Dark and Daizi paused. "Goose, maybe you should go with."
"I think I better."
Since he went shopping with the twins anyway, he went ahead and picked up his prescription during that trip and the next day he went alone to visit with the owner of the Arab market, Khalil Al-Attar. Daizi had offered to go with him for support, but he said he preferred to talk between the two of them, and anyway, it's not like he was meeting a lost relative the way the twins had done, it was just the man who owned their favourite store. They went to a falafel place--not a chain, one of the small, unknown places where they yell the orders to the kitchen when they serve you, and they spoke for a long time. Not about the war, or what they had experienced, but about their families, and what they missed in Iraq. Dark lamented how he hadn't had a pomegranate as good as those he had in Iraq since he left, and Khalil talked about the Tigris. They both agreed how special it was to grow up along the banks of one of the most famous and most important rivers in the world. Civilization began there! The city was ancient, and you could feel it in the air. Cities in the United States didn't feel that way. Most of the Americans they met didn't know what old meant. Khalil did ask some questions about Dark's name, good naturedly and curiously, but didn't push it when Dark didn't answer.
The best part of all of it, was that Dark was able to speak Iraqi Arabic again, taking great pleasure in not being as rusty as he expected--which he attributed to Daizi, who had demanded to learn it, despite not having a use for it, and she would sometimes speak with him in it, although mostly they spoke Egyptian Arabic at home. It was close enough that it was comfortable to slide back into, but different enough that it brought some deep, forgotten level of comfort.
He was away for longer than he expected, but when he came home, he told everyone that it went well, thanked Daizi for setting it up, and then took some time by himself to reflect. He hadn't anticipated the feelings it would stir up in him. For all the hell he went through, he still didn't really blame the country, because the country was more than who led it. A dictator, war, and two individual abusers had harmed him, but the music, and the sand, and the food, and the people who brought him extras when they could--that was that he remembered. That was what he was proud of. But as much as he longed to return, with what he knew of his homeland from the news, he knew it was almost certainly better he had left, and he longed for his country to be how it ought to be. All of his love and frustration and regret were all too tangled together to separate, but he was glad to have, finally, spoken with someone else who had all of those same complicated feelings. It was... restorative, almost.
A few days later, it was the Fourth of July, and Dark decided to wear a white button-down shirt, leaving the top four buttons undone, as he often did, although this time he let a peak of a red undershirt show, and he wore dark green pants, and a black belt. As promised, he dressed Ivy in her watermelon bathing suit. Daizi sidestepped it altogether and put on light purple chiffon fairy pants with a matching crop top with a flowing coverup decorated with a large sun. When Cooger arrived, he arrived in red, white, and blue, because it was the best day of the year to be over the top about it.
