Away on Avatar Duties
Tell me how long it will take to unwind you from my memories. What pieces of you will be left for me to stitch back together. On the deathbed you retained your boyish glow, that youthful smirk that greeted me decades and decades ago. When you found me in that loneliness, that pitch white loneliness with my tribe suffering, did you know our tundra would welcome you? Little orange blemish on a blank canvas, as powerful and present as the sun and stars.
Did you know you would alter our lives forever just by waking up, and now change our lives again by falling asleep?
This is the longing that will undo me. This is the threat that unties us at the seams - our separation finally - I always thought with my fatty diet, my birthing three kids, my hypertension and bad temper - I always thought I would beat you to the spirit world. We had our scares. When Bumi broke both legs on one of his missions, a full grown man in his thirties restricted to a bed day and night for months. I lost my mind worrying if he would walk again, cringing every time he swung his broken limbs from the bed like there was nothing wrong with him at all, gripping his crutches until his knuckles were white as stone, insisting, "It's fine, Ma. If Tenzin was in this mess you wouldn't worry about him this much. Would you." An accusation. Never any questions from Bumi, who knew it all.
But Tenzin was your baby, your prodigy, and I never worried about Tenzin because you did that enough.
When Kya came back pregnant from her travels, mid-twenties and single, stubborn. Wild. Her spirit was your spirit embodied, head in the clouds. She filled up so fast and even when I suggested she contact the child's father she looked at me with anger and intent. Those mornings she spent doubled over near the water basin coughing up last night's stewed prunes, her face tinged green, she would shake her head over and over. Once she broke out with a laugh that filled her eyes with water. "You did this three times, Ma? Bless your soul. Spirits, bless you." The baby died. Before its small wax skeleton ever coagulated and joined. Just after its heart began to beat, it stopped beating.
Gran-Gran and Pakku succumbing, one after the other, as cleanly as dominoes, to old age. At their respective burials the kids wouldn't sit still. When Kya approached the open casket of her great-grandmother, she was stunned silent for a week, unable to speak, and when you told her, "Darling, you have to talk to us. Tell us what's wrong," she answered through gulping sobs, "She looked like Mama! She looked like Mama!"
In those instances that death would touch our family, it always touched with little baby fingers, little tendrils that struck at our hearts but never enough to bring us to our knees. Once Kya was born, and with Tenzin still inside, we couldn't travel the way we used to. I lost my stomach on Appa, no longer careless and slim and fourteen - and you were worried, too. "Pregnant women do not belong on flying bison!" No one could argue that your logic lacked reason. Pregnant women belong safely on the ground. I was forced to disclose to hopeful visitors that you were away at meetings, drafting laws, important Avatar business. And in the face of your absences I longed for you, thought of you, hoped for your safe return.
Sokka, for our tenth anniversary, made us a wooden sign to hang on the bedroom door when we did not want to be bothered by the kids. Away on Avatar Duties.
The house is empty now; though I often complained that it was too small when the kids were young and would sprint room from room, hopping on the couches, the coffee tables. Bending battles between Kya and Tenzin and Bumi's defensive physical rebuttals left me spent and flustered with the lack of space. Every house we moved in to was too small and everything was always growing, growing. Even when Kya and Bumi moved away, and when Tenzin married and traveled to the city, the house was too small. I was occupied with where they would stay when they returned, where their own children would sleep, and a million other details that never came to fruition.
Without you here to listen to my whining and tease me, the house, at last, is so vast I could get lost in it. Every room is a universe of space. Our bed especially feels as though it has tripled in size.
Kya arrived yesterday to heal me from you, this wound that scarred, this tumor that cannot be cut out without compromising my structure, this internal deformity. She is smart, sharp and quick like you. With the wanderlust finally rubbed out of her eyes she looks tame and worn. She makes lukewarm tea and dry scones for me in the morning amid apologies that she is no cook (not that she ever had any interest to learn) and that the expectation that cooking should come naturally to women is a sexist notion too many of her previous lovers bore (not that I had any interest to hear of them). In the soft yellow light of morning, I make out the lines indenting her eyes, her mouth, and see you there. Besides her caramel skin and her waterbending, Kya is saturated with you - your ideals, the bridge of your nose, your upper lip - even her hands have the rough, square outline of a young man. It startles me to think that outside of the nine months I carried her, this girl is not mine, nor was she ever.
Her boyish fingers reach for mine and she squeezes. "Hey. Ma? You know the shop vendor thought I was you this morning." She smiles, the space between her canine and back teeth endearing her to me. That premolar, that one tooth that never grew in. The missing bone tormenting an impatient little girl with its absence. She used to check for it every morning in the chipped bathroom mirror, standing on Bumi's back and prying her mouth open with her thumbs. "I was getting some vegetables for dinner tonight and he called me Miss Katara by accident. You remember the old guy? Lee or Dee or something."
"Vegetables? That is a surprise."
"What do you think?" she wants to know. "I look a lot like you, especially now that I'm trudging up that hill..."
She makes the decision to stay - a few days only, she says - but at night, over dinner, I notice the way she serves me, how she kicks off her moccasins to relax on the couch. Even her decision to sleep next to me in our bed. These are the small ways that she tells me she'll be around for months and months. These are the ways she sacrifices her freedoms without blaming your absence, your death, and my abandonment.
The wooden plaque Sokka made for us so long ago has been missing for years, not that I ever bothered to look for it. The vastness of the house muffles my voice, my activities. I stay in the kitchen and my bedroom. When it is warm I watch the city from my balcony and imagine us when we first started our lives, a young couple with Bumi on the way. But yesterday, visiting the temple where we've honored your ashes, I saw Kya shining the plaque with her elbow in the far corner. She turned to me with a shy smirk. That naughtiness. Your face. On the urn that holds you, my only, my forever, my sweet airbender, is a crude carving now: Away on Avatar Duties