A Journey Through Heritage, Intimacy, and Memory in a Changing World

It starts with my grandmother’s voice

Her voice was raspy, like footsteps brushing over sun-baked earth. “Dem,” she’d say, tapping the edge of her tea glass with her long, thin nail, a sound I still hear, clear as a memory. “Time was God's first gift, and we were foolish enough to think it would stay.”

The way she spoke, time was not an idea. It was a presence, sacred and alive. Real as breath. Real as water. You had to hold it with both hands, or it would slip through your fingers and be gone.

She would sit in the old chair tucked into the corner of our Bielefeld apartment on Ziegelstrasse, where the Stra?enbahn rumbled past every few minutes, shaking the kitchen windows. The chair’s arms were worn smooth, the fabric soft from decades of resting hands and folded scarves. “In the mountains,” she’d say, her voice sure, “we had time for people. Do you know what that means?”

I didn’t know then. I was a child who measured time by how long Omi’s tea took to cool or how many cartoons I could squeeze in before bed. I knew Ziegelstrasse better than I knew her stories—its cracked pavement, the low walls we leapt from, the Stra?enbahn stops where we played tag until someone shouted, “Ez tu got?!”—I got you.

She’d ask me again, leaning forward slightly, her eyes holding mine. “Do you know what it means?”

I shook my head, but her answer came like an old prayer. “It means we sat close. We told stories face to face. We laughed into the fire until the wood turned to ash.”

Time and Attention

Omi’s stories always began in rooms crowded with voices—women sitting knee to knee, their scarves heavy with the dust of fields, their hands rolling prayer beads. Men sat further off, speaking in low, rolling tones that made you want to lean in, to listen.

“One word. One pause. A breath held between words could change everything,” she’d tell me. “We didn’t listen to answer. We listened to keep the stories alive.”

In Bielefeld, the living was different. My father’s shifts blurred days into nights, and the glow of the TV became our household fire. The streets outside—Ziegelstrasse, lined with its boxy apartment blocks and small squares of grass—were my kingdom. My friends and I hid behind parked cars, yelling, “Min dihat!”—“I’m here!”—until laughter folded us over.

Inside, though, we had stopped looking at each other. The clinking of spoons against plates was the only sound left in the room.

When I see families now—on buses, in cafés, their heads bent over glowing screens—I hear Omi’s voice again:

“To look at someone is to give them your life for a moment.”

We are losing those moments. Her words filled me with heyran?, that deep Yazidi wonder we hold for things we don’t quite understand. I wonder if we even notice how quickly those moments slip away, like water running through open hands.

Trust and Action

My grandfather, Bap?, did not tell stories like Omi. His words were carved into his actions.

One winter, when I slipped on the ice and scraped my knee raw, I sat on the pavement, tears swelling as the cold bit into my skin. I walked home slowly, limping, ashamed.

Bap? was waiting at the door. He didn’t ask where I’d been or why I had fallen. He bent down slowly—his knees cracked like dry wood—and placed his warm, rough hands over my bleeding knee. “êde derd e. Ez bi?e,” he said softly. “It will pass.”

Later, Omi explained. “That is trust,” she said. “Two hands on a wound. The belief it will heal. Showing your pain and knowing someone will not look away.”

Today, pain lives in captions, flattened into polished images for others to consume. If Omi saw this, she would lower her scarf over her face and shake her head. “Not everything is for strangers’ eyes,” she’d whisper. “Some moments are only for God, for the walls of a room, for the breath between two people.”

Presence and Embodiment

When I was fourteen, I begged Omi for a cordless phone. “Why?” she asked, her head tilting just slightly. “What can you say that cannot wait until your feet are under you and your eyes can look into theirs?”

Presence, to her, was life—sure, quiet, and full. She wanted both my hands and my head to be here, not somewhere else.

Sometimes, now, I sit across from people who stare at their screens while speaking. I remember the way her finger tapped her teacup, her voice calling me back.

“Where are your hands? Where is your head?”

She meant not just to be here, but to be fully here.

What We Risk Losing

“The fire,” Omi told me once, “was not just for warmth. It was for stories.”

She spoke of nights in the village when they cooked rice in pots as wide as bathtubs. “We danced barefoot until our feet hurt. We forgave what needed forgiving. By the end, we were closer than when we came.”

Her voice was stern when she warned me: “Some things lose their taste when shown to too many eyes.”

Now, weddings are live-streamed for strangers. Birthday dinners are trophies for others to see. I think of her words often.

I sit at my dinner table, hands on a keyboard instead of a fork, words spilling onto a screen instead of being spoken into the air. Outside the window, the Stra?enbahn rolls by—unchanging as ever—but inside, something feels hollow.

“A house without stories,” Omi said, “is a grave where the people still breathe.”

We are breathing, yes. But are we living?

Reclaiming Intimacy

Sometimes, I try to live the way Omi taught me. I put my phone away and look into the faces of people I love. I listen—not to reply, but to hold their words like a fragile glass.

I keep small things unshared: the sound of a friend’s laughter, a quiet meal, the softness of my dog’s fur, the leash in my hand on rojê têr?n—a sunset walk—with those I love.

When I sit still enough, I feel her near me—the weight of her cardigan across my shoulders, her voice sure as stone:

“Life is a borrowed story. Hold it carefully, or it will disappear.”

So I light small fires in my life. I sit close, knees touching knees, and share stories that may outlive me.

Because this is how we stay alive. This is how we rise.

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