Among our grievances is the inevitable fact that our father is aging, despite our refusal to accept. How do you accept that your father, who once held your hand and portrayed a figure bigger than yourself and peers, is no longer the same? How do you accept that he is no longer as strong or as passionate about the little things or even the more complicated? How do you erase your childhood memory of him raising you and replace it by the sad image you see everyday: sitting, aimlessly filling out word puzzles and dozing off to sleep in between?
But the inevitability of our father’s disappearance is not as heartbreaking as the fact that our time with him shrinks too. We miss him when he is gone at work. We miss him when he is with us because he is somewhere in his thoughts, maybe back in Paris where he studied for a year. Or maybe he is imagining the rest of his life in Europe, in the meadows, the way he has always imagined it. No one knows what the man thinks or feels. Perhaps the closest person to him is Mom but I feel that even she has lost part of him.
We are guilty for not trying hard enough. We are guilty for not talking and for assuming he has nothing to say. We are guilty for the choices we make as children. We are guilty for abandoning them to build lives of our own and satisfy our needs. We are guilty for growing up and moving on, for telling ourselves that it is all to make them proud.
I see my father everyday and everyday I feel that I am losing him too. I want to remember what he does and says for I know that I can never let him disappear before my eyes. And it is with this burden of guilt that she and I part from my father every morning and night, hoping that the next day we can make it up. We still see him as grandeur; we see him as the man who spoke out to us and stood tall. For that, it becomes ever harder to see him change.

This room is mine. We bought this house in October and I have not yet called it mine. But this room, with its light and view to the trees surrounding us, is mine. I don’t put much effort into cleaning it or organizing what it holds; I walk in and out, to sleep and pick out my clothes for the day. I always thought the wooden floor was too hard to walk on, too hard to feel, too cold to touch. But now that we are in May and the sun is out more often, the cold floor feels good to step on, to walk on in the morning after the sweltering sun has hit my face. The colors stand out, the red of my bed sheets against the cream of the floor and the walls and bookshelf.
But this room needs refreshing. It needs life, life that I am not giving. I barely stay here. I walk in and out. I spend half the day in the big room downstairs, or in the kitchen getting an apple, or making tea or a mid-afternoon coffee. And I forget about this room upstairs, forget what’s mine. The curtains and windows stay shut. And when I come back up to sleep, it’s hard to breathe.
How long does it take to accept and possess what is yours? How long does it take to move on?
Everybody else did. They came to this house with open arms, thrilled and excited as I stood aside and watched. The first day we moved into this house was the first day I saw it. And then I left three months later. They loved it from the beginning and watched its flowers bud in the spring, the snow melt and the yard become a big garden. They loved it from the beginning and called it the best thing that happened to them.
I am back now, after four months. And this room is mine.

“I don’t like this. I don’t like that things come to an end.”
“But there has to be an ending to begin something new.”
The skies are still light. It is 8:30 in Madrid and Ana and I are having our last dinner together in her kitchen. She has cut her hair and dyed it blonder. She smiles at me, her usual, the one that makes me smile wholeheartedly and without thought. She pulls her chair closer and we eat, talking with our mouths full and listening to the April winds. I tell her that I would like to start reading “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Marquez when I return home. She says that will be great practice but that it will be very difficult. Perhaps I will also read it in English, I tell her.
Four months have passed and Ana and I have talked about a lot of things in this kitchen. We’ve talked about America and fast food, about jobs and writing, about New York and my future apartment in Manhattan, about traveling the world and the beauty of Madrid, about Zapatero and Bush, about tortillas and my mother’s Iranian food. And we have always ended it with al fin, both knowing that every story, every conversation, every night, has its end.
Yet tonight I don’t hear it. Perhaps we have both realized that this is some kind of goodbye, some kind of parting and yet it isn’t. I give her, as my last parting gift, a packet of Starbucks coffee beans, and a thank you note. In Spanish I have written that I will never forget her sweet words and smile, or the taste of her morning coffee. That I will never forget everything that happened in Spain and in her sweet house. I have thanked her for everything and signed it with love. She hugs me and says I am a sweet girl and that she should have bought a book for me. So instead she lets me pick a book from the shelf in my bedroom to take it back home as a memory.
I pick Cien anos de Soledad by Marquez and have her write a dedication for me. And with that, we say good night and hasta pronto, until soon, for there are some things that don’t have an ending.