Leaves in big, black garbage bags. Red, beaten, sorrowful, fallen leaves that my father plows and collects and dips into plastic bags. Leaves that are now the face of our lawn, our backyard and deck. As the winds pick up speed, I see the leaves dancing in the air, gathering dust. I toast my bagel, wait for the water to boil so I can make tea, and watch the dance from inside. I feel closer to what gathers behind the windowsills than to what I hold myself against inside the house. I feel closer to autumn and the winds and the leaves than to the rug under my feet, the room that has yet to warm, and the unfurnished walls. And winter is inevitably coming. I am afraid it will take away what little I have left behind the doors. I am afraid that the grass, along with the auburn leaves will disappear beneath the snow, melting, fading.
My father loves this house. Sometimes I think it was his dream, having a house for his children. He wears a sweater, refusing to take his winter coat out of the closet, puts on his gardening gloves and goes into the winds, his perfect, grey hair rising up. He gathers the leaves and dips them into plastic bags and keeps going until he tires down. I see him walking in, a fainted smile on his mouth, taking off the gloves and smoothing his hair. And he says nothing of the wind or how it hit him hard in the face. He says nothing of his sorrows, of the past that he now can throw out like the garbage bags. He says nothing, but that he is tired and wants a cup of tea.
We’ve left eight bags, full of recovered leaves, right by the mailbox. Someone will pick them up tomorrow, these heavy bags of the unwanted. And my father will do another round of plowing with my mother.

I hated the autumn leaves, falling flat on my face, those pestering red leaves. I hated the winds that cut my face and burned my lips. I hated the trees that my mother loved and enthusiastically begged me to see. They were trees. I had seen them before. I hated the wide roads because they reminded me of the suburbs of Iran. We call them roosta, the little villages where people dress in colorful, hand-made clothes and milk cows. I hated Virginia and never understood why it was for lovers. I hated winter. Winter trapped us inside the dingy apartment we had just rented. I hated being an immigrant, being so fucking flawed and misunderstood by everyone who wasn’t Iranian. I hated being mispronounced. I repeated my name so many times that I forgot which syllable was supposed to get the emphasis. It’s hilarious now, when I think that I couldn’t even remember how to pronounce it anymore. But it wasn’t funny then.
I hated shopping at cheap stores and not even knowing the damn labels. I hated that my mother tried to make everything okay and that my father worked at 7-eleven on the night shifts. I hated that he would never wear a suit again and work in an office which a bunch of pompous, narcissist men. I hated that my father was so damn in love with America that he wouldn’t even consider going back to his hellhole.
I hated school. I hated that my hair was short, that I looked like a boy and had a difficult name. I hated Mrs. Brady, my seventh grade chorus teacher, who just didn’t get it when I said I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. I hated that she made us sing Jingle Bell. Even now when I hear Jingle Bell, I want to curse because it makes me feel lame.
I hate how much I have grown to love this place, to call it home. I hate that America is now mine; that it always was. I hate that I am bound to the leaves and trees and everything green around me. I hate that fall is about to end and that the leaves are dispersed on the lawn, no longer floating in my hair, or falling on my face.

Nothing speaks.
My mother calls me for dinner. She says I look thin. She says I should eat fruits and broccoli.
I have told her, over and over, that I hate broccoli. Broccoli is too green, too hard. It’s tasteless and the smell of it makes me sick. I hate it.
Nothing speaks.
My sister says why don’t you get a job. I tell her I don’t like anything. The mall depresses me. Retail is sickening because I can’t pretend to care for what people want to buy. I can’t pretend I like a dress that looks ugly and shouldn’t be sold to anyone.
Nothing speaks.
My father reads the online news because technology has changed. He falls asleep often, his head resting on the keyboard. I call and say dad, why don’t you sleep on the couch. He goes back to reading. If he calls me it’s because I forgot to turn the lights off in my room. Don’t you know how much we pay for electricity now?
Nothing speaks.
My room gets more disorganized every week. I try to go through old papers and throw them out. Then I realize I need them. I just don’t know where to place them anymore. I am still getting used to this new room.
The old room spoke. My walls were happier. They were softer, whiter.
People spoke.
Now,
Everyone gathers in the kitchen downstairs with a laptop in front of his face.
Nothing speaks.
I don’t even speak. It’s like my lungs are tired of taking a breath for words and my body is building up muscle because I work out so much and I am too tired to think.
272 words. I am speaking two hundred and seventy words but I am not saying anything. I am not trying. I am taking the easy way out. I am not writing. This isn’t writing.
Nothing speaks.
Nothing speaks DAMN it.
I miss inspiring people. I have lost the ability to inspire. And I find that sad. Slap me. Tell me to stop nagging and start finding something real. You know what my horoscope said today, it said I should stop dreaming and start working towards a real goal. I laughed and said screw you.
I’m wondering if I am dreaming again.
Nothing speaks.
I take a hot shower. My showers take an hour sometimes because this house is so fucking cold that the blood stops circulating in my ears. I take a long, burning hot shower and cry because I can’t think of a reason why I feel so damn tired.
I just broke my nail that had grown so nicely. And now I feel like cutting all of them, making them as ugly as I can.
I wonder how people see me. I’ll tell you what I think. I think they think I’m pretty, but mean and insecure. I wonder if that’s how they see me.
I wonder what it would be like to be a real writer.

The clock was pushed back an hour and my father was happy because he had an extra hour to spend his day with. On his off-days, my father likes to solve puzzles, browse the web for Persian news, walk around the house, eat ice cream and drink tea. Today, he collected dead leaves that covered our lawn. I helped him put them away in large, plastic bags, and we did this over and over, until I got tired and left. The leaves made me sad because they were pretty, red, green and yellow, but now rotten, waste. And I was sad to see my father there, bending down, and rising back up, his gloved hands full of dead leaves. I wondered if the house still felt foreign to him, if the arduous housework bothered him, if he minded clearing the grass of dirty leaves. I should ask him, why have I not asked him this?
We will get used to it. We’ll get used to turning off the lights, and locking the many doors, and maybe we’ll even sit in the living room one day instead of the kitchen, where we sit and eat and talk and do homework and check our emails.
My father came back inside, and it felt like it’d been hours. He was tired, but still holding a weary smile. He wasn’t even wearing a jacket, not even a sweater on a windy November afternoon. We poured him tea, and that’s how we spent the rest of the day, drinking tea, and answering the phone, and reading the paper. My mother did the laundry and sewed the curtains in my sister’s room and I bought the groceries and washed dishes. And Sunday was over, and it didn’t matter that the hour was pushed back because we still stayed up late, getting ready for tomorrow and the day after that, and the day after that.