The nights are better, now that we have had rain. No one picked up the trash, so the garbage bags, cans and plastics, still sit underneath tree branches, wet and silky. The house is still too big, foreign to our senses. Hearing hefty raindrops, caressing the rooftop against wood surprises us. We stop what we are doing to hear thunder and admire our new home. My sister pours coffee into a striped mug, beaming under the kitchen lights, unafraid of the storm that delves our walls.
The nights are better, now that we are filled. The stairs are still an effort, and the floor is cold and unfurnished, stale and rugged. My feet agonize as I make my way over to the bed, where I find a new kind of warmth, pleasing after a long time. I role on my side, listen to what is now the soundtrack of my sleep, and hope to fall, deep down.
The nights are better.
Now that we are.

It’s been a while since I’ve sat down to put thoughts on here.
Many nights I want to put a bullet through the thin layer of thoughts that deteriorate the cells in my brain and slow down my heart.
Many nights I walk down the stairs, careful of my coarse feet against the tin floor. I make my way to the kitchen that still has the stain of coffee on the wooden cabinets. I feel the tainted cold in between my toes while the house sleeps, hear an echo of mid-night, of the keys that lie on the counter, of the pot that boiled hours ago. I swallow a bite of left-over food and wander, in between nothingness and silence, drifting away from my reflection in the glass windows that encircle me. I rest on my mother’s seat, still warm, and watch the magenta leaves of Mr. and Mrs. Byron’s garden.
Many nights I don’t intend to do the petty, tiring, night things like brushing my teeth and pulling the heavy covers over my head. Many nights I want to slip out of my skin and walk barefoot on the new lawn, the wet, unfamiliar grass, sit on the patterned swing and fall into silence, gone like everyone else…
Many nights I continue the endlessness of my day-dreams, the sad breathing and become a fainted brush stroke of ink.
I put a bullet through the thin layer of my thoughts, through my damaged soul and write fresh, about what it feels to feel again…
Many nights I don’t bother with poetry because I find it disrupting to reality, to the simple fact that I’ve been alone for a long time, and still have a hard time making it through the hours. I think of sleep the way a child does about a pony.
Many nights, I go to bed, my teeth brushed carelessly, my body half under.

The new house in Cedar smells foreign, but sweet. We discover a piece of it everyday, doors that open to storage rooms, closets and windows. Baba says the kitchen is big enough to dance in as Maman and I dance to an old Persian song, singing softly. Paria, who is the main character in the song, is told not to go to the kooche. She has to be careful of the boys for they might take her away and steal her lover’s heart.
Maman and Baba are happier, perhaps because change is good. My sister smiles more as she walks barefoot on the cold, delicate parquet. The stairs are sharp on the edges, and Baba has to be careful when he gets up at dawn to leave for work. I worry about him taking the stairs.
This house, our house, is gentle, akin to every other place we left. The rooms are dry, cotton-like. Waking up in them is easy; sun doesn’t beam too much, but still, I sleep and I’m hollow, which is good.
I feel like I don’t have to make sense in a place like this, where there is room for all the things I never got to do. We don’t have to make sense for this home to be ours. It already is. It already speaks, makes small talk and puts us to bed at night.
Change is good; it makes us forget. Change distracts us from the hackneyed, from the old, from the rotten phases of ordinary days. Driving on Cedar lane, parking in front of a door that’s ours, walking up the rough stairs to find ourselves facing a new stranger, are the things that we do these days. We needed to find a bigger dream, somewhere where we could set up tables in every corner, or lay the silverware and arrange all the plates. Somewhere where we could hold ourselves, together and within.
Maybe we will change. Maybe we have already begun to see a new side of our old selves. But there is a sense of satisfaction, a sense of entitlement in owning something bigger than our dreams. There is something in Maman’s voice that tells me things are going to be okay. There is something in father’s hello that tells me we are going to be fine.

When you empty a room, and rid of all posters, the dusty tired picture frames, the cobwebs that you weren’t even aware of, there is something that hits you inside. You hear your voice, echoing back from the walls, from the disdained emptiness of yourself. And you wonder if all you ever did, right here, in this little room, was worth doing. You wonder if anything will be remembered.
Box after box, layer after layer, and we are moving on again, and again. And although we are no longer strangers in our own skin, although we’ve built on and have learned to let go, still, there is a funny sadness from the bruised walls.
The fog suffocates us, me and these broken memories. The clock ticks and the sound echoes back. I write, for a last time, within this space.