This is not about you.
Which means it is not about the Middle West,
or about sonorous suburban nights,
or about that girl who left and who you still dream about,
the one who comes in the night like a phantom
and who insists she does not miss you.

This is not about that.
This is about war.

Or, it is about what comes after war. What survives.
And what survives is beauty.
To be precise:
A beautiful woman.
Her neck almost impossibly long,
her face lean and slender,
her hair like a chaff of Nebraska wheat.

She is what survives.
And what does she survive to do?
She survives to tell us about the war, but not really.
She’ll tell us that she could recognize the sounds of the weapons
as they sailed over her home.
That she knew when one of the armies was newly stocked,
Because the sound was different.
But she doesn’t want to talk about the war.
Because everyone asks about the war.
And she is not the war.
She is a young woman, beautiful, with jocund eyes
that are the opposite of haunted.
She laughs when we laugh. She smiles at you
when you read from your novel of minor heartbreak.

She is not here to talk about the war.
She is here to sing.
It is a song,
she tells us,
about heartbreak.
A song about a woman whose lover has left her.
But for some reason, it makes her happy.
When the shellings were really bad,
my sister and I would sing this. And we would feel happy.
(Amazing how when the context is war,
you don’t want to ask her
what she means by the word “happy.”
How foolish such a question would be.
How obvious the answer.)

So she sings.
She sings in Arabic.
Her voice is good but not great;
she can’t quite reach the highest notes.
But it doesn’t matter.
We are all riveted and smitten,
all of us processing it in our small, selfish ways.
Being reminded of our own petty lives, our own losses -
the man over there thinks of his father,
the girl behind you thinks about her first boyfriend.
And you think about those who did not survive.
You think about the songs they might have sung.
The lovers they might have kept.
The laughter they missed, the heartbreak, the devastation,
the messy, glorious shit of living, of living instead of not living.

It’s beautiful.
That's all I can say.
It is beautiful.
And I wish you could have seen it.
I wish you could have heard her voice.
Because it’s not about you.
It’s about war.
But it’s not really even about war.
Really, it’s about hope.
It’s about living instead of not living.