EDITOR’S NOTE: In August, Asbarez reported on Natelle Ezadjian, a Ferrahian graduate, who triumphantly climbed Mt. Ararat, where she displayed, among other flags, those of Artsakh and her alma mater, the Holy Martyrs Ferrahian Armenian School. Per Asbarez’s request, Ezadjian reflects on her journey.
BY NATELLE EZADJIAN
At 5,137 meters, the wind was violent enough to make my eyes water.
Or maybe it was my emotions overwhelming me after finally having reached my lifelong dream.
My hands were blue. My stomach was turning. My legs were barely carrying me anymore. My knees were begging me to stop. My breath was short. My head was pounding. I had spent the last few hours climbing through darkness, stopping whenever my body refused to take another step, wondering more than once whether I was actually going to make it.
And then there it was.
The summit.
Somewhere in the chaos of gloves and jackets and frozen fingers, the flags came out.
Armenia. Lebanon. United States. ARF. AYF. Homenetmen. Ferrahian.
And Artsakh.
We had been told before the climb that some flags could not be flown at the summit. I knew what that meant. I knew exactly which one I wanted to see in the sky anyway.
So I took it out.
I held it in both hands and stood there with it against the mountain.
It did not fly. The wind never got to have it.
But I did not put it away.
For a few photographs, at the top of Ararat, I stood there holding Artsakh in my hands.
And maybe that is the part I will remember most.
Not because it was dramatic. There was no speech. No one said anything. I was exhausted enough that even lifting my arms felt like work.
I just looked at that flag.
I had grown up hearing the name of a place that, by the time I was old enough to understand what it meant, was already slipping out of the hands of my generation. I had watched adults grieve it. I had watched maps change. I had heard stories that were never told without a pause somewhere in the middle.
And now I was standing on Ararat.
There are things you spend your whole life trying to explain, and then there are things you can only hold.
So I held it.
Below my feet was the mountain I had drawn as a little girl in Lebanon, long before I had ever seen its real face. Somewhere behind me were the roads that had taken me through Gars, through Ani, through Van, places whose names had lived in Armenian mouths long after they stopped appearing on Armenian maps.
I was eighteen years old.
My hands were shaking.
The flags were snapping around me.
And for a moment, I did not feel like a girl who had finally reached something she had spent years dreaming about.
I felt very, very small.
Not insignificant.
Small in the way a person feels when they suddenly understand that the life they are living did not begin with them.
I thought about the people who had left these lands carrying whatever they could carry. About the ones who never made it anywhere. About the ones who kept Armenian names, Armenian songs, Armenian prayers, Armenian memories alive in places that were never supposed to become home.
And then I looked down at the flag in my hands.
I could not make the mountain give anything back.
I could not undo a century.
I could not bring back a homeland my generation had watched disappear.
But I was there.
And the flag was there.
That had to mean something.
Years earlier, I had drawn Ararat without knowing why I kept putting the same mountain onto every page.
Now I was standing on it, exhausted, half-frozen, surrounded by pieces of every place and every community that had made me who I was.
For all the years I had spent looking at Masis from far away, I had never imagined that one day I would look down from its summit and see my whole life scattered beneath me.
Lebanon.
United States.
Armenia.
Artsakh.
Homenetmen.
AYF.
ARF.
Ferrahian.
Eight flags in the wind.
And me, somewhere among them, trying to understand how a mountain could feel so much like a memory of a home I had never been allowed to have.