that offended me on her behalf. Sixty-two, I kept thinking... She was supposed to get to sixty-two. So I would do the sixty-second for her, the way you might return a library book for someone who can't.
The first week of entries reads like a hostage negotiation. Hunger is a loud tenant. It stomps around the upstairs of you all day, it complains, it slams the cupboards of your attention every few minutes.
I wrote about food with an obsessiveness that embarrasses me now: the exact chemistry of my aunt's fried lentils, the specific cold of watermelon, the way a date tastes at sunset after seventeen hours, which is not like sugar... but like being forgiven.
Week two, the entries changed without my permission.
The hunger was still there, but it had gone from a fire alarm to a clock ticking, and in the space it vacated, other things started walking in.
Day nine is entirely about a fight my mother and I had in 2016 that I had never written down and apparently never digested. Day eleven is about her hands. Day thirteen, I recorded a whole phone conversation with my aunt, who told me that when my mother was a girl she used to break her fast secretly at noon and my grandmother pretended not to see, and that she only grew into the fasting later, in her twenties, after her first grief. "The month is a container," my aunt said. "You put in it whatever you're carrying that year." I wrote that down word for word and stared at it.
I had assumed devotion was a talent, something you either had, like her, or lacked, like me. It had not occurred to me that she had learned it, clumsily, the way I learn everything.
Hunger is loud for two weeks, and then it hands you the microphone.
Week three is where the diary stops being about food at all. The entries get shorter and stranger. Day seventeen says only: "Quiet has a texture. Today it was wool." Day nineteen: "Caught myself talking to her at the sink. Didn't stop." I was sleeping better than I had in years, which made no medical sense. My body had gone quiet the way a house goes quiet, not empty, just listening.
On day twenty-three, something happened that I am still slightly embarrassed by. I sat down to write my page and what came out had line breaks. I had not written a poem since school, and I did not exactly write this one either; it was more that the sentence about her hands kept refusing to reach the right-hand margin. It was eleven lines about my mother salting a pot of soup with her eyes closed, tasting nothing, knowing by weight. It was not good. It was true, which that month felt like the superior category.
Weeks later, on a brave night, I typed it up and posted it on a community wall for poets, where a stranger commented that her own mother salted blind too, and I sat with my phone in the dark feeling like two lit windows on the same street.
I mention this because the diary taught me something about grief that no one had managed to say to my face: you cannot write about it directly at first. For twenty-two days I wrote around her, about toast and headaches and watermelon, and the writing-around was not avoidance, it was approach. It was the long spiral a bird makes before it lands. I have since read a lot of what other people wrote about grief, and the honest ones all spiral like that. The poems that walk straight up to the coffin are usually lying.
Then day twenty-seven.
This is the entry I did not expect and the reason I am telling you any of this. Going through her cupboard for Eid preparations, inside her folded prayer things, I found a notebook. Small, swollen with age, rubber band around it. Her handwriting, year after year, one page per Ramadan, going back four decades. Most of it is startlingly mundane: grocery lists, who came to dinner, a note to buy more dates because my father ate them like a criminal. But at the bottom of each year's page, set apart, one line. Just one. Different every year.
1994: "Kept all thirty. The baby kicked at every sunset, my little clock." That baby was me.
2009, the year my father died: "Kept twenty-eight. He would have teased me about the two."
Last year, her final line, the sixty-first: "Kept all thirty. Tired now. The quiet is very good this year, like He is sitting closer."
She had been keeping the same diary I was keeping.
Her whole life... One honest line a year, and I had known nothing about it.
Devotion, it turns out, is not a talent or even a feeling. It is a record.
It is showing up to the page at the appointed hour whether or not anything comes, which is also, I understand now, an exact description of writing, and I do wonder if that is why hers lasted and mine, both kinds, kept lapsing. There is a whole page on memory I keep returning to since that month, because I no longer trust my memories of her and I trust her one-line ledger completely.
The last morning of the fast, Eid, the house filled with my aunt's cooking and other people's children. That night I sat down with my diary to write the final entry. Thirty pages of hunger, spirals, one bad true poem.
I thought for a long time about what to say... and then I stopped thinking, because I finally understood the form. One line. Set apart at the bottom of the page.
"Kept all thirty. Sixty-two, Ma. The quiet is very good this year."
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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