My husband returns from the Safeway
Empty-handed, and without his familiar jovial twinkle.
Sweetie, where are the groceries? I ask.
He had gone to buy non-perishables,
hearing on King 5 News of sudden shortages of
toilet paper, pasta, canned beans.
His eyes stricken.
I didn’t get groceries.
Our hastily assembled list
Dangling between his fingertips.
There were no groceries.
No spaghetti, no garbanzos, no toilet paper.
I laid my hand on his shoulder seeking to comfort him:
But honey, it’s fine. We have food. We have supplies.
We’re fine.

I open the pantry door.
Not pasta and toilet paper, but look,
we have food. Quinoa, sardines, frozen peas, Kleenex.
He shook his head, not reassured.
I feel like I’m back in high school in Colombo.
The shelves were empty, but they still had these signs up,
LIMIT 1 PER CUSTOMER.
It was like being in the ’83 riots all over again,
constant rationing, throngs of raging rebels breaking into our homes,
Hiding up in our houses while the city burned.

It was not fear of starvation,
it turned out, that was unsettling him,
Nor of toilet paper running out.
The empty Safeway shelves were recalling
other empty shelves from thirty years ago,
and with those shelves other emotions,
other smells, other technicolor images.

How many others like him were now leading ordinary lives,
steady, merry, stoic brown and black folks
waking every morning,
measuring coffee beans,
brushing teeth in the shower,
smiling through meetings,

How many others like him,
were stopping at grocery stores after work
and being undone by empty shelves,
being transported back a year, three years,
or, like my husband, thirty years, to rations,
bombs exploding, military checkpoints,
drivers dragged out of cars,
nameless bodies washing up on beaches?

How many other shoppers were shivering,
trying to catch their breath,
and, as if swimming through gelatine,
struggling to move to the present,
then returning to their homes, to their lives
without their pasta and toilet paper?

 

Suhanthie Motha was born in Sri Lanka, raised in Australia and New Caledonia, and currently lives on the unceded homelands of the Coast Salish peoples. She is on the faculty of the English Department at the University of Washington where she writes about language, migration and displacement, war, and community collaborations.