Street View

Winner of the 2022 “Annie Dillard Award” in Nonfiction

In 1995, Byron Kim, a Brooklyn based contemporary artist, attempted to paint his childhood home when he realized he could not recall its exact color. He knew it was pink, but he couldn’t remember if the house was the color of a tongue or the pale pink that rimmed an eye. Was it the color of blood, dimmed by water, circling a drain, or the color of the sky at sunset in certain cities, on certain nights, red wavelengths surviving the expanse of the atmosphere? The house itself, a split-level, single family home in a New England suburb, long since painted over green, could provide no answers.

“What color was the pink house on Wallingford?” he asks his sister and parents after collecting over 200 paint samples from a hardware store. They peruse the paint chips. No one chooses the same shade of pink. He paints all their selections in large stripes across a 96×48 inch canvas and names the work 46 Halsey Drive, Wallingford, CT 06492.

What color was the pink house on Wallingford, the house in which past versions of Byron Kim and his family once walked from room to room, the house with the kitchen where, I imagine, a past version of his mother once stood at the foot of the stove at the end of a long day making dinner, the smell summoning her husband and children to the table, the house with the shingled roof under which they once slept, some nights for many uninterrupted hours, some nights after being jostled awake by a bad dream, turning over in bed and waking again in the morning with no memory of the nightmare, only its residue clinging like a child to the coming day.

It is 2007 in the house on Rondos Drive and all its inhabitants are alive. It’s a sunny day in September. The leaves of the maple tree in the front yard are tinged by the season. A crown of red and orange circle the root. There is a white van in the driveway that my parents pooled years of savings to buy. My dad takes the car to work during the day. In the evenings it is used to shuffle my siblings and I from soccer practice to Quran class, to haul groceries from the shelves of Winco to the front door where we line up to bring them into the house, stocking the fridge and pantry. We have lived in this house for five years, its mortgage is another mouth to feed, but it is the first thing in this country that my parents own, even if that ownership is, like most things in the United States, conditional.

I am 15 years old and almost as tall as my mother. She is a student, determined to finish her Bachelor’s degree. She takes one class at a time over a span of ten years, studying in the evenings while we are sleeping, holding textbooks over the stove while she cooks, scrambling to complete homework assignments on time while a baby wails.
The youngest of us is only 4. He was a c-section baby after four natural births. My mother takes evening classes while I play house in the hours between her departure for class and my father’s return from work.

Depending on what time the photograph was taken, now immortalized on Google Maps, we could be doing any number of things. If it is a weekend morning, my siblings and I might be sitting on the couch, our small bodies pressed against each other, watching cartoons. My mother might be in the office studying. There are dishes in the sink. My father might be at the grocery store;

If it is a weekday morning, my siblings and I are at school. My father hasn’t left for work yet. He could be standing over the kitchen island with a cup of coffee. The baby might be asleep. Or perhaps he is awake and strapped into his highchair and my mother, tired-eyed, is coaxing him to eat. Or perhaps he is still asleep and she is lapping the silence;

Perhaps it is not a day like any other and we stumble out of our routines. Maybe we are all together. Maybe we are laughing at a joke someone made. Maybe we are busy getting dressed to go to the beach, to wade in the brisk waters of the Pacific. We will pack into the van, fight about who has to sit in the backseat. We’ll play games during the ninety-minute drive, we’ll lob insults back and forth. Someone will be hungry. My mother will peel oranges in the front seat and then pass them back to us. The smell of citrus will tickle my nose. When we get to the beach my father will stand at the shore to supervise us. He’ll yell at us if we wade too deep. My mother will be sitting on a blanket in the sand, her pants rolled up mid-calf, a pair of enormous sunglasses obscuring her face. Ayan and I will sit in the water and hold still as the waves break against our small bodies, diluted by the time they reach us. There will be sand in our hair that our mother will painstakingly brush later
that evening. On the drive home our father will sing along to whatever is on the radio. Everyone will fall asleep except me. I’ll stare out the window and marvel at how the moon trails us until we pull into the driveway and my father says alhamdulillah, thanking God for the blessing of our safe passage;

Perhaps we experience a day like any other, uneventful as most days are, and the only miracles that happen are the ordinary ones. They are no less precious or fragile. Our chests rise and fall. Oxygen becomes carbon dioxide. Our hearts clench and unclench. The sun rises. We wake up. The sun sets. We go to sleep. Ayan and I share a bed. Sometimes we dream. Sometimes we do not.

It is 2011 in the house on Rondos Drive and all its inhabitants are alive. It is a sunny day in September. The grass is yellowed where it meets the sidewalk. Perhaps it was a hot summer. The recycling bin with its bright green lid is at the edge of the driveway. There is no way to know if the trash can is empty or full. The basketball hoop out front is fraying. The net hangs like a tongue down the rim. The boys play ball after school. They come into the house with their shoes on, their faces shiny with sweat.

My mother has had a baby six months ago. She is on extended maternity leave from her new job. Our lives orbit around Laddan’s needs. My mother jokes that she hardly ever sees her, that she is more my daughter than hers. She is always in someone’s arms. My mother’s c-section takes longer to heal than her first one. During the first few post-partum weeks, Ayan and I slept at the floor of her bed, rising at the sound of the alarm to administer her pain medication. At night my father sleeps with the baby, responsible for her nighttime feedings. I hardly sleep at all; I startle at every rustle in the night, worried someone needs something only I know to give. I volley between my mother’s pain and the baby’s hunger.
In the picture, immortalized on Google Maps, there is no car in the driveway. The old white Plymouth gave out a few years ago and an old man with a truck towed it to a junkyard in exchange for $100. By the time it is taken to be converted to scrap metal, my father has spent more money on repairs than the car was initially worth. A picture taken from the side street captures the house in August of that same year. On that random day, the replacement van, a Chrysler, glints in the sun.

It is hard to know what might be happening inside the house on this fall day. Our lives now extend beyond it. I am a freshman in college. Ayan is a sophomore in high school. Our lives run parallel to one another. My mother will not return to work until the baby turns a year old.

If it is a weekday morning, the baby is in her highchair, her face and small hands are covered in oatmeal. My mother is drinking tea across from her, telling the children to make sure they brush their teeth before leaving for school. My father is already at work. Ayan and I are making sack lunches for our siblings. They are at the table shoveling cereal into their mouths. Bye! they’ll say before running out the door and into the day;

If it is a weekend morning, my mother will be sleeping in. Someone will be changing the baby’s diaper. She’ll hold her hands in front of her face, marvel at their movement. She will babble like a stream, and whoever is holding her will listen intently. Tell me more they’ll coo when she pauses. And then what happened? they will ask;

Perhaps it is not a day like any other and we stumble out of our routines. Maybe we are all together. Maybe we are laughing at a joke someone made. Maybe we are busy getting dressed because our neighbor, Chelsea, has offered to take professional photographs of us. We try and color coordinate. We wear the colors of the season, variations of brown and burgundy. We smile when the photographer tells us to smile. We make silly faces when she asks us to make silly faces. Laddan has a bow on her head the size of the moon. When she fusses, we take turns bouncing her on our knees. We crowd close together so we all fit in the frame;

The world is a grapefruit cleaved clean down the middle. I am the knife and I am the pulp along its ridge. I am a red smear, what leaks from the wounded fruit.

In the world as I know it there are only two time zones:

before and after.

A past where my sister is alive and an unyielding present:

a suspended sentence in which I am captive.

There exists only what lives above the Earth and what bloats beneath it. There are only two axes upon which my world spins. There are only two languages: a past tense that resurrects her and a present tense that XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.

I remember the time our first neighborhood in Portland, Oregon started to expand, and with it, my entire world. Developers were adding new units to our apartment complex and the sound of jackhammers shifting concrete slabs was the soundtrack to those long summer days. My sister Ayan and I spent most of our time playing outside with the other neighborhood kids. We were Somali, we were Iraqi, we were Russian. Our fathers were always at work and we stayed home with our mothers. Our mothers were all friends. Our fathers never spoke to each other.

I was eight years old and I watched in fear and fascination as the landscape of my childhood grew unrecognizable. Where there had once been a park there was suddenly a bustling street, through-traffic, cars that scared us with their speed. While we had been allowed to play at the park unsupervised, our mothers’ new rule was that we couldn’t cross the street without an adult. The Douglas-firs we ducked behind during our games of hide-and-seek gave way to a railroad track. Cement replaced the grass where we had spent whole afternoons belly-up, sticky under the summer sun, looking at the sky, architects carving a world from the clouds.

When my father came home from work he would turn on the news and I’d sit beside him on the couch as he flicked between channels. It was 1999. There were bombings and school shootings and protests and presidential scandals. There was rubble, there was debris, there was broken glass. A camera panned over the faces of wailing strangers. The world outside was sad and scary in ways I hadn’t known was possible. I came to the realization like a street I had to cross alone, without a hand to hold, without a body to act as a buffer between me and a sea of fast cars.

Our neighborhood looked more and more different each day. I could not shake the feeling that I would wake up one morning and it would be like waking up from a nightmare—I would be disoriented and confused, unsure of where I was— except this time I was afraid that no matter how hard I rubbed my eyes the world would not sharpen into focus, and nothing would ever be familiar again.

Once, in a fit of boredom, Ayan and I decided to get to the bottom of what it was the construction crew did all day. It must have been a Saturday or Sunday because there was a reprieve from the raucous noise, the clicks and clangs of construction that pulled us from our sleep each morning. The yellow hazard tape and orange cones didn’t deter us. We were young and believed nothing could ever hurt us.

Inside we were surprised to find the apartment was almost an exact replica of ours. Light poured in from the windows dappling the exposed flooring. In the bathroom we were delighted to find a mirror, brighter and shinier than any in our own home. We pursed our lips and pouted. We spent a few minutes pretending we were adult women with jobs, adult women who paid rent, adult women who fixed their lips around their fingers to prevent any lipstick from getting on their teeth. Ayan turned off the lights and suddenly the rest of the empty apartment grew louder in the darkness.

“You know,” I began, “if you look into the mirror and say Bloody Mary three times, you’ll see a woman’s reflection staring back at you.” I didn’t know if this was true, but I’d heard some kids say this on the bus.

“Really? Do it,” she dared.

I didn’t know if I believed in ghosts, but in case they were real, I didn’t want to be the sole benefactor of Mary’s wrath. “Let’s say it together,” I proposed. “On the count of three.”

One.
Two.
Three.

“Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary.”

We held our breaths and waited for a face to appear. Ayan reached for my hand. I felt her nails press into the flesh of my palms. I began to grow antsy. I felt prickles on the back of my arms. I remembered the stories Ayeeyo had told us of witch-women who stole the spirits and bodies of young girls. I felt hot and then cold. I remembered the stories we had learned in madrasa about jinns congregating in bathrooms, invisible to the naked eye. Before I knew it, I was running out of the bathroom and then out of the apartment and then out of the construction zone and I didn’t stop running until Ayan and I were back where we should have been all along.

“What happened,” Ayan yelled. “Did you see her?”

We were on the grass now, panting like animals, bent at the waist, standing at the edge of the half-made apartment building, across from a road in the middle of construction. Did I see Bloody Mary’s reflection in the mirror? Ayan looked at me as she struggled to catch her breath. We were still holding hands. I didn’t answer her question. I didn’t know how.

In a few years no one would remember the wilderness that been culled, that we had once been girls growing among the wild grass. Soon no one would remember there had been trees here, that we had climbed them. How they held our small bodies up, how their roots interlocked like fingers beneath the soil.

For the grieving, Street View can allow one to return to the past, a place preserved by the infrastructure of surveillance, but otherwise impenetrable. I can see the house on Rondos Drive in the years before my sister’s death. The light is on in her bedroom. Perhaps she is napping or reading. Perhaps she is sitting at my feet and I am combing her hair. Perhaps we are mad at each other and not speaking. I feel an enormous tenderness for the occupants of that house. It is a different house now. The people who lived in it, those past versions of us, are strangers to me now, too.

If I strain my eyes in the direction of what is gone, I can see the house on Rondos Drive and how it stretched to contain us, how my mother filled it with furniture bought piecemeal over the span of several years; I see Ayan and I whispering deep into the night, stretching the day by resisting our need for sleep; I see my mother slipping between the hips of my grandmother; I see my mother at eight leaving a home she has no way of knowing whether or not she’ll return to; I see my mother at eighteen, her body a speck of brown in the blinding snow, English breeching the dam of her mouth; I see her carrying the burgeoning shape of my life from one country to the next, hoping to give me what she herself never recovered from losing.

There is the house on Halsey Drive that Byron Kim and his family lived in together, and then there is the house on Halsey Drive that lives inside each of them, that fortress where none can trespass, that room with no door, that door with no key. On a rectangular strip of plywood these contested versions of the house on Halsey Drive pulse beneath the color gradient, enough houses to crowd the streets of a paper town, each brushstroke a cartographer’s delight, creating what, until now, had only nested in the mind’s eye, each brushstroke a bulldozer obliterating what it meant to reproduce, each brushstroke a Matryoshka doll split from her seed, each pink brushstroke a girl, each pink brushstroke a ghost made in her image.

In a picture of the house on Rondos Drive, you can see the shingles of the roof, moss and lichens blooming on the wood. Outside the frame there are two girls. They’ve lifted their bodies through a tear in the window net. Everyone else in the house is asleep. They huddle under a blanket for warmth, their knees knocking into each other. The occasional car glides down the road, its headlights slicing the dark. When their teeth begin to chatter, they will climb back through the window and into the house where it is quiet and warm. The next day they will wake up beside each other even though they each have a bed of their own.

Years later, I will sit on the roof alone looking for the door, the window, the opening, that took my sister into the night, into its blinding, borrowed light. Jekyll of no nation, she is nowhere I know, nowhere I’ve been before. By morning, even the stars will have forgotten the shape of the sky.

Jamila Osman is a Somali writer, educator, and community organizer. She received the 2019 Brunel International African Poetry Prize and is the author of the chapbook A Girl is a Sovereign State (Akashic 2020). She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. She lives in Portland, Oregon where she is working on a hybrid memoir on girlhood, grief, and belonging. This essay is an excerpt from that project.