The park is in full bloom, smelling like flowers, fresh grass, and wet earth. Smelling of spring, and awakening, and hope. I’m squatting in the grass that’s already as tall as I am, pushing my flimsy paper boat with a stick down the narrow irrigation stream. The boat bobs and struggles against the rocks in the shallow stream, and I consider whether adding a sail would help the situation. I eye the leaves on the trees around me appraisingly, but it’s still early enough in the spring that the leaves aren’t quite sail-worthy yet. But the shock of purple lilac catches my eye, so I abandon the boat to its fate and head over to investigate. The flowers smell sweet and intoxicating. I bury by face in them to take it all in. And even at 7 years old the scent feels nostalgic of 7 previous springs. I examine the tiny purple flowers – finding a five-petaled bloom is good luck and makes you wishes come true. I look for one wishing for money for a lollipop – a wish that feels aspirational at the time, so when a find a flower with five tiny petals, I eat it for good measure, so as not to squander the good luck away. And the smell of the lilac is then forever imprinted in my memory, taking me back to that spring, and that park, and that paper boat in the stream.
The trees around me seem immense. At 7 years old, the world is boundlessly large, and adulthood impossibly far away. I wish it would hurry up though, particularly since mom said I could eat ice cream whenever I please when I’m an adult, but until then I will have to wait until school gets out in June. And June feels just as far away as adulthood.
I pop my head out from behind the lilac buh and examine the group of older men on the benches. Two of them are hunched over a chess board, frowning, and a small group surrounds them: some watching intently and shaking their heads, some eating sunflower seeds and enjoying the first warm spring evening in a while, most of them giving advice. One of the men at the board is my father – he’s staring at the chess pieces fiercely, his thought process imprinting in the creases on his forehead. He makes a move with one of the pieces jerkily, presses the button on top of the clock, and looks at his opponent expectantly. Is he winning or losing? I try to read the weather. Is he happy or sad? Because on this depends the success of my mission of asking him for money for a lollipop. Will he bark no, or will his anticipation of a win result in magnanimity?
I’m not allowed lollipops from street vendors. Mom doesn’t trust that they are particularly hygienic – prepared in someone’s kitchen and unwrapped as they are. Mom threatens me with salmonella and dysentery and all the GI illnesses under the sun. But these lollipops are all I can think about when I see them being hawked at the park – bright red so that you can’t miss them, dripping with syrup, and shaped like roosters – they are even called “shaqar aqlor,” sugar roosters, in Armenian. And if I time my ask just right, I know I can shake down dad for the kopecks I need to buy this treasure. (I will do this more as I get older – read the weather patterns of my dad’s moods, and look for the signs of spring. I will do this again years later, as a professional, negotiating multimillion dollar deals as a part of my job – contemplate the proverbial lollipop and whether it might be the right time to ask for it.)
I’m thirteen. I sit in a cloud of lilac scent, trying to concentrate on homework, but my mind wanders, pulled towards the sunshine outside my window. Every spring my heart fills to bursting, but with what – I do not know. I imagine that it’s with lilacs. A knock on the door interrupts my reverie, but I don’t think twice about it – it literally could be anyone: people selling village yogurt or brooms, people begging for money and collecting funds for rubbish removal. But the man on the other side of the door is none of those things. He’s small and gray and agitated. He’s trailed by a lost-looking girl about my age with bewildered eyes. And he’s looking for my dad. I remember the pitch of his voice and how it cracked when he started yelling. And my heart, full as it was with lilacs, shattered to pieces. But his words… they are gone, wiped clean by time and pain and the mercy my memory has decided to take on me. Now I’m just left with a dull ache where a stab wound once was. The man’s words are gone, but I remember my mom’s face as she walks out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel. I remember the little girl and her wide eyes (our paths would cross again when many years later I find out that she had dated my fiancé at the time). I remember wanting to be anywhere but there, wanting to get away from my mom’s tears, from the smell of the lilacs, from this man, looking for his wife. And for my dad.
It’s another bright spring day full of sunshine and birdsong and unexplained heartache and longing. I cut class by hopping out of a second story window in the back of the school so as not to get caught – I promised to meet a boy in the park. When I get there, he’s already waiting, on the very same benches that my dad used to play chess on all these years ago. I kiss him how only fifteen year olds know how to kiss – as if your entire life depends on it, because at fifteen, you think that it does. I kiss him to the consternation of the grannies who are eating sunflower seeds on the bench across from us. When our lips meet, I smell lilacs. But the solid reality of his lips on mine transports me to a place where the pieces of my heart don’t ache like a phantom limb. He stands and pulls me by the hand onto the grass, towards the lilacs and away from the prying eyes of the grannies. We fall into the grass laughing – we’re fifteen, and it’s spring – what else does one need for unbounded joy? Our lips meet, and the ache mutes. When we come up for air (has it been minutes, hours, days?), he asks me if I want anything. “Ice cream,” I say, “I wasn’t allowed to have any until school got out for the summer when I was a kid.” He laughs, “well, you’re not a kid now,” and heads to get us ice cream. I sit in the grass, hugging my knees to my chest, watching the narrow irrigation stream, waiting for the boy whose kisses dull my heartache, enveloped in the scent of lilacs. And it smells of spring, of awakening and hope.
Packing List for Immigration 