The Afghanistan Feeling

When I think “Afghanistan,” I think of a faraway country in the middle of nowhere, a yellow desert where rare people are all covered in gray sheets, protecting them from the hot sun. I've never been there, and I've never met an Afghan person. I know nothing about that place—at times I even wonder if it truly exists. I've never checked it with my own eyes, never felt it on my own skin.

But Afghanistan moves something inside me, a feeling, a motion, a disturbing sensation. Afghanistan is more than a place under a killing sun. It is a feeling from deep inside me. On the surface, it may comprise various geographical references: countries like Syria, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, or Saharan Africa. We are so far apart, so alien to one another, and yet, thinking of those places, I feel as if a strong and old experience of them hides somewhere deep inside my body.

My Afghanistan feeling is a complicated emotion. It's not anxiety. It's more like a lurking apprehension, as if I'm in hiding in a dangerous place that I cannot escape, as there is no exit. Maybe that's what it is: my fear of locked places, my claustrophobia?

I felt Afghanistan that morning last year when I learned about US troops leaving Afghanistan. The beats of my heart slowed for a few moments, and my mind spun: What happens to Afghanistan?! Then I minded my small, little life, and my Afghanistan feeling faded away. Me here, Afghanistan on the other side of the planet or on a totally different planet. I've never been there; I know no Afghan person…

Indeed, I felt Afghanistan again last fall. That feeling was right there, awakening from the depths of my guts, rising from so far inside me that its exoticism could hardly even touch me, and yet it was so close that I could smell it. You cannot avoid smelling Afghanistan. It is the odor of dry COVID. It blocks your nostrils and fills your lungs with unbreathable, scratching flows of air, until you feel like you are bleeding from your trachea, suffocating.

Late last fall