The Phoenix's Rocks | By Syahna Maryam, 19

Grief is powerful beyond belief. I have spent sixteen years thinking of my mother as a ghostless figure, nostalgic for a memory I can’t remember. She passed away when I was 3. She had me and what she was shaking hands with: cervical cancer. Levitating through the darkest of times, I figured that I have never really thought about her, or sitting in front of our display of her photos and take a moment of remembering. I think everything about her is the question of the ages.

You are not an Indonesian descendant if you haven’t heard of Malin Kundang. Malin is a young man raised by his single mother. He grows up being a successful skipper of a nobility class. However, he forget about where he comes from, and inevitably his mother. She thunderously curses him into a rock; a road-block to the boats working under his supervision, delivering golds. It is like a Phoenix’s death as it burns to ashes, and only a mother’s tear can tender the magic of love.

Now that I grow up without any slight view of a mother figure, I have a fear that lingers: What if a spot in my heart hardens like a rock as the time goes by?

My name is Syahna. It is a thoughtfully given name by my mother. If you travel through Arhamaic beginnings, it means The Deep Sea. It also means Freedom in Navajo, Beautiful in Yiddish, and The Celestial Red Rose in Mongolia. I have, or had, not spoken any conversation I remember with her. I couldn’t speak a single language when she was there. She was not my home. This name I obtain was the only inheritance at one point. Years pass, and I’ve only known her from stories. I own an unique relationship with my mother where things escalate from different perspectives and I always have had to ponder which is true and which is not.

I suppose it’s different when you have deceased parents, because people are always going to tell you that you can keep them in your heart. In memories, where they are supposed to be. You won’t understand what it means, and you will live inside the fear of entirely losing them if you go against what you know about them. My aunts told me I was walking around the cemetery, telling my relatives that my mother was only asleep when she was buried, and the fundamental knowledge of death I gained as I turned older thrilled me to my spines.

She’s left dozens of clothes for me and my two older sisters to wear. Her coats are always too tight for my shoulders, her dresses are awkward tablecloths with my height, her hair claws hurt my waves. It is none of her knitted blanket warms me. In the cold, my skin burns, be one with the thin air; of Phoenix’s ashes, ill of a broken heart.

Our family has been planting some jasmine trees on the soil in where she is now buried. It is blossoming as of today, along with the coldness of the rain. Probably it’s her rejuvenating as she finally filtrates within me. Maybe the ash of the thin air, the tears of a Phoenix, have awaken her in ways that I need to bolden my skin, fiery in turmoil, through the cold atmosphere of people and fond memories.

Her grave used so hilly when I was much younger. Now, I only need a ten-minute walk. As it is steep, there are many rocks in the way. I look at them, and think, what if they are a collection of deaths that Phoenix encounters, and hardens by fond memories?​