“This is a poem about what it's like being away from your home for so long and not remembering much about it. I wrote it when my parents decided to sell our apartment in Syria and it felt as though it were a very finite goodbye to all the memories I had there”

- Layla Faraj, United States

“You Can’t Put a Price on Memories”
a spoken word

The Phrase You can’t put a price on memories
Is a privilege
It’s the sign leading to a white suburban neighborhood with the picket fence and the one token black family that goes to work dressed in suits and corporate heels
You Can’t Put a Price on Memories
It’s that feeling you get when you know that you’re at an unfair advantage
It’s your mom telling you that you don’t have to do the dishes so you can study but you end up playing on your phone
You Can’t Put a Price on Memories
Is being told that your parents didn’t expect anything less from you because it was so easy for you to succeed
And it Is a phrase that my family can’t afford

Turns out you can put a price on memories
When you're Syrian
When your passport and apartment keys aren’t enough to get you home
When your phone calls to your cousins consists of how are you’s that really mean
Have you managed to survive alright this week?
Where “where’s your sister I want to talk to her” translates to I need to make she’s okay too because I just heard on the news that there was another attack near your home and I need to know how much her world shook

I found out last week that my parents are going to be selling our apartment in Syria
Turns out you can put a price on memories
For those of you wondering
Childhood memories cost the amount of 2 peaches every night from the corner store and a wooden table to sit on
They cost about three fans and one air conditioning unit
They cost a broken plastic laundry basket and clothes pins
They cost a TV as big as a desktop and channel 24 that plays spacetoon or channel 42 or channel 142 I don’t know it’s been 9 years but I do know that

It turns out you can put a price on memories
And for those of you wondering
Memories marked to be made cost about as much as 2.9 million Syrian refugees
They cost the destruction of a mosque that has stood since 715 AD
They cost putting children through the trauma of war
They cost the wails of a mother and the blood of her son that now paints the town red
They cost a million deaths, or was it a million and a half, or was it- counts fingers they cost a death toll lost in the fog of war

So next time I hear someone say that You Can’t put a Price on Memories
I’ll walk in an empty room so that they can hear the clinking of the broken fragments of my heart
Because the navy blue string from my couches back home that sewed the pieces together was taken from me when my parents finally handed over the keys
I’ll show them the soles of my feet and how I’ve worn them out from walking the same thin line of hope year after year
And I’ll show them my unhealed rib-cage
From each time I was pushed off

Next Time someone says you can’t put a price on memories I’ll let them see the bare jasmine flower vines growing around my bones trying to make me stronger and I’ll tell them how each time they bloomed someone cut them off and sold them to make perfume
I’ll tell them that I have yet to receive any money for my flowers
But then again my people have given and given and given and look what they have to show for it
You know,
I can’t help but think
if they were paid what they deserved
maybe my could afford to buy a memory or two
i'd love to remember what channel spacetoon was