Ani

by Michael Vakian

Ani, tall, silent, with black hair falling like a memory
who is of a people who have endured what words cannot hold.
You wouldn’t know it here,
not on Sunset Boulevard, where light burns
too bright to remember anything.

Her footsteps fill the night, clutching to what she holds dear,
cigarettes, a bracelet, a name forgotten.
Perhaps the world would call her lost.
But I know that she carries the echo of a thousand women
who crossed deserts of silence to stand upright in the sun.

Oh my Ani, what have you become?
What has become of all of us?
We hold our past as if it were gold,
afraid that if we set it down,
the ghosts might slip away to.
So we cradle our pain
holding it tight, sometimes even sing to it.

Long ago our people learned that
forgetting is a type of death
So we latch on to its memory
even when it tastes of hunger
when it is nothing but dust.

But Ani,
sweet, broken mirror of my youth,
there is life beyond the pain.
The longing that brought you here
It was not meant for sorrow.

Our memories must live,
but we must let go of the pain.
You are not the desert that burned and buried them.
You are the water which they never found.

Ani, when I speak your name
it becomes a prayer for all those I cannot reach.
The faces fading in our families old photographs,
or to the voices that the wind still carries
when it blows from Mt. Ararat.

Ani, are you still alive?
If yes, do you remember the songs your mother would sing?
I remember our ache…
as our hands held tight and we spoke… of the old story
It keeps me searching,
even when I know
the road between us no longer exists.

And now, as I walk into the small café besides the bakery.
The air is thick with the scent of baklava, of lavash,
of sugar and heat and something older, something remembered.

For a moment, it fills me with hope.
Not that we might return to our youth,
but that we have somehow changed into something new.
Because our people have endured the fire and come through it,
carrying with them the taste of sweetness,
the patience of dough rising once again.

Maybe this is what our survival looks like —
not through triumph, or forgetting,
but the quiet act of baking bread
and letting the smell give us peace.


Behind the counter, I see a young woman move with quiet grace,
her dark hair tied back, her hands dusted in flour.
For a heartbeat, I almost call your name.
Ani?

But no… she is younger, softer around the eyes,
though there’s something familiar in the tilt of her head,
the way she hums to herself,
how she handles the dough as if it were something sacred.

I want to ask her if she knows Ani,
if she remembers the woman who once burned too bright,
who carried her pain like a torch through every dark place.

But I do not speak.
The words catch in my throat,
the way our history so often does.
Instead, I order coffee.
I sit by the window, and I watch her move,
shaping bread with the same care our grandmothers gave to prayer.

And for a moment,
I let myself believe that somewhere, somehow,
Ani has found a peace like this…
quiet, steady, alive in the smell of warm bread
and the hum of a song no one remembers the words to.