Some families pack up houses and chase security at the drop of a hat. My family shies from impermanence. So my father made the decision.

Maybe my parents grew so old they forgot what it was like. They must have forgotten the rules, the regulations, the ways of this place. They brought us up on little more than a love of the place they’d spent more than half their lives in, but now all I have is hatred. I might be spitting out harsh words, considering I’ve grown angrier as I’ve grown older, but I’ve come to realize that there is nothing holding me back any longer. My tongue and my lips and my spit and blood have all picked up their bags and abandoned common sense. None of them wants to stay inside me. My tongue’s papillae mark borders and each land has its own statement; each population wants its own national anthem. So everything sings, and everything has been singing ever since my father lost his job.

My memory fails me every time I attempt to remember the few months after the incident. The day itself is a fuzz of mama-too-stunned-to-cook-today, sister-too-dumbfounded-to-go-to-class-today, and baba-too-fired-to-go-to-work-today. In the midst of the hunger, the shock and the disbelief of a man who has worked the same job for 33 years, I didn’t know where to go. I longed so hard to run into my mother’s arms and have her untangle my chestnut hair with my head in her lap, while she patted my back humming the lullaby she put me to sleep with when I was younger. Instead she had a fifty-something, sun-roasted, hazel-eyed Syrian man hoping to hide his shame of not knowing in her arms. Rumor said that the situation was quite similar for many other Syrians that worked in the oil industry that month. No matter how long they had been working there, there were security concerns: the perpetrators had to go.

Go. An order. A signature from a higher-upper and an execution from a lower-under. Go. An expulsion from an office, a plant, a house, a land, a home. Go, the voice on the upper floor said, and the employees complied.

A week passed by. My father’s skin still had remains of static from the shock. We met with other families that were in the same situation — Baba’s friends. One wife cried right in front of her children as my mother consoled her. “Not in front of the children. We can’t tell them anything.” Amid the bawling women, some men boasted about remaining hopeful. “They’ll call for us soon. We’ve worked with them for more than 30 years. This is just a temporary thing,” they said. My siblings nodded as my insides clenched at my father’s delusions. The impracticality of the situation was all I could think of. No job means no sponsor. No sponsor means no visa renewal. No visa renewal means no staying here. No staying here means we leave our home. Beneath the extremely unnerving laughs that my father projected onto us, I knew he was thinking of the exact same thing.

It was either run away, find home somewhere else, somewhere new, somewhere that, as the men would have thought, wouldn’t slap my children in the face like that — or stay. Through the stressful visa renewals and the expenses burning through everything my father owned, we would find a way to stay, he announced. At the time, I did not know this decision was fuelled by the fact that I was in the last year of high school. If we left, my father knew what that would mean for his daughter, the one he always knew would make him proud. But if we didn’t, I didn’t know what would happen to the family.

My father is a strong man. Baba loves his family more than his money. So Baba called and called and ran errands and sat in offices and paid his bills to make sure that I could finish the school year. “We’ll leave once the year is over. We’ll find somewhere better for them,” I would come to learn. They would have the conversations when we went to sleep, just like in the movies. They would get in bed after kissing my younger siblings good night and discuss the issues of the household. But in this magical scene, they were discussing where to go when our hourglass ran out.

In a few months, the year came to an end. And my parents still hadn’t decided on a new place to call home. As they debated, the roof started breaking down, letting in the landlord with his many, many fines. One was for the extended stay, which only increased each day, another was for the missing tile in the kitchen and yet another one for being from far away. Mama and Baba tried to hide the notices, but nothing would keep them away. Instead of being filled with lumps of college decisions, my desk transformed itself into a desert of warning notice dunes.

One day Baba put his foot down, after one too many paper cuts. “I’ll start the application for Canada,” he puffed. We did not know what this meant for us. When would it happen? Would we have to leave stuff behind? Would we even be allowed to go? Does it matter? Does it even matter? Where will home be? My siblings dealt with the tornado of feelings calmly. On the other hand, I called them a tornado. My sense of home was eradicated the second my father was removed from his element. The world that I spent 17 years building, picking every detail so meticulously to have the right to call this place home, took a final blow.